It was an ad posted on Craigslist.com that led Dave Copeland ’96 to the subject for his first book, Blood & Volume: Inside New York’s Israeli Mafia.
Copeland was looking for a freelance job when he found the posting
from former mafia member Ron Gonen and his wife, Honey Tesman. They
wanted a writer to tell their sordid tale, starting with their involvement
in the Israeli mafia and Gonen’s large-scale drug dealing, to the couple’s
shared cocaine addictions, and later their quiet suburban life in the
Witness Protection Program.
For two years Copeland maintained a daily correspondence with Gonen,
a man who masterminded a prison break from a German jail, was exiled
from his native Israel, and who just missed being caught by a Guatemalan
death squad for posing as an Israeli intelligence officer.
“It wasn’t really scary,” says Copeland about his relationship with
Gonen. “After a while it actually got annoying.” Gonen found life in
the Witness Protection Program boring compared to his Israeli mafia
days. He called Copeland daily to fill him in on the mundane details
of his life, ranging from his daughter’s academics to his contempt
for being taxed.
Gonen has since been kicked out of the Witness Protection Program because
of the book. And one of the main characters Copeland wrote about, Ran
Ephraim, was killed in February in a drive-by shooting in Tel Aviv.
Other than Gonen’s incessant calls, Copeland has not been harmed because
of his inside knowledge of the Israeli mafia, but his tell-all did
not go unnoticed by “the family.” “I’ve received a few e-mails from
the relatives he [Gonen] testified against,” Copeland says. It’s not
enough to stop him from trying to sell the movie rights for Blood & Volume,
he says.
The research for his next book will help keep him in shape if he needs
to escape from pursuers on foot: Copeland is hard at work on a first-person
account of his experience as a novice marathon runner.
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