A Deal With the Devil

''Pamela Colloff demonstrates again why she is one of the best reporters and writers. This story is astonishing and deeply important.'' David Grann, Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author ''Amazing journalism by Pamela Colloff. Read it and weep.'' Jeffrey Tobin Paul Skalnik was a prolific and ruthless conman and abuser. For more than three decades, he passed himself off as a Vietnam veteran, a college football star, a high-rolling oilman, a criminal defence attorney, an undercover FBI agent and a terminally ill cancer patient. From 1977 to 2015 he was incarcerated many times over and repeatedly used as a jailhouse informant. His bogus witness testimonies of cell confessions have sent at least four men to Death Row. During a year-long investigation for the New York Times Magazine , Pamela Colloff determined that Skalnik was one of the most prolific, and most effective, jailhouse informants in American history. For decades he was considered the state prosecution''s ''closer'' witness who could smooth over a case''s inconsistencies, nudging jurors past reasonable doubt. Whenever he was released from prison he would continue his crime spree in which women were usually the collateral damage. Over four decades he was charged with 32 felonies including larceny, fraud, grand theft, the unauthorised practice of law, bail jumping, bigamy and lewd conduct. He married at least nine different women, some at the same time, and was a serial abuser of young girls. The narrative is framed by the botched investigation of James Dailey - tried with the murder of 14 year-old Shelley Boggio. Skalnik''s witness testimony helped put Dailey on Death Row. By recounting Skalnik''s lurid life, Pamela Colloff tells a larger story of injustice and the trail of broken lives he has left behind.

Préface

Riveting true crime tale about a notorious and enigmatic con man and jailhouse informant, Paul Skalnik
A Deal with the Devil investigates his decades-long crime spree, the people he damaged along the way and the institutions that enabled him.

Auteur

Pamela Colloff is a staff writer at the New York Times and a senior reporter at ProPublica. In 2014 she was awarded the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and has been widely anthologized from Best American Magazine Writing and Best American Crime Reporting to the forthcoming Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit and Obsession.

Twitter: @pamelacolloff.