Mark T. Sullivan

Behind the Book

In the late 1980s, I was assigned by my editor at the San Diego Tribune to cover the drug culture. I worked stories about drug cartels and their ties to domestic organized crime, politicians and money launderers. The story led me into the halls of power in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., all along the southwest border and into Mexico. It also took me to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, the notorious hubs of international money laundering. When I wasn't overseas, I spent many of my days in neo-natal intensive care units, watching nurses care for crack babies as part of a series looking at the lives of children born into the families of addicts.

At the same time, the "extreme" sports movement was gathering steam in America. I'd grown up a skier in New England, spending my formative years at the region's ultimate hardcore area -- Mad River Glen in Vermont. But on my vacations skiing in the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas, I was seeing younger skiers doing things I considered downright suicidal: jumping off eighty-foot cliffs, performing first descents on 50 degree slopes and generally reinventing the sport as a form of personal assault and adrenaline addiction. I was fascinated.

Others were as well. Filmmakers were documenting these daredevils and making them into media stars. That winter several young men died trying to make a name for themselves.

I became convinced my first novel was somewhere in all of this. I took a leave of absence to immerse myself in the world of thrill seekers and to write the book. I moved to Utah for six weeks and skied with people who frankly scared the bejesus out of me. We skied couloirs out of bounds in the Little Cottonwood Canyon. We cliff jumped and skied in powder so deep we needed snorkels. At night, I talked with them about what made them tick. Then I went on the road again, skiing some of the most dangerous lines at Lake Tahoe and Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Back in San Diego, I tracked down convicted money launderers and interviewed them about their motives. To my surprise, there was a remarkable amount of overlap between the white-collar drug guys and the extreme skiers.

As you might expect, part of what drove the money launderers was greed. But one guy I spoke to who was about to go to prison for four years for his role in a money laundering scheme admitted that he got involved with drug smugglers out of sheer boredom. He loved the thrill of trying to beat the system and not get caught.

Out of all this research, the character and story of Jack Farrell emerged -- a man on the run from his past who becomes part of a film about the meaning of extreme, a young banker, skier and thrill seeker who got sucked down into the world of money laundering at the same time his wife, Lena, a nurse, watched the crack epidemic ravage a generation of babies.