Mark T. Sullivan

Behind the Book

Many people who’ve read Triple Cross say they’re amazed at the parallels between events Mark describes in the book and events that have subsequently happened in real life. Honest to God, he says it’s coincidence.

Mark finished the final draft of Triple Cross nine months before the Wall Street meltdown, eleven months before terrorists seized two luxury hotels in Mumbai, India, and twelve months before the Bernie Madoff investment scandal came to light.

In the novel, Mark details financial techniques used by many high-stakes investors like Madoff before the real market crash of 2008 and paints a portrait of how vast fortunes can be made – or lost – with a brutal kidnapping and the click of a computer mouse.

Mark started his career as a financial reporter for Reuters in Chicago, and then worked as a political reporter with a financial focus in Washington D.C. before shifting into full-time investigative reporting in California.

He admits openly he’s no economic genius, but based on his early experiences as a journalist coupled with research that he started in 2005, Mark came to believe that there were excesses going on Wall Street that could buckle the U.S. financial markets.

“I also became convinced that it was entirely possible to manipulate the markets,” Mark says. “I found a group of high financiers who agreed to help me “game” the market events described in the book. At the time several of them told me they thought I was pushing the edge of credibility when there was $15 billion at stake in the novel. Then along comes Bernard Madoff and his swindle for $50 billion. I was just floored. In reality, Wall Street wasn’t just playing hard and fast with the rules, some of the most famous investment houses in the world were engaged in wholesale and widespread fraud.

“The so-called ‘Smart People’ thought that there were no repercussions to their strategies as long as they made money,” Mark says. “Obviously, their unethical and sometimes illegal business practices had widespread and brutal consequences beyond those I describe in Triple Cross. Real people lost homes, their jobs, and their savings. Real kids stopped attending the colleges they wanted to attend. Real philanthropic organizations went bankrupt and shut their doors. Real global investors began to rightly look at the American markets and the institutions around them with a skeptical and jaundiced eye.”

When asked about other similarities between the novel and reality, Mark admits that there is a place in Montana like the Jefferson Club, which went bankrupt after the real crash.

“In some ways that place was emblematic of the excesses of that time, a super-private ski resort for the rich and powerful that demanded a liquid net worth of millions to join,” Mark says. “Some of the wealthiest people in the world stayed up there, and I started thinking, ‘What if a place like that got attacked? And why?” Out of those questions came Triple Cross. Mark hopes you like it.