Jeffrey Konvitz is a multi-time best-selling author, going all the way back to the horror novel Sentinel in the 1970s. He's also a big-time Hollywood lawyer. His new novel, "The Circus of Satan", is historical fiction of the early 20th century at the time of the decline of the Irish mob(s) and the rise of Italian and Jewish mobsters. Quite a fun and interesting read with plenty of fascinating characters who really lived.
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
We've got a book in my hands here. It's a
big book. It's a fairly big book, and it's called
The Circus of Satan, and it's around five hundred pages,
and I enjoyed every page. I've read the whole thing.
And my next guest is the author Jeffrey Convitz, who
wrote his first best seller well when I was still
pretty young, and has done a lot of interesting things

(00:20):
since then, including this book. So we've got a lot
to talk about. Jeffrey, Welcome to KOA.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hey.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
It's my pleasure, my total pleasure us.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
And I like to mention that I've read the book
because I find that authors go on radio shows and
find more often than not that the hosts have not
actually read the book and they're just working from press
talking points. So I want you to know I read it.
There it is so, you know, before we do Circus
of Satan, you seem like you've had an interesting life,
and you've done some interesting things in Hollywood with the

(00:53):
screenwriting and the lawyering, and so how are you what's
causing you or allowing you to go back and forth
between these worlds of sort of the management and operations
and legal side in Hollywood versus being a creative.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
Well, it's hard to pinpoint.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
In fact, if I'd probably stayed in one area without
all the others, I'd probably be far more financially successful.
But it was in my soul to do different things.
And when I look back on my life both as
a novelist, a screenwriter, a president or a CEO of

(01:37):
public companies that were distributing and producing motion pictures and
financing them, as well as a practicing lawyer, trial lawyer,
and appellate lawyer, I look at the panoply and say
and said, I did it. Not that I started out
to do all these things, but I naturally fell into it,

(02:01):
and no matter what it was, I wanted to do
it as best as I could.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
Yeah, well, I just think that's so cool that you've
done all those all those different things and I didn't
know about public company ceo. Just one more quick thing
about your past before we talk about this book. So
I think your first best seller was a Sentinel? Was
Centinel and then and then that was it seventy four ish.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
Yeah, I came, I got out of law school.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
I was I went to work for what is now
one of the giant talent agents. I was a lawyer
agent and I was writing it at night. And then
I went to MGM as a production executive in nineteen
seventy two or three, and I continued writing it just
based on an idea I had. It was very interesting

(02:53):
because my first creative writing paper at Cornell, the professor
gave me a d and wrote, your illiterate, which is appropriate.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
I got a little better, so I think I got
to be in the course.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
But you know, writing a novel, it was something I'd
never done before.

Speaker 3 (03:10):
I was, you know, just just vamping.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
When then and then it was turned into a movie.

Speaker 3 (03:17):
And did you.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
Write the screenplay or co write the screenplay as well?

Speaker 2 (03:20):
I co wrote the screenplay. I cope. I produced the movie.
The movie had his problems. The director and I didn't
see one hundred percent eye to eye.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
It is what it is. It happens all over the
business all the time. But yes I did. We did
make the movie universal.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
And the funny thing is they used a they used
the airport type casting of name actors, older actors, and
when the picture came out that was a negative. Now
when people look at the picture, especially in midnight screenings
or festivals.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
They all go crazy.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
Ava Gardener's in it, and Eli Wallach and all these
great old actors.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
They got nuts.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
That's funny, all right. So that's about the movie called
The Sentinel that came out in nineteen seventy seven, based
on a book that Jeffrey wrote well over many years,
but was released a few years before the movie. Now
let's talk about the new book, The Circus of Satan.
So this is a fascinating read and a really entertaining read.
And I guess I'd have to call it historical fiction.

(04:24):
But is that a reasonable characterization?

Speaker 2 (04:27):
Yeah, when we categorize it for publication purposes and advertising purposes,
is historical fiction?

Speaker 3 (04:33):
Organized crime crime?

Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yeah? And just to give folks kind of the setting.
You know, most of the time when you see movies
or read books about gangster stuff, it's usually at least
nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties, elliot Ness, al Capone, Prohibition, all
that kind of stuff. This book is about the world

(04:57):
of gangsters, the generation before those guys, and it's just
it's an incredible thriller that weaves in a lot of
actual people from the day.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yeah, the actual people and actual events. What basically happened
us is. I read a book called Against the Evidence
about the Becca Rosenthal murder trial, which is a little
piece of the book at the end of this book.
But it's the most famous murder case in New York history,
has never really been solved. And later on another writer,

(05:35):
another writer wrote a book called Satan's Circus about the
murder trial and the events. But that's the trial that
broke the back of what is what I call the
Irish Mob. Between nineteen hundred and nineteen thirteen, virtually every
major city.

Speaker 3 (05:51):
And people don't know this. This is dead history.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
The all politics, the police departments, crime were all controlled
by what I call the Irish Mob. The Irish came
over and the Potato famines. They had a pension for bars,
they had a pension for politics, They had a pension
for gangs. There were many gangs, bootle gangs, gas house

(06:16):
gangs all over New York, all over Chicago, all over
the Midwest. And out of those gangs rose the political
leaders of the day. So by nineteen hundred to nineteen thirteen,
particularly in New York with Tammany Hall, they were all
run by ex Irish gangsters and the way they controlled
everything was through control of the police departments which were

(06:37):
totally corrupt, and the police departments controlled the graft, the crime,
the drugs, the prostitution, gambling.

Speaker 3 (06:50):
Everyone had to have a license.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
They paid it into the Irish overlords who would put
people in office who would give them back contracts.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
It was.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
A very violent period and a very controlled period. And
what I found out as I went along, and I'll
throw this in.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
Because it astonished me.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
I started writing the book back in the nineteen seventies
and I stopped because I tried to fictionalize it all.
It didn't work. I left it for sixteen years. My
wife new wife, picked it up, read it and said,
it's an interesting story. You are to work on it.
I read it again, I hated it, and then I
hit an epiphany. The only way to tell this story

(07:35):
was to use all real events, all real people, and
then run my fictional characters and plot through it into
these real events, which stopped things from happening, or we
had to move around the real events, or the real
events made things happen after.

Speaker 3 (07:52):
It was so difficult. It took me.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
Twenty five years to write I'm not gonna do this again.
This is the one time event. But I realized what
I was done. I started writing again in around nineteen
ninety four. In two thousand and three there was a
movie called Gangs in New York. It was Leonardo DiCaprio.
And then in two thousand hen started Baldwork Empire, the

(08:21):
massive hit series. This connects them the whole period. Here
connects those two periods and tells you how you got
from one place to the next by accident.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
We're talking with Jeffrey Convicts about is just thoroughly entertaining
new historical fiction crime thriller called The Circus of Satan.
Just have a few minutes left. I want to ask
you so that the main character Beginness Beginnis, right, yeah,
is it was Beginnings. The real person is at the

(08:54):
one thing that's like truly fiction right from your brain.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
And Monaghan bad, the so called bad guy, all came
out of my brain.

Speaker 3 (09:05):
And what what what? What intrigued me about McGinnis was
number one.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
I was able to put forth my philosophies, my personal
philosophies on life and death, ethics, morals, justice, all different
forms of justice. Adam McGinnis comes a lot of my
own thoughts on this. But what intrigued me about McGinnis

(09:32):
is there's a guy who led a very violent life,
not intended, and then he lives the rest of his
life dealing at the consequences of the momentum he set
in motion right through the end of his life. When
he finds peace. It's a it's a redemption story that

(09:53):
comes out of extreme violence that affects the lives of
thousands of people. That actually, as as I lay in
the book, led to the thought of organized crime. Once
the Irish mob collapsed in nineteen thirteen, out came the
Jews and the Italians. They're organized crimes organizations and labor racketeering, bootlegging,

(10:14):
and then everything else we know later on, but it
all happened in this period and I was just fascinated
by it.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
There is some interesting twist in the book that I
won't give away about McGinnis, but I'll just say his
name sounds Irish. But there's a whole interesting story there,
all right. So one last question for you, and I
want to ask you about an actual person from history
who is in the book. And there are a lot

(10:43):
of them I could pick, even like FDR, but I'm
not going to go there right now. I was reading
another book. I don't even remember what it was. And
somewhere in that book, just recently this name pops up
that I never heard of before except reading your book.
Monkey Eastman, so just give me.

Speaker 2 (11:03):
Eastman was the first, was the first great Jewish gangster.
He controlled an army of two thousand warriors in the
Bowery kind of like eighteen ninety eight through nineteen three four,
and then he was shot, He went to prison, he

(11:25):
came back out. He was replaced by Big Jack Zelig
in a fight for power, and he became kind of
a goon hit man for Arnold Rothstein. Donald Rostein rose
up the chain as the overlord of all you know,
organized manipulations and crime. A Monk Eastman was the first

(11:48):
real great Jewish gangster in the Bowery. In fact, he
was so violent they named the whole ward in Bellevue.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
Hospital after him.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
They called it the Monk Eastman Ward because bodies would
would come in. And there's a great line of the
book where Michelangelo put put bodies together and Monke Eastman
then broke them apart. Well.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
Jeffrey Convas's new book is called The Circus of Satan,
A great summer read. Go buy it. Go buy it
for a friend. You will thoroughly enjoy yourself.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Let me let me throw something. Let me throw one
thing in Rosses. Not in the bookstores, because it's an
indie book. It's impossible to get them in the bookstores.
You go to Amazon and Bonds and Nobles, it's right there.
It order it, it comes right away.

Speaker 3 (12:34):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (12:34):
And it's such a fun story. And we all love
gangster stories and crime stuff, and you mix it with
actual history, and especially actual history of a period that
none of us really knows anything about. Like we've all
seen innumerable things about about the al Capone era and
the untouchables and and you know, elliot ness and so on.

(12:58):
Nobody knows until I didn't know anything about that time frame.
And so even though it's a novel, I learned a
heck of a lot and I really enjoyed myself. The
Circus of Satan is the name of the book. Jeffrey Convicts.
Thank you for a great book. Thanks for your time today,
and amazing that you spent twenty or thirty or whatever
years it is writing it. But I think it was

(13:18):
worth it. Just don't do it again.

Speaker 3 (13:21):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
Great to have you

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