Peter Maas wrote about crooks and cops, about people's corruption and
integrity. His subjects were often real people and his stories
unrelentingly factual. He grew up in the Hamilton Heights area on the
upper west side of New York City. His community largely comprised an
ethnic melding of German, Jewish, and Irish families. He himself
descended from Dutch and Irish stock and liked to tell the story that
his name pronounced "mace" in Irish means "thighbone" and pronounced
"moss" in Dutch means "mace" -- a club, which to his way of thinking
was roughly the same thing but in two distinct languages and cultures
-- a bit like himself. This affinity for the melding of types and
portrayals of people permeates Maas' work. In the "Valachi Papers" and
"Serpico," for instance, distinguishing between heroes and villains is
at times a difficult task, at other times a dangerous gamble. He began
his writing career while still a political science major at Duke
University in the late '40s. It was in his capacity as a reporter for
the College paper that he found his way into an exclusive interview
with Walter Reuther, the then-president of the United Auto Workers
union. It was a big scoop for a college student, and, for his efforts,
he received $100 from the Associated Press. More importantly, it was
the beginning of a career in journalistic writing that often found him
brushing up against and portraying in his work elements of society that
frequently played rough, certainly by different rules than the
mainstream, and sometimes even deadly. After college and a brief stint
in Paris, France, working for the New York Herald Tribune (a job he
wrestled from the editor by promising that he could learn French -- not
having learned it yet -- in time enough to post his first assignment),
Maas found himself enlisting in the navy during the Korean War. It was
after the navy in 1955 that he joined Collier's magazine. His time
there, however, was brief; the magazine ceased publishing in January
1957, leaving Maas to find temporary work on a lobster boat. But before
too long he was writing for Look magazine, where he found national
prominence with a piece about a black death-row inmate in Angola,
Louisiana, who had been on death row for 14 years, longer than any
other inmate. Maas wrote convincingly about the man's innocence,
eventually influencing a reconsideration of the case and the man's
release. He eventually moved over to the Saturday Evening Post and hit
upon one of his greatest scoops -- a slip of the tongue by
then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy about the Mafia informant Joe
Valachi. The government was, to say the least, reluctant to allow Maas
to publish Valachi's story, claiming that public exposure would be
"detrimental to law enforcement." Consequently, Maas had to take the
government to court in order to gain the rights to publish his book (in
the end, agreeing that he would write the book about Valachi and not
write it with Valachi). And he had to go through nearly two dozen
publishers before he got it published. The book, of course, became a
best seller and the subsequent movie became a box office hit. Other
non-fiction publishing and movie achievements for Peter Maas include
the story of Frank Serpico's efforts against police corruption (i.e.
"Serpico"), the chronicle of a power struggle among three generations
of a Gypsy "royal family" (i.e. "The King of the Gypsies"), one woman's
fight to end corruption involving the Tennessee state house (i.e.
"Marie"), the heroic rescue of a pre-WWII sunken submarine (i.e. "The
Terrible Hours" made for T.V. as "Submerged"), and the plight of a baby
boy effectively orphaned by his father's murder of his mother and soon
thereafter caught in a fight between his parents' families for his
custody (i.e. "In a Child's Name"). Peter Maas has also published the
fictional "Made in America." It recounts in pure Maas fashion the
melding of right and wrong, villain and hero, up and down in telling
the story of an average, law-abiding citizen given a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity for riches if only he can get a hold of the right amount of
money -- something he does from a loan shark.
