My friends at Midriff Records are launching a blog which label founder/Beatings frontman/college buddy/all-around-good guy Eldridge Rodriguez describes as “only peripherally music oriented, because when it comes to bands we won’t pretend to be impartial about who we think should get the public’s attention. It’s more of a lifestyle or things we dig blog which usually centers around us getting drunk and making fun of people.”

Needless to say, I was thrilled when they asked me to contribute a piece. The only editorial direction I was given was to write “something about your book,” which came out five years ago this week. I decided I’d write about all the strange (and often scummy) people who come into your life when you write a book that has the potential to be made into a movie.

I’m going to let Midriff have all the glory of publishing this piece in its entirety for the first time, but I figured I’d start you with a taste over here and link you to their new blog as soon as it’s up and running:

The first one came even before the book was released: an ex-actor who said he wanted to get into directing and maybe star in the film version of the adaptation of my book. He didn’t give up when he figured out there was no six-figure book advance, that I had no money to invest in a film: the best I could do was spot him $84 for a room in a hooker-ridden hotel when he came to Boston to meet me.

When the publisher told him they wouldn’t sell the film rights to someone with no film making experience, he decided he was going to make a documentary about releasing a book. He rented an impressive looking camera for my book release party, but he didn’t rent lights, so most of the footage he shot was unusable. He spent most of that night, plus time at a similar event in Pittsburgh, hitting on my friends. I saw him one more time, when the gangster I had written about met him in New York City and he shot footage of Ron going to his old haunts: the Chelsea Hotel, Long Beach, the Diamond District.

I didn’t hear from him after that, and I didn’t really want to: I had managed to get my hands on a copy of one of the two indie films he had “starred” in (the other one had only been released in Greece and had never even managed to go straight to video). He played the villain in a low-budget kids flick and, frankly, had every scene he was in stolen by the kid hero.

The official line on my book, Blood & Volume: Inside New York’s Israeli Mafia is that it got great reviews but it didn’t sell well, partly because the publisher filed for bankruptcy shortly after it was released and partly because not enough people got killed in it. Yet a lot of the handful of the people who read it picked up on the fact that I wrote it in three acts. They picked up on the fact that I was begging for someone to make it into a film.

And that has meant a steady stream of people with promises coming into and out of my life over the past five years.

I found out today my book, Blood & Volume: Inside New York’s Israeli Mafia was named first runner-up in the legacy nonfiction catergory of the Eric Hoffer Awards for Independent Books. The category is set up specifically to recognize older books from independent publishers, which often have to rely on their back lists.

…I offer my very loose connection via Ron Gonen to the last royal wedding in 1981. Excerpted from Blood & Volume: Inside New York’s Israeli Mafia by Dave Copeland (Barricade Books, 2007):

In 1979 Ron Gonen had moved to London and set up an import-export company as a front for a complex fraud ring. In its simplest form, Gonen bought expensive imported wines, golf clubs, designer clothes and other luxury items on credit, then immediately resold them at cut rates to Greek gangsters and other underworld operatives throughout Europe and the Middle East. The scheme was designed to eventually fail. Once creditors got wise to the fact that they would never be paid the whole operation would collapse. It didn’t matter – when the creditors went to look for the man who owed them millions of dollars, they’d go looking for Levi Ezanko.

Levi Ezanko had an Israeli birth certificate and an Italian passport. He even had a German driver’s license and a listed phone number. What he didn’t have was a pulse. Gonen had stolen the identity of a dead man and had crafted a set of forged documents that were so realistic it would take Scotland Yard two trips to the expensive Fleet Street offices Gonen had rented to confront Mr. Ezanko with the fact that he was deceased. But by the time the second trip rolled around, the offices were empty and Gonen was on his way to Guatemala, which didn’t have an extradition treaty with Great Britain.

Gonen’s mistake had been renting the offices on Fleet Street. The only reason British authorities had shown up at the office in the first place was because they were conducting security checks on all of the people working on Fleet Street who would have front row seats to the parade following Princess Diana’s wedding to Prince Charles, which was scheduled for June of 1981. After 18 months, Gonen had netted more money than he had ever imagined from the sting, but it was just as quickly over because he – posing as Levi Ezanko – had been foolish enough to actually use the office.

I posted a four-page, .PDF excerpt of Blood & Volume: Inside New York’s Israeli Mafia that deals with many of the same issues Massachusetts prosecutors are facing as they try to charge a 40-year-old Ecuadoran man suspected in the beating deaths of a woman and her two-year-old son in Brockton last month. Luis Guaman fled to his native country, but Massachusetts officials are confident he will be returned to face trial.

Ecuador, like Israel in the 1990′s, has a Constitutional provision that prohibits extradition of its citizens. And, like Israel did with members of the Israeli Mafia that I wrote about in B&V, Ecaudor has promised to try Guaman for his crimes in that country. From the excerpt I posted:

Israel “Alice” Mizrachi and Joe Reich couldn’t outrun their American crime spree…in 1993 — after significant pressure from U.S. authorities — an Israeli judge rules that Mizrachi and Reich could be tried in Israel for their role in the Markowitz murder, even though the murder had been committed in the United States. It was an unprecedented and difficult way to try a case.

A story in today’s Globe about the Guaman case alludes to some of those difficulties:

Plymouth District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz said talks were underway to return Guaman to the United States, despite Ecuador’s constitutional prohibition on extraditing its citizens. Cruz said he “fully expects’’ Guaman to face prosecution here.

“The legal jurisdiction is here, the witnesses are here, the physical evidence is here, and the many experts dedicated to analyzing that physical evidence at the State Police crime lab are here,’’ he said. “This community demands that the perpetrator of those crimes face justice here.’’

Guaman’s return would be a dramatic shift in a case that just days ago seemed destined to take place in Ecuador. Ecuadoran authorities, who are holding Guaman on charges of traveling under a passport with another name, had said Friday that they were cooperating with law enforcement in the United States to proceed with a murder trial there, using evidence gathered in the United States.

If tried in Ecaudor, my money is on an acquittal for Guaman (Mizrachi and Reich were acquitted in Israel on the murder charges, although Mizrachi was convicted of smuggling four kilos of heroin from Amsterdam to New York by a jury in Jerusalem. When he was released from prison he reportedly led a law-abiding life and worked as a florist before being killed in a car bombing, presumably as retribution for misdeeds in New York, in 2003).

Read another excerpt and more about “Blood & Volume,” or order your copy.

I have always been a big opponent of writing contests, figuring the time and effort that goes into producing an entry that amounts to little more than a lottery ticket could have been better spent tracking down and working on a paid assignment. That said, I just uploaded a script to Amazon Studios, a new venture by Amazon explained well in this L.A. Times article:

In exchange for submitting material, users will give Amazon an 18 months of exclusive rights, an “option” in industry parlance, to their work. That type of restriction without payment is likely to deter working filmmakers and screenwriters and make Amazon Studios a home for rookies only.

However, a panel of judges including “Top Gun” screenwriter Jack Epps, Jr. and “Bottle Rocket” producer Michael Taylor will look at the highest rated material and award monthly and yearly prizes to screenplays and films. Through the end of 2011, the prizes will total $2.7 million.

Amazon will then have the ability to take projects to Warner Bros. or, if it passes, other studios in hopes of getting them made. Writers or directors whose script or sample film is turned into a theatrically released film by a studio would get paid $200,000 by Amazon.

So why did I break my own cardinal rule? Especially when I’m particularly paranoid about script writing contests because I’ve heard so many Hollywood horror stories about stolen work?

For starters, it’s the script based on my book that I spent more than a year working on before it was ultimately rejected by the Robert Evans Company. The fact that it’s based on my book gives me some added protection, as does the fact that I trust Amazon as a company. The heavy lifting is done and the project, until I saw this article, was in my “dead/on hold projects” folder. This is just another effort to get my work in front of another production company (Robert Evans has a similar first-look arrangement with Paramount). I also like the script — it’s a good script but Hollywood is increasingly relying on trusted formulas: sequels, remakes of older movies and television shows and films based on best-selling books.

There’s an interesting component in there that will allow people to comment and edit your work, which is kind of strange and foreign to me, but so is the whole entering a screen-writing contest. Perhaps it will make it stronger.

But, ultimately, I’m realizing this recession and loads of new technologies are very abruptly changing the way writers and other creative types make money. With more and more free content being produced by skilled amateurs, we may some day get to a point where contests backed by big, trusted companies are going to be the best way for writers to make livable wages. People who write this kind of stuff cautiously guard their work for fear of having it lifted, but at some point you need to get it out there so someone with influence can get their eyes on it and put some passion behind it.

So wish me luck….if anything interesting happens with it I’ll let you know.

So remember about a year ago when I told you I was the subject of a documentary?

Apparently it’s out.

After months of not hearing from the producer I got n email about a month ago saying he was going to enter it in some festivals. And then nothing.

I’m pretty sure our agreement allowed me to see it before it was released. But maybe not. I should check that.

When I visited campus last fall, a UMass student took the initiative to profile me for the alumni magazine. The version that appeared in the print version is one of my favorite articles that was written about Blood & Volume, and for the past several months I have been getting emails from friends who saw the article which garnered a full page and a big, honking picture of me taken by Schisler at the Pittsburgh book release party (note to authors: alumni magazines have huge circulations, particularly at a place like UMass, and should be one of the first places you contact to promote your book).

A shorter version of Melissa Garber’s article is finally online, if you’re curious (a bit dated, given references to a project that has been back-burnered for the moment, but still a clip that I had no complaints with).

Someone has been Googling names in race results…I’m pretty sure I don’t qualify but I always appreciate a good plug from good people:

Word out on the street was that Boston Marathon legend Jack Fultz was in-town tonight giving a lecture to a beer in-hand crowd at Khoury’s State Spa…well we had our own celebrity in-house tonight, author Dave Copeland who most recently penned “Blood and Volume: Inside New York’s Israeli Mafia”….Dave didn’t lecture but he did run and he always had a beer in-hand after the run!!!

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If you want to know why I’m having a less-than-stellar weekend you need to go back to May, when I got an email from my publisher’s in-house publicist. This was two months after the book had been released, two months after the prime time for meaningful book promotion had passed and came only after I had made a stink about the lack of support I had gotten after hiring my own publicists for the initial marketing drive.

Every author complains about the publicity push — or lack thereof — that they get from their publisher. But in my case, I think my gripes were warranted.

That’s because that email was addressed to Ron.

In other words, the woman in charge of knowing my book inside and out, the person who should be able to talk intelligently about it to reporters and interested reviewers, thought the subject was the author. A full two months after the book had come out and a full three months after the book should have come out, she did not know the author’s name.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been all that surprised when my agent called yesterday to say that the publisher had filed for bankruptcy. He did not — regrettably — negotiate that deal, but he represents another author with a Barricade book. The official notice from the bankruptcy court came in today’s mail.

It may not be all bad, I keep telling myself. The royalties I’m likely to lose were bound to be minuscule at best. And it may give me an opportunity to reclaim some rights. At the end of the day, I got a book that was well-reviewed which led to a new agent (who will help me avoid deals like this in the future), teaching gigs and it has opened some doors for more potential work.

Still….all I can say at this point is Go Sox! It may be the saving grace of this lost weekend. Guess I should’ve made more of a push to go to Dublin to watch the marathon I was running a year ago this weekend. Bad news doesn;t seem as bad when you’re in a foreign country and behind a pint.

So imagine you had these weird neighbors — so weird that the patriarch gets shot in a gangland slaying. Then 16 or 17 years later you pick up a book that got good reviews, and find out that the book is largely about said neighbors.

Check out the latest Blood & Volume reader email:

I TOTALLY enjoyed BLOOD & VOLUME. I had seen a review inthe W0RLD JEWISH newspaper. It caught my eye and I was flabbergasted to learn something that I WAS FAMILIAR WITH.

I lived on XXXXX BLVD. in Oceanside after returning after living in Isreal for ten years. My daughter became friends with a new Israeli girl from school, that recently moved to the neighborhood. I thought this would be nice for her to have an Israeli friend here to make the transistion easier, and be able to speak Hebrew to. I also thought that I would have a family here in the neighborhood that I might be able to relate to also, and keep up my Hebrew.

As typical, I met the mother (Ofra Attias), who seemed sweet, but a bit intense. One day I walked over there to pick up my daughter (and check out the big new house they lived in). The rumor was that they paid cash, for the house, which really got all the neighbor’s talking. I walked in and Ofra said to come to the backyard to meet her husband.

I was greeted there by A SLEW of Israeli gangster-looking men, sitting eating sunflower seeds (typical). I asked Ofra which one was her husband. She coyly answered that I should pick out the best looking one, and that was him. I stood there frozen, not knowing what to say..in case I picked the wrong one. Johnny LAUGHED and I figured it out.

AT THAT MOMENT, I KNEW THAT THESE MEN WERE UP TO NO GOOD. I had known of men is ISRAEL that were a bit to the left of the law,so I figured they were the same. The girls became good friends, and she and SANDY used to come over often. They never really wanted to go home. I once came home from work to find them sittingon the sidewalk waiting for my daughter. Once they called up during an afternoon that they were alone telling my daughter that they were scared because a man was sitting in a car across the street from their house.

We thought they were over reacting, never really thinking something so sinister could happen in Oceanside. A summer that I worked in a JEWISH SLEEP AWAY camp OFRA asked if she could send her girls to get a more Jewish feel. She got them in and on visiting day they came up to visit and Johnny looked ridiculous walking through the hills of the camp with all the parents and kids. He was actually a sad looking outcast from society, I thought.

When word got out of his killing I went to the SHIVA…but didn’t ask any questions. I wasn’t really friends with them. I guess a few weeks later when she was arrested, her mother came to take care of the kids. (btw, didn’t she have a baby boy around 1987?) SOON THE WERE ALL GONE, AND WE JUST HEARD SOMETHING LIKE THE GRANDMOTHER TOOK THEM TO BE NEAR HER IN JAIL.

I had no idea how far up on the food-chain he was till I read your book. It helped me fill in the blanks on some things that I always was confused about.

I also for some reason think the name HONEY TESSMAN is familiar. Perhaps from the beach clubs we went to as kids in the mid-60′s. Thank you for quite a good read, and it really showed me how my instincts were correct about the ATTIAS family.