On a shimmering summer morning in June 2000 I was jolted awake by an urgent knocking at the front door. When I opened it, I faced a thicket of badges and guns. It was the FBI. My first reaction, after shock, was that the gaggle of agents and policemen in my doorway had to have the wrong address. But they didn’t. They were there to arrest my husband.

I asked what they could possibly want Glenn for.  He was a successful trader at the Mercantile Exchange who only invested his own money. He had no regulatory problems, always paid his taxes, and was a devoted husband who spent nearly all his free time with our two children.  What could he have possibly done? The agents filing through rooms and closets didn’t know. They’d been sent to our home in a leafy suburb of Chicago by an affiliate office from the Southern District of New York.

What happened to our family that day was the result of a chance encounter with a cooperating witness, who had been sent into the general public to secretly tape conversations for the Justice Department.  Like almost all cooperating witnesses, he was a felon trying to incriminate others in order to avoid serving jail time himself.

So how did my husband, who had never been under any kind of suspicion, cross paths with a criminal wired for sound?  In early 2000, Glenn began raising public money for the first time in his life for a hedge fund he wanted to start. In furtherance of this goal, an acquaintance introduced him to a wealthy investment banker at a pitch meeting in New York. Shortly after Glenn arrived back home in Chicago, this “banker” began calling his office incessantly offering introductions to a variety of wealthy investors. Unbeknownst to Glenn, this very aggressive new contact was really a career con man who’d swindled Wall Street investors out of millions of dollars. And in a few short weeks, he robbed our family too. He stripped us of our reputation, our security, and almost all the good will we’d amassed over 25 years. And he did it with words.

In the years between Glenn’s arrest and his eventual trial we had to sell our home in order to pay for his defense. I found myself with little time for charities I’d served for years, or the screenplay I’d written that had been optioned by a production company in Los Angeles. (The producer eventually abandoned my screenplay too, after he was offered a chance to direct for Disney.)  My passion for Shakespeare, Faulkner and Yeats was also set aside, so I could concentrate more fully on the Kafkaesque world of American conspiracy law, where speculation about what ambiguous words and statements might mean or what might have been said on unintelligible portions of tape is enough to convict. Transcripts of incomplete and often incoherent “taped evidence” that would be used against my husband became the unwelcome new literature of my life. These transcripts, dominated by the breathless, theatrical rant of a singular criminal witness who boorishly talked over any interruption or dissent became the inspiration for the character Conner Skilling.

The stories I’ve always valued most are those that have some resonance beyond their ability to entertain. I can hear the former teacher in myself when I say a good novel leads the reader into thrilling, sometimes frightening territory beyond the realm of common experience, while gently probing hidden truths just beneath the crust of our defenses. The elite corps of criminal informants who specialize in developing conspiracy cases for Federal intelligence agencies have provided us with some of our most fleetingly spectacular headlines, and in the case of Ahmed Chalabi, discredited information that has cost thousands of Iraqi and American lives.  The Cooperating Witness is not biography, though it contains many technical and procedural elements that directly impacted the quality of justice my family received. I like to think of it as a guided tour through a rationalized, highly regulated system that often prefers the immediacy of information -- no matter how questionable the source -- to the rigor and duration of thorough investigation. It is a story about the carelessness with which we as a society dispense one of the most destructive and under regulated weapons in the human arsenal today: the power to accuse.