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"As a tough but smart Italian American kid, Ernest Cuneo played Ivy League football at Columbia University and was in the old Brooklyn Dodgers NFL franchise before becoming a city hall lawyer and "Brain Trust'' aide to President Roosevelt. He was on the payroll of national radio columnist Walter Winchell and mingled with the famous and powerful. But his status as a spy remained a secret, hiding in plain sight. During this time, Cuneo began a close friendship with British spy Ian Fleming and helped inspire Fleming's James Bond novels. He also began a love affair with one of Churchill's agents at Rockefeller Center--Margaret Watson, a beautiful Canadian woman with a photographic memory ideal for spycraft. In one nighttime attack, Watson was nearly smothered to death by a Nazi assassin inside her women's dormitory near Rockefeller Center. Cuneo's transformation from a gridiron athlete into a high-stakes intelligence go-between and political influencer is one of the great untold stories of American espionage. He has remained "invisible" in the public eye--until now, with this unveiled look into his life."--Provided by publisher.
About the author
Thomas Maier is an award-winning author, journalist, and television producer. He was a producer for both the Emmy-winning Showtime drama Masters of Sex, and the 2024 Paramount+ docuseries Mafia Spies, both adapted from his non-fiction books. His biography, Dr. Spock: An American Life, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The JFK Library hosted a forum about his 2014 book, When Lions Roar: The Churchills and the Kennedys, which was excerpted in Time and The Wall Street Journal. At Newsday in New York, Maier twice won the National Society of Professional Journalists’ top prize and several honors, including the Daniel Pearl Award from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and now serves on the paper’s editorial board. He won the 2022 Columbia University Journalism School’s Alumni Award for career achievement. He has appeared twice on the Today show and Morning Joe, as well as 20/20, CBS Evening News, Hardball, CNN, and NPR’s Fresh Air.
