The Leverage was born in late 2024 and early 2025. It started as an attempt to answer a handful of questions: Why were people behaving the way they were? Why were issues of obvious transparency that were widely popular so hard to make happen? The research I did about those questions led to even more questions and surfaced coincidences.
Here is one example. Early on, I was reading about Epstein’s first job: teaching at the Dalton School in Manhattan in 1974, hired without a college degree. The headmaster through June of that year was Donald Barr — OSS veteran and father of William Barr, who would twice serve as Attorney General and was in office when Epstein died in federal custody. Whether Donald Barr hired Jeffrey Epstein is a genuinely open question: he resigned in June, Epstein started in September under Barr’s successor, and a spring hire is possible. The record is silent.
The record is not silent about everything, though. In 1973 — the year before Epstein arrived — Donald Barr published a science-fiction novel about aristocrats who keep teenage sex slaves. It’s called Space Relations. You can read it at the Internet Archive.
What the actual fuck.
I kept finding things like this — clusters of documented facts that sit next to each other and create a shape. The facts are real. The shape is not evidence. Learning to hold those two sentences at once is what the book is, and it’s why the novel comes with a public source register that separates what’s documented from what’s invented.
Through the first half of 2025, these ideas percolated. I developed a thesis. I explored the origin story of political influence. The idea of turning this research into a novel had not really occurred to me.
Then, in the fall of 2025, my wife started law school. For those of you who have never been in close proximity to a law student, law school (especially the 1L year) is all-consuming. Suddenly the mood in the house became very academic. Our evenings turned quiet.
Somewhere in those quiet evenings, the shapes I unearthed found their form. I couldn’t write them as nonfiction. The shapes aren’t evidence, and a nonfiction book would have to pretend they were. Fiction could hold both halves honestly: take the words and facts of real people, and invent characters to interpret them.
The Teaser
The Leverage is a speculative political thriller about the quietest institution in American politics: leverage. From Hoover’s secret files to Cohn’s townhouse recordings to Epstein’s surveillance machine, every generation built a cleaner, stronger version than the last. Its most elegant operator now works inside the government — the latest holder of a position that has brokered the reversals and rewards of lawmakers for over half a century.
The investigation runs through Derek Hunter, a bitter retired FBI agent working a wall of Post-its in a house in Truro; Gabriel Cantor, a data engineer in Maine with a dark history inside the system; and Heidi Weber, a skeptical journalist who covers institutional power. They are hunting the curator at the center — and the reader is already in the room with her, watching her work, while the investigators close in from the outside.
The history is drawn from the documented record where it exists and speculation where it doesn’t. The arc moves from investigation into a constitutional crisis. The cold truth is that the machine was always meant to survive the people who ran it.
What to Expect Here
Over the coming months, I’ll be using this Substack to share the research, the underlying mechanics, and the rollout of The Leverage.
Next post: The Source Register. I’ll walk through the public Source Register I built for the novel. It’s an interactive, transparent accounting of the entire book: every real event, date, transcript, and primary source is mapped out — with reported, transposed, and invented material explicitly flagged.
Beyond that, here’s what’s coming:
Deeper dives into the historical clusters that underpin the story — from Roy Cohn’s townhouse and Craig Spence’s parties to the files Helen Gandy didn’t burn. There’s so much fascinating research that didn’t make it onto the page. You’ll find it here.
Where the hard data ends, where the narrative begins, and how to tell the difference.
Excerpts, schedules, character notes, and the story of how the scaffolding of the book came together.
If you’re interested in institutional power, political control, and the strange places where the public record ends, I’m glad you’re here.
Subscribe, and let’s trace the leverage together.