Books published by Strategic Media Books

"When popular First Lady Rose Gannon dies suddenly (and mysteriously) during an interview with White House correspondent Lark Chadwick, Lark is thrust into the midst of a media-bashing frenzy. Lark, still reeling from the death of her photographer boyfriend, finds herself covering a grieving president struggling with his pain while trying to defuse a looming nuclear war. In the era of "fake news," when all "facts" are suspect (and reporters are targets), Lark tries to discover the truth while also under personal attack. FAKE is author John DeDakis's most important and perhaps most controversial book to date. In FAKE, DeDakis, a former White House correspondent, and former CNN Senior Copy Editor, offers a real-life look behind-the-scenes at the ethical struggles of a female journalist in a #MeToo world. Protagonist Lark Chadwick is a strong-willed, strong-minded twenty-something trying to walk the line between personal feelings and dispassionate objectivity - trying to discern the difference between what's real . . . and what's fake."--Publisher's description.

Now a summer 2023 ViX Original series based on this book by Ron Chepesiuk. Carlos Lehder is one of the most important and fascinating individuals in the history of drug trafficking and the U.S. War on Drugs. Lehder was the drug kingpin who developed the transportation system that helped flood the flood the U.S. with drugs from Latin America. This is the first biography of Lehder. Born in 1949, Carlo Lehder rose from a struggling, small time pot dealer to become a major godfather in the Medellin cartel, the crime syndicate largely responsible for initiating the cocaine epidemic plaguing American society since the late 1970s. Federal U.S. prosecutor Robert Merkle, who successfully prosecuted Lehder in 1988, said that the drug lord "was to cocaine transportation what Henry Ford was to automobiles" because he was the mastermind behind the transportation network that revolutionized the international drug trade. Lehder's genius was to devise a sophisticated transportation system that allowed the Medellin cartel to transport huge quantities of cocaine from Colombia, the source country, to the U.S., the world's major illegal drug market. By 1987, the DEA and the Colombian government had put Lehder's net wealth at more than $3 billion. A great admirer of both Nazi icon Adolph Hitler and Marxist Che Guevara, Lehder hated the U.S. and viewed cocaine as a kind of atomic bomb that could destroy Uncle Sam from within. Lehder got the nickname, "Crazy Charlie," because of his bizarre and often unpredictable behavior.

Spook War gives a glimpse and a tour into the primary and collateral events triggered when the Reagan Administration abruptly shifted three decades of American foreign policy to favor the interests of the Arab States to the detriment of our traditional Middle East allies, the Israelis. Have you ever wondered about the real story behind the blaring headlines of that era? Count Alexandre de Marenches, longtime chief of the Service de Documentation Exterieure de Contre-Espionnage, the primary Intelligence Agency of France, described it as two sorts of historythe known and the unknown. This book describes some of those unknowns. Welcome to the Spook War.