About
I’m a debut thriller novelist with roots in 1960s New York. I started Goju Ryu at 13 and earned my black belt at 20. I grew up in Little Italy after immigrating at seven, drove a NYC yellow Checker cab at 18, graduated from Automotive High School in 1978, and studied at New York Technical College (Voorhees Campus). From 1984 to 2019, I worked for General Motors, moving from Technical Training Instructor to leadership roles in Philadelphia and New York, then heading service operations for eleven Middle East countries from Dubai, UAE. From the age of 13, I was a member of the Episcopal Mission Societies’ Bleecker Street Youth Club on the Lower East Side, where I began my photography hobby as a street, urban, and landscape photographer. I now live with my wife in Spain’s Costa del Sol, Malaga, Andalucia.
Featured Work
The Night Driver is a gritty, research-driven thriller set in 1979 New York City. Diego De LaCruz—taxi driver, Goju-Ryu practitioner, and Kali stick expert—finds a corpse dumped in his cab and becomes the target of a corporate-style crime syndicate. As he fights extortion crews from The Cage in Greenwich Village to Chinatown’s restaurant row, Diego navigates loyalty, the ethics of force, and the immigrant grind. The book leans on period-accurate detail (payphones, GM cars, subway lines) and explores how one neighborhood defender pushes back when the system looks the other way.
The Night Driver is a gritty thriller set in 1979 New York City. Diego De LaCruz, a young taxi driver and disciplined practitioner of Okinawan Goju-Ryu, discovers a dead body in his cab and realizes he’s being framed by a syndicate expanding into the Lower East Side. From a violent ambush at Tompkins Square Park to a streetball power play at West Fourth’s “The Cage,” and an extortion squeeze on a Chinatown restaurant, Diego pushes back to protect his neighborhood while staying within a code he learned in the dojo. The book emphasizes period accuracy and portrays combat as functional, rather than flashy. The core themes are loyalty, the ethics of force, and how ordinary people resist when institutions fail them. The Night Driver launches a continuing series following Diego as he confronts organized crime’s quiet, corporate turn.
