Anthony Bruno

Anthony Bruno has a deep interest in Japanese culture and has studied the Japanese martial art, aikido, for over 25 years.  Among his many Crime Library articles is a widely reprinted piece on the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia.  In The Roppongi Stalker, he takes the reader into the tangled world of Tokyo’s sex trade where a charming serial rapist and killer preyed on young women to satisfy his deviant sexual desires.

It takes an experienced author to capture the complexity of a killer’s true character.  Bruno was the first author to delve into the twisted mind of Richard “the Iceman” Kuklinski ─ Mafia assassin, lethal scam artist, and family man.  For his full-length book, The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer, he communicated with Kuklinski so extensively and researched his actions so thoroughly that he was able to sort out most of what was truth and what was fiction in the legend.  That book is the basis for an upcoming feature film starring Ray Liotta, Chris Evans and Boardwalk Empire’s Michael Shannon as the Iceman. Bruno is serving as executive producer for the feature film.  Bruno is well-grounded in the mob culture and has written about it extensively.

His big break as a writer came in 1988 when his crime novel Bad Guys was published in hardcover.  Bad Guys was the first in a series of novels (Bad Blood, Bad Luck, Bad Business, Bad Moon, and Bad Apple) about FBI agents Mike Tozzi and Cuthbert Gibbons, odd-couple partners whose prime targets are New York and New Jersey wiseguys. Basing his stories on actual Mafia figures and their criminal activities, Bruno pioneered the territory that made The Sopranos a television phenomenon. Rave reviews compared Bruno to Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake. People called Gibbons and Tozzi “the best fictional cop duo around.”

In 1995, Bruno wrote Seven: The Novelization based on the hit feature film starring Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

For his next fiction series, Bruno created a new law-enforcement duo, parole officers Loretta Kovacs and Frank Marvelli of the New Jersey Parole Violators Search Unit. Loretta and Marvelli made their debut in Devil’s Food, in which zaftig Loretta goes undercover at a Florida fat farm in order to nab a crafty embezzler. The second book in this series, Double Espresso, was nominated for an Anthony Award in 1998. The latest entry, Hot Fudge, takes Loretta and Marvelli into the world of gourmet ice cream and kinky sex as they track down a criminal opportunist who’s looking to add murder to his extensive rap sheet.

The Seekers: A Bounty Hunter’s Story, Bruno’s latest non-fiction book, recounts the life and adventures of America’s most unique and most successful bounty hunter, Joshua Armstrong, the leader of the Seekers, an elite Mission: Impossible-style team whose most effective weapon is their spirituality. The Seekers was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime book in 2001.

In February 2004, a television movie adaptation of Bruno’s novel Bad Apple, starring and produced by actor Chris Noth (“Law & Order”), premiered on TNT.

Bruno wrote virtually all the stories about organized crime on Time Warner’s Crime Library.