Peter Lance Biography

Nov.1st  2024 Peter Lance is a five-time Emmy-winning investigative reporter now working as a screenwriter and novelist. With a Masters Degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law, Lance spent the first 15 years of his career as a print reporter and network correspondent.

He began his career as a reporter for his hometown paper, The Newport, R.I. Daily News. There, while a student at Northeastern University in Boston, he won the coveted Sevellon Brown Award from the A.P. Managing Editors Association. Lance next moved to WNET, the PBS flagship in New York, where he won his first New York area Emmy and the Ohio State Award as a producer- reporter for Channel 13’s news magazine THE 51ST STATE.

Later, while working as a writer and producer for WABC-TV Lance won his second Emmy along with the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism prize for WILLOWBROOK: THE PEOPLE VS. THE STATE OF NEW YORK, an exposé on a notorious institution housing patients with intellectual disabilities. He was also awarded The National Community Service Emmy for that same documentary.

While getting his law degree, Lance worked as a Trial Preparation Assistant in the office of the District Attorney for New York County. Moving to ABC News as a field producer, Lance won his fourth Emmy for “Arson and Profit,” his undercover investigation of an arson ring in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago.

In 1981 Lance became Investigative Correspondent for ABC News. For his very first investigative piece on 20/20 Lance won his fifth Emmy for “Unnecessary Surgery,” an exposé on unnecessary surgery in an Arkansas hospital. He won two more Emmy nominations in 1982 for 20/20 investigative pieces on Formaldehyde : “The Danger Within” and toxic waste: “Deadly Chemicals, Deadly Oil;” a piece that also won The National Headliner Award.

Over the next five years he covered hundreds of stories worldwide for ABC NEWS 20/20, NIGHTLINE, and WORLD NEWS TONIGHT, including a special two-part report for NIGHTLINE on the 20th anniversary of the assassination of President John. F. Kennedy. Reporting from the Texas School Book Depository Building, Lance was one of the last reporters granted access to accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s alleged shooting position as he reportedly trained his Mannlicher Carcano rifle down on the Presidential motorcade.

Later, Lance was a member of the first American crew into Indochina after the end of the Vietnam War. He chased rebel insurgents through the Plaine Des Jarres in Laos and members of the Genovese Family through the toxic wastelands of New Jersey. He tracked knife-happy surgeons in the Deep South and nuclear terrorists through the twisted streets of Antwerp. Then, in 1987, he took a break from non-fiction.

Lance came to L.A. and began working as a writer and story editor for Michael Mann on two of his acclaimed NBC series: CRIME STORY and MIAMI VICE. 
In 1989 Lance became the co-executive producer and “show runner” on the fourth season of WISEGUY for CBS and in 1993 he co-created MISSING PERSONS, for ABC. He later served as a writer and consulting producer on JAG (NBC).

In 1997 Lance’s first novel FIRST DEGREE BURN became a national best seller, ranking No. 24 on The Ingram A-List The Top 50 Requested Titles in Mystery- Detective Fiction. The film-noir mystery features FDNY Fire Marshal Eddie Burke.

Later Lance adapted VEIL: THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA, Bob Woodward’s best-seller on William Casey for HBO. For Showtime he wrote TERROR.NET, the story of Bradley Smith, the courageous Diplomatic Security agent responsible for helping to apprehend the world’s most notorious terrorists. In the year 2000 Lance returned to investigative reporting with his best-selling non-fiction investigative biography: THE STINGRAY: Lethal Tactics of The Sole Survivor.

9/11 HARPERCOLLINS TRILOGY

Following the 9/11 attacks Lance began investigating the origins of the FBI’s original probe of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Ahmed Yousef. After visiting Yousef’s former bomb factory in the Philippines, he came away with 100’s of pages of classified documents proving that Yousef had set the 9/11 plot into motion as early as 1994.

Lance then went back and examined the FBI’s original efforts to stop Yousef in 1992 as he built the first WTC device. The result is his acclaimed investigative book from Harper Collins 1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE.

Lance followed that book with COVER UP in 2004. In it he established evidence that federal officials entered into an “ends/means” decision in 1996 that buried a treasure trove of al Qaeda-related intelligence in order to preserve a series of Mafia-related cases in the Eastern District of New York (Brooklyn).

Lance presented probative evidence in the book that a senior Organized Crime Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s New York Office (NYO) may have been in a corrupt relationship with a Colombo Family killer. It was the FBI’s desire to prevent this potential scandal from tanking the mob cases, that led, Lance determined, to the al Qaeda evidence suppression.

A year after COVER UP’s publication the Brooklyn D.A. commenced a grand jury investigation inspired, in part, by Lance’s revelations about the Supervisory Special Agent: R. Lindley DeVecchio. On March 30th, 2006 DeVecchio was indicted on four counts of second degree murder stemming from that D.A.’s investigation. After an aborted two-week trial in Brooklyn, the case against DeVecchio was dismissed with the trial judge describing the FBI’s 32 year relationship with Scarpa Sr. as “a deal with the devil.”

In TRIPLE CROSS, the third book in Lance’s 9/11 investigative trilogy, he provides stunning evidence that senior FBI and Justice Dept. officials may have obstructed justice in their failure to monitor Ali A Mohamed, Osama bin Laden’s principal spy inside the United. States. From the fall of 2007 until 2009, Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago waged an exhaustive campaign to pulp the hardcover edition of TRIPLE CROSS and prevent the paperback edition from being published.

After a 20 month re-vetting of the book by HarperCollins, after which all of Lance’s reporting in the hardcover edition was verified, the trade paper edition was published in June 2009 with 26 additional pages documenting Fitzgerald’s censorship efforts. Lance then filed this HUFFINGTON POST,   detailing Fitzgerald’s campaign to pulp the book.

UCSB & MAGAZINE WRITING

In April, 2010 Lance was appointed Research Scholar at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Lance’s profile of former FBI undercover asset Emad Salem, “The Spy Who Came In For The Heat,” was the lead non-fiction article in Playboy magazine’s September, 2010 issue. For Playboy’s January, 2011 issue Lance filed “The Private War of Anthony Shaffer,” the untold story of the Pentagon’s censorship of “Operation Dark Heart,” the Afghan war memoir of Bronze Star winner Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer. Earlier for playboy.com Lance chronicled his battle with Fitzgerald in a piece entitled “The Chilling Effect.

In the summer of 2011 Lance published a thirteen part series in The Santa Barbara News press documenting his investigation into alleged corrupt practices by the top DUI officer for the SBPD. The probe led to a grand jury mandating the installation of video in all Santa Barbara PD units.

In April, 2012 Lance’s second novel, STRANGER 456  a thriller about the hunt for a serial killer, was published worldwide by amazon.com and in June, 2012 he wrote the Foreword to a new updated edition of the 1951 true crime classic MURDER, INC. by Burton B. Turkus and Sid Feder.

DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

Following the termination of the Lin DeVecchio murder trial, Lance continued his examination of the FBI’s relationship with Gregory Scarpa Sr. After obtaining a copy of the DeVecchio trial transcript which had been under seal, Lance uncovered new probative evidence of FBI misconduct in its more than three decade relationship with the Colombo killer.

In 2012 Lance got access to more than 1,100 heretofore secret files on Scarpa Sr.’s decades-long run as an FBI Top Echelon informant. They proved that in the 12 years ex-SSA Lin DeVecchio acted as Scarpa Sr.’s FBI contacting agent, Senior, who was a hyper-violent capo with the Colombo crime family, was responsible for twenty-five separate homicides. Lance’s fourth book for HarperCollins, DEAL WITH THE DEVIL, the epic story of the FBI’s 30 year relationship with a Mafia killer was published in July 2013.

The book got a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, was a Book of The Month Club Selection and The Introduction was excerpted on salon.com. PW also interviewed Lance about his six year process of reporting and writing the book, which Nicholas Gage, the former dean of organized crime reporters for The New York Times called, “the most penetrating look into the inner workings of the Mafia since THE VALACHI PAPERS.”

In January, 2015 Lance wrote The Foreword to the new memoir by John Gotti Jr., SHADOW OF MY FATHER. A year later, he adapted his novel STRANGER 456 into a nine-hour scripted dramatic series. During this period Lance filed multiple analytical pieces for The Huffington Post

Recently Lance adapted two of his HarperCollins books, TRIPLE CROSS and DEAL WITH THE DEVIL into a ten-hour dramatic series.

HOMICIDE AT ROUGH POINT

Peter Lance’s most recent best seller has an origin story that spans more than half a century. In June of 1967, he began working as a cub reporter for The Newport Daily News just months after billionaire Doris Duke crushed her longtime art curator and designer, Eduardo Tirella to death under the wheels of a two ton station wagon outside the gates of her Newport estate, Rough Point.

The local police quickly concluded it was “an unfortunate accident” and closed the case. Almost immediately Ms. Duke began donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to the City  (then facing bankruptcy) prompting rumors that she had bought her way out of murder charges.

Over the ensuing decades, Lance was haunted by the prospect of eventually uncovering the truth. In 2018 he returned to Newport and spent two years locating the long missing official police report and working surviving sources. The result was an 8,000 word piece published by Vanity Fair across 14 pages in its July/August 2020 issue. It turned out to be the most read VF piece of the year. In fact, AppleNews+ called a special audio recording of the story, The Best True Crime Audio of 2o2o.

On February, 23rd, 2021 Tenacity Media Books published a 438 page book: HOMICIDE AT ROUGH POINT, based, in part on the piece. This is A TRAILER for the book, available in four editions: Hardcover, Trade Paperback, Kindle, and Audible  

In the summer of 2021 during a book signing at The Brenton Hotel in Newport, where he was “author in residence,” Lance met Bob Walker Jr. who revealed that he’d been the 13 year-old paperboy for Rough Point at the time of Eduardo’s death.

On the late afternoon of October 7th, 1966 as he was about to deliver The Newport Daily News to Duke’s estate, Bob heard the entire lead up to the fatal crash and actually confronted Doris herself. He had kept secret what he heard, but decided to come forward after 54 years because what he read  in “HOMICIDE” synced precisely with his memory of the incident.

After vetting Bob, Lance realized that he was talking to the only living witness to the murder. So he filed a second piece for VF and Vanity Fair’s editors compiled THIS VIDEO from interviews Lance did with Bob outside Rough Point. When the Newport Police reopened the case, prompted by Bob’s account, the Associated Press published this piece that generated international headlines.

Lance has just adapted his work for VF and the book into a PILOT script and DECK for a continuing eight hour scripted dramatic series. This links to A GRAPHIC BIBLE for Season One. He’s currently working on a screenplay for a thriller that links back to the JFK Assassination, which he reported on for ABC NEWS on its 20th anniversary.
Peter Lance can be followed on X @PETERLANCE_