Money Wanders: A Novel

Publishers Weekly

Beltway spin doctor Dezenhall (Nail `Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses) tries his hand at fiction with this comic caper about a Jewish pollster put to work for an aging South Jersey/Philly Mafia don. Middle-aged Jonah Eastman, a D.C. spin doctor for hire whose business is in the doldrums, is summoned back to his Jersey home by his ailing grandfather Mickey, an old-school Jewish capo for the local Cosa Nostra kingpin, Mario Vanni. Mickey's cryptic deathbed missive to his nervous grandson directs Jonah to take on the don as a client (Vanni needs a fast image makeover in order to qualify for an Atlantic City casino license "To be a gangster anymore is an acid trip. There's nothin' left in the life but the fantasies about the life") and gives Jonah a veiled hint about some buried Jewish treasure long hidden from the Italians. Rallying support from a PR colleague, Mickey's Jewish gangsters (one memorably named "Irv the Curve") and a teenage hacker (nicknamed "Dorkus"), Jonah launches a massive disinformation campaign intended to paint Vanni as a pillar of the community. Along the way, Jonah manages to fall in love with a klezmer musician at Mickey's funeral, tick off Vanni's psychopathic consigliere (incongruously named "Noel") and become probably the only pollster to set up shop inside a giant roadside elephant. Mixing light comedy with a nostalgic look at the Jersey shore and the days when the mishpocha and the paisani were kinsmen, if uneasy ones, Dezenhall's debut is a breezy alternative to The Sopranos and shows that with the right press, even savages can be saints. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Money may wander but attention never strays in this comic debut. Dezenhall (Nail' Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses, not reviewed) nimbly skewers the Internet, journalists, politicians, and public relations spinmeisters and their power to dupe huge numbers of people. He starts with p.r. rep Jonah Eastman, a Beltway pollster, who takes on client Mario Vanni, an Atlantic City mob boss who seeks to clean up his reputation and so snare a casino license. Probing focus groups to find out what issues might move people to back the don of the Jersey Shore, Eastman hears them speak poignantly about fears of local crime. He thereby creates DELVAC (Delaware Valley Anticrime Coalition) and gives it a Web site, which he uses to boost Vanni's image as a family guy who wants to keep drug-dealers away from his kids. Eastman boldly fakes a scene, viewable on the site, of two thugs beating up a drug-dealer, who is really an actor from a Wilmington theater troupe. Also on the site, Eastman creates a "Flackenstein," a nonexistent druglord named "Automatic Bart." "Evanjournalists" (reporters who "don't check . . . just run with whatever sounds good") parlay the Net information into news stories that suggest antidrug Vanni ordered hits on Bart's dealers. Soon the carefully groomed, thoroughly rehearsed, periodically Xanexed Mr. Vanni, his popularity soaring, goes to Washington to tell a congressional committee what to do about crime. Stunned silence, which Eastman terms "antiapplause," greets Vanni's nuanced performance. Vanni gets the license. Eastman, himself the grandson of a mafiosi, is left wondering about his own character. His nice, fuzzy romance with a musician from NewJersey (in this treatment, a place of charm) and his keen sense of good and bad people (and their use and abuse of the King's English) suggest he's a guy with depth. Thoughtful, unpretentious, filled with laugh-out-loud funny scenes and delightfully realized characters. Place your bets on this winner.