The Story Behind the Book

But all of this was just the background of the characters and the setting. The real power of the story, to me, was the horrific crimes at the center of the plot. I still remember the first time I was really educated about the shocking horrors of human trafficking and sex slavery. In January 2003 I read an article in Details Magazine titled Slave Drivers by Kevin Gray about the sex slavery epidemic spreading across Eastern Europe. I hadn’t heard much about these crimes before that article, and at that moment I knew that I had to do whatever I could to further highlight these crimes to help add as much focus to them as possible. I couldn’t believe that in our modern world, such a horrible crime could be happening on a large scale across the world. It had to be the single worst crime ever. What could be worse than the combination of slavery and repeated rape? I couldn’t imagine anything more horrible than that, yet public awareness at that time didn’t seem very high. One would have thought that the nightly news would start each evening with a highlight of these horrific crimes, but they didn’t. Why? Was it because it was too horrible to think about? Maybe. But there was something else here, too. How could it be happening so secretly? How could it be happening at all? And then I discovered the answer: organized crime.

Like for most people, organized crime for me was nothing more than a source of entertainment in movies. I loved the Godfather trilogy in high school and adored GoodFellas and Casino and other Scorsese masterpieces in college. But I had never really stepped back to think about the nuts and bolts of organized crime. After six years studying accounting, finance, strategic and operational management, and a slew of other disciplines in business school, I realized that there really was an intriguing business side to all the organized crime activities. How did they hire and supervise people for tasks? How did they run the operations of their complex, secretive businesses? How did upper management really work? And how did the money move? I read a ton of books on these subjects, but my most favorite was Five Families by Selwyn Raab, an incredible book about the history of America’s most powerful Mafia empires (with some scary predictions of the resurgence of organized crime in recent years). In addition, I discovered a rare gem for my topic, a book published in 1995 by Cambridge University Press titled The Economics of Organised Crime, which was a compilation of economic papers from the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), edited by Gianluca Fiorentini and Sam Peltzman. It is the first book to use economic theory in the analysis of all the different aspects of organized crime, and it became so critical to my story that I even show and quote the book in my novel.

I also researched many human rights and humanitarian efforts throughout history. Of everything I read, the two most helpful books for my research were The White Rose by Inge Scholl (a tragic but inspiring true story of a small underground organization of German students and professors who opposed Hitler’s Nazi Party in 1942) and Chasing The Flame by Samantha Power (the true story of Sergio Vieira de Mello, a remarkable man whose passion and courage helped so many). The story of the White Rose was the inspiration for an organization in my novel, and the story of Sergio Vieira de Mello was the inspiration for one of my novel’s main characters.

In the end, The Price of Innocence became many things to me. It was a reflection on one of the most exciting periods of my life, a homage to the great Cold War thrillers by John le Carré (my favorite author), an exploration of the business acumen of those in organized crime, a display of the powerful bonds between siblings, and an exposition of and call-to-action against the horrors of human trafficking and sex slavery. It’s a dark story, but one that I felt I had to write.

-Bryan Devore