CAPITAL NEW YORK: 20th Century Fox TV options book about clandestine NYPD counterterror operations
20th Century Fox Television has bought the rights to a forthcoming book by Associated Press reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman about clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted by the New York City Police Department, Capital has learned.
The book, Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America, is based on a series of articles the duo wrote for the Associated Press beginning two years ago.
Attached to the 20th Century Fox Television project are producers Erwin Stoff and Tom Lassally of 3 Arts Entertainment. Stoff was executive producer of The Devil's Advocate, The Matrix and, more recently, 47 Ronin.Lassally was executive producer of "American Candidate" (a TV series) and the forthcoming movie Edge of Tomorrow.
The book will hit shelves Sept. 3 and is published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It will include reporting based on hundreds of secret NYPD documents that Apuzzo and Goldman obtained after winning the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting last year for their initial series of AP reports.
Which means that there is a lot more to come from these two.
"We used this new material to write the book," Goldman told Capital. "We’ll be making many of the documents public."
The book is sure to be controversial, as the original article series was. In particular, the News Corp-owned New York Post has been critical of the Associated Press' reporting on the NYPD. Though the Postand 20st Century Fox are now owned by separate companies, both are controlled by Rupert Murdoch.
Goldman declined to specify how much the book sold for but said "there were multiple offers." The deal was inked in September 2012.
New York magazine will publish an excerpt in its next issue, which lands on Monday.
"After 9/11, police commissioner Ray Kelly called on former senior CIA officer David Cohen, who along with then current CIA officer Larry Sanchez, created the city’s own CIA," reads a teaser circulated by the magazine's publicists this afternoon. "They believed that to catch the few, the NYPD would spy on many. Their Demographics Unit ended up a failure, both as a matter of police work, but more importantly, of the civil liberties of New Yorkers."