Hank Messick

Hank Messick was an American author and investigative journalist who was best known for his spectacular biography of Meyer Lansky and the combination of historical fiction with crime mysteries. Messick was an expert in organized crime and his later novels would continue in the same vein as his journalistic writing. He was born in Happy Valley North Carolina in 1922 and went to the University of Iowa, from where he graduated with a master’s degree. After graduating from college, he went on to work as a professor at Colorado A & M College where he taught journalism for a time. He then got a job at the Waynesville Mountaineer, a weekly where he worked as a reporter. From there, he would work for several newspapers in the state before he changed direction. Between 1957 and 1963, he was a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal where he was charged with providing stories on the illegal gambling rampant in Newport Kentucky during this time. Between 1963 and 1966, he investigated police corruption for the Miami Herald. One of the most interesting of his reporting jobs was when he was let go by the Boston Traveler after investigating the former associate of Charles “King” Solomon Joseph Linsey who happened to be one of the biggest shareholders in the newspaper. Tired of the newspaper game, he decided to become a full-time author and given his experience as a journalist investigating organized crime he believed he had all the material he needed for his novels. Most of his work was set in Hollywood, New York City, Cleveland, Chicago, Bahamas, Florida, and Kentucky and were all about organized crime.