Showing results by author "Mike Sager" in All Categories

From the start, it sounds ridiculous: "Go to Tahiti, and find Marlon Brando." But, the worldwide search for the legendary method actor, the star of such classic movies as The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, On the Waterfront, and Mutiny on the Bounty, soon becomes an obsession. The story of one man’s coming of age. When we first meet him, Sager is 30 years old, divorce pending, no longer the youngest in the room. Winter is coming. His prospects are dim.

Some say he was a breakthrough academic and visionary shaman. Others say he was a sham. Either way, Carlos Castaneda shaped a generation of mystical thinkers and magic mushroom eaters. In 1968, at the height of the psychedelic age, Castaneda published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, the first of 12 books describing his apprenticeship to an Indian shaman, and his journeys to the “separate reality” of the sorcerers’ worlds. 

Mike Sager is to drugs, porn, and crimes of desperate delusion what Dominic Dunne is to the society murder. In addition to his long-classic Rolling Stone story "The Devil and John Holmes" (which helped inspire the Val Kilmer film Wonderland) and his groundbreaking GQ piece about murdered Irish investigative reporter Veronica Guerin (also the subject of a major film starring Cate Blanchett), Scary Monsters and Super Freaks is a wonderful rogue's gallery of up-close pieces about the most public failures of the American dream.

Lt. Col. Tim Maxwell prided himself on being a hard-core Marinea patriotic Devil Dog on his third tour of Iraq. Then his brain was shredded with mortar shrapnel. Today, Maxwell has a large angry scar on the left side of his head. He forgets words, his wife has to read to him, and he drags one foot when he walks. Yet he works 12-hour days as commander of the Wounded Warrior Barracks at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. For these warriors, Iraq and Afghanistan will never quite be in the past.

Jonathan Seede is the picture of Washington, DC, respectability, an urban pioneer with a pretty wife, a new baby, and a job at the town’s most esteemed newspaper. But 10 blocks from the White House, on the notorious 14th Street strip, a war is raging over deviant behavior. And Seede is on the front lines, deep into a secret freelance project that’s taking him to places where most people would never dare to go.