Patrick Oster
Aside from summer jobs working in a dirt-floor cement factory or operating a jackhammer, Patrick Oster began earning a living as a lawyer, working on antitrust and international trade matters. Looking for something more down-to-earth, he became an investigator for the Better Government Association in Chicago, working with local newspapers to uncover waste and corruption. One of those papers, The Chicago Sun-Times, hired him to investigate the local criminal courts, a job that let him use his law background and later snag a spot with U.S. News & World Report covering the U.S. Supreme Court and the Justice Department. He went back to the Sun-Times in its Washington bureau, covering the same high-court beat. A year later, he was promoted to bureau chief of a 7-reporter team. As chief, he was assigned to cover the White House, first during the administration of Jimmy Carter and then that of Ronald Reagan. Part of his job was to cover national security, including the Central Intelligence Agency, and foreign policy. He traveled on his own to dozens of countries to get the -on-the-ground story behind presidential policy. He was shot at and almost blown up in Central America covering civil wars there. The Russian government made him an enemy of the state after a series of stories on the crippling weaknesses of the Soviet Union, a country Reagan had warned was a powerful evil empire.
There were pleasanter assignments, such as covering meetings of government leaders in Paris or Rome with access to five-star hotels and 3-star Michelin restaurants Among more exotic venues, he had a nice stay in Bali to cover a foreign-ministers meeting that focused on the plight of the Vietnamese boat people,. The accompanying photo shows him, in pre-laptop days, typing out his dispatches on his trusty Olivetti portable, a tropical drink not far away from his bamboo fan chair in his villa at a luxury resort.
Along the way, he won awards for his legal reporting, for his commentary on Reagan's approach to combatting communism in Central America and on the waste in Reagan's defense build-up.
After a disagreement with the new management at The Sun-Times, which was bought by Rupert Murdoch in 1984, he was fired and wound up as Mexico City bureau chief for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain. His assignment: Latin America. He won an Overseas Press Club award for his coverage of the twin earthquakes in Mexico and wrote "The Mexicans," a non-fiction book about 20 Mexicans whose lives were representative of conditions in that important U.S. neighbor. The book was picked as a Book-of-the-Month-Cub selection and reviewed favorably by the New York Times and other major publications.
On the advice of his book editor, he eventually turned his interest to writing novels, using the real life stories he had observed as a journalist to form the bases of fictional stories that ring true to life.
In collecting the real-life fodder for his novels, he covered major events in Europe, such as the formation of the European Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall for Business Week and the Washington Post. Returning to his expertise in legal journalism, he directed coverage of dozens of white-collar and cyber-crime stories, including the massive fraud perpetrated by conman Bernard Madoff and major hacking of U.S. companies by Chinese and Russian operatives.
In his personal life, he settled with his wife, son and dogs in Croton-on-Hudson, a river town just 45 minutes commute along the famed river. Making that trip for a couple of decades gave hm the idea for his first novel, a comic thriller called "The Commuter.”