Neither side, the Green nor the Gray army, has ever won. If you spend the time to read through the 2,500 after-action reports and 40-plus war summaries, the conclusion would be that the war has been a 60-year stalemate. But winning was never the point, anyway. The war is a political statement and the war is an escape. But maybe, the war has always been about reaching back ceaselessly through the decades, past Provincetown and Wolfeboro, past Salem and Greenwich Village, past the blue Yucatan and a white Alaska and into a solitary Long Island bedroom.

Until now, Anna has only been known as Associate 1 – peppered throughout an 81-page federal complaint as an accomplice to a political mob family.

What she lived and what she witnessed has been written about from many other points of view – that of prosecutors, FBI agents, informants, and defendants. But through everything that’s happened, Anna’s perspective has been a mystery. She’s never shared, until now, what she saw and what she lived.

Her story straddles two very different worlds: the inside of what authorities call a “criminal enterprise” and then the quiet workings of a federal prosecution. This story is hers. It’s told how she saw it, how she reflects on everything that happened, and how it changed her life forever.

Forget dry reports and sanitized accounts. This is the unfiltered, unpredictable, and unapologetically honest diary of a witness.

“So then I guess the big question,” she says, “is how do you know our esteemed host Fahim?”

It should be an easy question, one I’ve had plenty of time to ponder. Yet the words refuse to roll off my tongue. I know him as a man I have always admired, a mythic figure since my earliest memories, a charismatic jetsetter I saw occasionally when I was a kid, more frequently the older I got. After waiting more than 30 years to visit his homeland, I travelled to Lebanon to better understand the secrets he carried, embarking on a road trip to excavate mysteries that shaped me. I let loose a meek chuckle to lighten the weight of my answer. 

“Fahim,” I say, “is my dad.”