A. Craig Copetas

A. Craig Copetas is a dual national Greek-American journalist (his paternal family emigrated to the US from Vlachokerasia in Arcadia, Greece and his maternal family from Racalmuto, Sicily).    His maternal grandmother, Carmela Perrone Di Benedetto, was the first female fashion designer to have her name on an American haute couture fashion brand Liotti & Perrone, which she began with her business partner Joe Liotti around 1920.  It remained in business until the early 1950s.  

A. Craig Copetas
Nationality	Greek/American
Citizenship	Greek, American
Education	Ohio University University of East Anglia Harriman Institute
Occupation	Author, journalist

Copetas' grandmother's 1949 Carte D'Acheteur

Early life and education

Copetas attended Upper St. Clair High School in Pittsburgh, where he was a writer on the school's newspaper, The St. Clairion. He also played in the band Karl Ottoman & the Empires.

He had various summer jobs which included laying natural gas pipelines in Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia and clerking at law firm Eckert, Seamans, Cherin & Mellot.  This led to him becoming a researcher on The Scranton Commission on Campus Unrest in the summer of 1970, directly in the wake of the Kent State and Jackson State massacres in May 1970.

Between 1969 and 1972, he studied journalism, history and, under the tutelage of the celebrated American poet Stanley Plumly, creative writing at Ohio University[1][1] as a Cutler College Honors Program student. The program arranged for Copetas to spend his senior year at The University of East Anglia (UK), where he studied political and Russian history. During this time, he got to know fellow UEA student Ian McEwan,[2][3][4] and also the American Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs.[5]

Marriage and children

He is married and has two sons with Marie-Céline Girard, a French television producer, the director of admissions at the Paris-based film school EICAR[6] and the daughter of the Academy Award-winning French film producer Roland Girard whose 1978 film Madame Rosa / Le Vie Devant Soi[7] won the 1978 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the French actress Virginie (Dupuis) Vitry.

Career 

Copetas and photographer Richard Young in Langans Brasserie, 1976

Copetas began his journalism career in 1973 at the London bureau of Rolling Stone Magazine. "He was a cocksure American fresh from J school,"[8] said RS bureau chief Andrew Bailey, who hired Copetas as a reporter after being introduced to him by Tony Elliott. During his time at Rolling Stone Magazine, he shared a house on Stoneleigh Street with fellow employees such as Lanny Aldrich, who at the time managed Rolling Stone's Straight Arrow Books distribution joint-venture Quick Fox in Europe, and later became a literary agent and author of "The Western Art of Charles M. Russell" and "Mallorca, The Art of Living". Visitors to the house on Stoneleigh Street included Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson,[9] British filmmaker Peter Whitehead and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter They frequented the nearby Julie's Wine Bar,[Notes 1][8] socialising with neighbours such as Sally Moore[10] and the (then aspiring) photographer Richard Young who at that time was working in a bookshop.[11]

Copetas' interview with Bowie and Burroughs for Rolling Stone

Copetas’ first big story came in 1974 when Rolling Stone sent him to find J.Paul Getty III shortly after he had been kidnapped in Italy.[12]  Copetas worked[Notes 2][8] with fellow Ohio University journalism graduate Joe Esztheras to interview him for the magazine[13] and enabled Richard Young, who photographed Getty, to secure his first published photograph. That same year, Copetas also interviewed his friend David Bowie and William S. Burroughs for the magazine.[14]

A. Craig Copetas in the High Times office, New York 1976

Copetas went on to serve as foreign correspondent for Alternative Press Syndicate , based in Quito, Ecuador, and Bogota and Colombia, and as news editor for High Times magazine[15] where he worked with Tom Forcade.[16] In 1976, Copetas broke the paraquat poisoning story[17] which highlighted the aerial spraying of Mexican marijuana fields with the lethal herbicide paraquat in the Mexican‐American war against marijuana.  His articles led Daryl Dodson, an intern on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, to research further and ultimately the Senate Subcommittee investigation[18] which resulted in Government testing of contaminated Mexican marijuana. Copetas was also responsible for maintaining a cooperative and mutually beneficial relationship with NORML,[19] the non-profit public-interest pro-marijuana advocacy group.

His other roles have included contributing staff writer at the New York Daily News, New York Times,[20] Harper's Magazine[21] and columnist for Inc Magazine.[22]

Copetas worked with Graham Greene amongst others while at Esquire Magazine

Esquire colleagues (L2R) Kaplan, Whittle Copetas and Moffit

In 1978, he joined Associated Newspapers where he served as associate editor and staff writer at Esquire magazine.[23]  At the magazine, Copetas worked with writers[24] such as Graham Greene, Norman Mailer,[25] Hunter Thompson, William Buckley, James Baldwin, Anthony Haden Guest and Jesse Kornbluth.[26] His fellow editors included Peter W. Kaplan, Marilyn Johnson,[27] Rob Fleder and Dominique Browning.  They were the last group to be trained and mentored by those who had edited the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe.  That group included Arnold Gingrich, Harold Hayes, Byron Dobell, Rust Hills and Don Erickson.

Copetas went on to work at ANG's The Soho Weekly News[28] before moving to London for the Mail on Sunday and helping to create the paper's Sunday Magazine supplement.

The issue of Regardie's with Copetas' story

During the 1980s, he also wrote for The Village Voice[29] and Regardie's Magazine.[30] In November 1986, during the height of a U.S. Congressional investigation into President Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra Affair arms-for-hostages deal, Regardie's magazine publisher William A. Regardie tasked Copetas with finding heavy weaponry[31] that could be installed on the roof of the publication's headquarters in Georgetown in order to show how easy it was to buy and move military-grade ordinance. Copetas found a legitimate arms dealer who, along with Irish mercenary Mad Mike Hoare, taught him the trade, moving on to chronicle his ultimately abandoned $324,000 purchase and delivery of a dozen 12.7mm Soviet anti-aircraft guns and 12,000 rounds of ammunition to Washington, D.C.

Cox and Copetas in Moscow 1989

By then, he was based in Moscow where he also became on-site director of media company Kommersant, returning to London and other bases in New York City and London periodically.  It was during one of his trips to London that he visited his friend Tony Elliott, founded of Time Out, during a labour strike at the publication. He persuaded Elliot to accompany him on a trip to Cairo[32] which they took alongside James Horwitz.

Back in Moscow, Copetas met actor Brian Cox[33] who was there to direct a production of "The Crucible"[34] with students from the Moscow Art Theatre in 1989. Copetas agreed to the role of ersatz casting director for his friend and found Nora Ivanovna, a Black Russian singer, to play Tituba, the slave-woman from Barbados.

In 1989, Copetas was named Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism,[30] a program designed to provide formal business and economics training for journalists at mid-career.

Copetas and colleague Daniel Pearl on the Macedonian-Albanian border

He reported on the ground in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq during the First Gulf War and then the Balkan conflict in Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia during the late 1990s for the Wall Street Journal with colleague Daniel Pearl.  Other long-term postings included China and Southeast Asia.  He was later embedded with British forces during the Second Gulf War.

In 1991, he became a staff reporter on the Wall Street Journal and went on to create and manage the sports section of The Wall Street Journal Europe, helping develop the first weekend section for the paper and extensively covering the Olympic corruption scandal.[35][36] He was briefly arrested in Singapore based on an Australian hold-and-detain order that claimed he was a terrorist suspect.  “The Great Olympic Swindle”[37] recounts the harassment that Copetas and his family subsequently suffered in the hopes that he would hold off publishing his story in the Wall Street Journal.

In 2001, he joined Bloomberg LP as a senior writer covering global financial news and events across all Bloomberg News platforms, including Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Television, Bloomberg Markets magazine and Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine. He held posts in Europe, Russia, Middle East and China.

In 2009, he was briefly jailed in Dubai[38] while there as senior writer for Bloomberg News working[Notes 3][39] on a story under former Associated Press Executive Editor William Ahearn. At the time, many foreign journalists were complaining that they had “been told to avoid writing negative stories” about the UAE's economy[40] and the UAE was on the brink of adopting a new media law which forbade the publication of stories that were deemed to be harmful to the national economy.  Bloomberg pulled the story “because of the threat of losing their wire terminals throughout the Middle East, being barred from press releases and press gatherings, having their assets in Dubai seized”[39]  Copetas was subsequently dismissed[41] from Bloomberg as was Ahearn.[42]  In 2014 it was reported that a Bloomberg story about mass accumulation of wealth by China's ruling class was closed down and the journalist also dismissed by Bloomberg.[43]

For seven years, he was a World Economic Forum Media Leader, taking part in panel discussions at World Economic Forums in Davos, Switzerland.  He was a representative on WEF's Summit on the Global Agenda, which formulates topics for discussion at WEF's annual meeting. He also held a similar position at OECDs Forum in Paris.[44]

He went on to host news talk shows on Bloomberg Television and represented Bloomberg LP on numerous global television and radio shows, including CNN, Fox News, CBS News, MSNBC, France 24.[45] He has also been a weekly columnist for International Herald Tribune.

Copetas on The World This Week with Christopher Dickey

From 2010 to 2014 he was a regular panellist on The World This Week,[46] a weekly one-hour news and current affairs program broadcast globally in English and French on French public broadcaster France 24, working with Christopher Dickey. During that time, he was involved in the founding of Quartz and became its Editor-at-Large based in Paris.[47]

From 2015 to 2019 he was Editor-at-Large for TRT World, the English-language news network.  He created and managed the Monday to Friday live-broadcast business and financial politics program Money Talks.

Copetas has held various academic posts including Visiting Scholar at The Harriman Institute of Advanced Russian Study at Columbia University in New York,[48]  Associate Professor of Narrative Journalism at the American University of Paris (2012-2014),[49] Visiting Lecturer on print, video and digital journalism and writing at University of Miami; Boston University; Harvard College; Tulane University; Ecole Jeannine Manuel; Science Po.

Awards

1990 New York University School of Journalism Olive Branch Award for Best Reporting from Soviet Union[48] (for his article on Soviet reform which appeared in Regardie's April 1989 issue)

1998 Wall Street Journal Awards (internal) for Best Leader “Familiar Rings”

2000 Wall Street Journal Awards (internal) for Best Investigative Writing with co-writer Roger Thurow on a multi-part series on The International Olympic Committee corruption scandal

In 2001 he became the 2nd American journalist (after Art Buchwald) to be awarded Ordre des Arts et des Lettres[50]

2003 National Headliner Award Best Feature Writer[51]

Books

"Metal Men[52]", is a non-fiction story of the rise and fall of commodity trader Marc Rich.  It was the first inside-look book on big business done in the style of "New Journalism" and remains required reading at dozens of U.S. universities and business schools.   The book was called an “attention grabber” (Newsday) and reviewed by many publications including The New York Times (“Mr. Copetas is at his best evoking the high-stakes, fast-paced life of the commodities traders[53]”) and Time Out ("Meticulously researched and skilfully written by the most skilful writer of his generation").

"Bear Hunting with the Politburo[54]", was his second bestselling non-fiction book and chronicles the birth of Russia's free-market system.  "Bear Hunting with the Politburo" also remains a required-to-read university text and is now in its third edition and named as one of the ten best books of the year by Business Week magazine.  It was hailed by the Financial Times as "the best book ever written on the Soviet wasteland”[55] and by The London Review of Books as "a wonderfully bold narrative of a writer with a clear passion to understand”.[56]  Hunter S.Thompson described it as “…fine, hard-ball, pure deadline style journalism, also very queer with savage & unnatural undertones. You might as well call Bear Hunting with the Politburo "Fear and Loathing in Moscow" (from the book's cover).

"Mona Lisa's Pajamas"[57] is an updated collection of narrative and evergreen foreign reportage from Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal.  Copetas was praised by New York Times business editor Lawrence Ingrassia for his “wonderful eye and graceful writing” and by Godfather 3 screenplay co-writer Nicholas Gage "Copetas roams our planet, he illuminates our times from rare perspectives that no historian could match".

“The Rolling Stone Book of Beats[58]” a history of Beat Generation culture as described by some 75 writers Goodreads describes as "the people who made the scene"[59]