Dave graduated from Brecksville High School in Cleveland Ohio and from Ohio University in 1971. He is also a graduate of Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan.
Dave has worked in a gas station, counted houses in the City of Cleveland for Avon, as a flower delivery boy, sold pots, pans and encyclopedias door to door, in a pizza parlor, delivered sailboats on the Great Lakes, sold Bayliner Boats, sailed in the Merchant Marine, worked as a bartender, worked in the worlds largest cement factory, worked at the Michigan Attorney General’s Office and now practices as an attorney in Alpena, Michigan.
He is the author of Tashtego, The Gingerbread Man and The Belly of the Beast. He also has been published in the Michigan Bar Journal. He lives in Alpena, Michigan with his dog Sophie.
He may be reached at elderlawoffices@yahoo.com
Golden boy Major Chester A. Arthur, call sign “Chetter”, is one of the finest A-10 Thunderbolts pilots, nick-named the Warthog, in the world. Highly decorated and after being shot down in Afghanistan and Bosnia, he chooses to retire from the Air Force and fly as captain for Delta Airlines out of Atlanta Georgia. But Major Arthur can’t quite scratch the itch of combat flying in his A-10 Warthog and so he joins the Air National Guard from his home in Chevy Chase Maryland.
Twice a year Wing Commander Arthur and his unit of A-10 Warthog pilots train at the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center at the air base in Northeast Michigan. On the last day of his mission, after the annual departure party, a young woman from the privately operated River Club is found partially nude and strangled in the nearby wooded swampy area of the Thunder Bay River that flows along side the base.
It is common knowledge that the married Major Arthur was having an affair with the woman and when undeniable DNA evidence is found implicating the Major, he is arrested in Maryland by Troopers of the Michigan State Police for the murder of Candy Cykanski.
Major Arthur must retain the services of attorney Miller and his eccentric millionaire partner and owner of Tempest Investigations and Tempest Air, Wulstan Joseph Tempest III. As in Miller’s previous famous trial of the murder of John Walks With Fire Wabano by Jimmy Holes In His Hands Blackbird aboard the abandoned fish tug Beast, it looks hopeless for the Major unless Miller and his team can, against all odds, successfully defend the Wing Commander from the intense prosecution from the State of Michigan and the United States Air Force.
While the small northern town of Alpena Michigan grabs the attention of the country for the trial and other events happening in nearby Gaylord Michigan, Miller and “Wully” must somehow find a way to defend Major Arthur before it is too late.
One early fall night in Rogers City, Michigan, Jimmy Holes In His Hands Blackbird and John Walks With Fire Wabano find them themselves intoxicated and enraged in a bar full of patrons over a blood feud that has been simmering for generations.
Early in the morning local police officers find, not for the first time, Jimmy Holes In His Hands passed out in his ancient pick up truck behind the International Hotel Bar. This time however, Jimmy is covered in blood from head to toe. Very soon after his arrest for Drunk and Disorderly, John Walks With Fire Wabano’s body is found brutally murdered in the abandoned fish tug Beast not two hundred yards from the International Hotel Bar. Police officers and the Presque Isle County Canine Unit, find a trail of blood directly from the Beast to Blackbird’s truck. The trouble is, Jimmy Blackbird can’t remember a thing.
Defense Attorney Miller has represented Jimmy for years and is on the case. But can there be a defense? Miller hires a colorful Private Investigator from Bay City Michigan by the name of Wulstan Joseph Tempest III. Through “Wully’s” investigative skills they soon learn that a mysterious figure by the name of Rix Secret Thunder Chusco was also in the International Hotel Bar that night and a new amazing twisting defense theory emerges from the darkness.
Chief Henry Dalton Ogema of the Ottawa Nation sends Henry Mensing of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians Tribal Police to observe the investigation and the plot thickens in what at first was believed to be an open and shut case of first degree murder with a terrible weapon.
Full of local characters and moving from Mackinac Island, the Kinross Correctional Facility in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Petoskey, Rogers City and Alpena Michigan the trial of James Holes In His Hands Blackbird is one for the ages.
Daggoo, Queequeg and Tashtego. The three harpooners from Melville’s classic Moby Dick. It is 1984 and Royal St. Vincent, a muscle car engineer from General Motors, hits the bottle after a bitter divorce. When the bottle is empty, he wakes up in Islemarada Florida and ready to start a new life. He buys the sixty foot sports fishing boat, the Makaira, and settles into his new career as a happy deep sea sports fishing captain surrounded by his colorful friends in the Florida Keys.
One day the unthinkable happens. He is approached by the more than beautiful girl, Scotty, from Miami who wants to charter a trip. Suspicious of her and her weird friends, and against his better judgment, he takes the trip and his life is never the same again.
It is the wild mid-eighties of Scarface in South Florida and drugs run rampant. Forced to work for a drug cartel, St. Vincent is persuaded to hide drugs in his catch until he is eventually discovered by the local undercover local DEA agent. Torn apart by the love of his daughter in Michigan, who is threatened by the cartel, and pressure from the Federal drug agency, he is advised by his Haitian recluse friend John, who lives in the Florida swamps, that Tashtego is the notorious head of the snake that controls the bloody drug cartel.
From Key West to the Turks and Cacaos Islands, Cuba, Columbia and Bolivia and against the backdrop of the furious volcanic eruption of Nevado Del Ruiz in 1985, St Vincent and his chosen friends must find the identity of Tashtego and free St. Vincent from the clutches of the mysterious drug lord.
Based loosly on Moby Dick and The Heart of Darkness, Tashtego is introduced by the thoughts of a 2,000 pound Blue Marlin while she fights for her very life against man and nature. Based largely on sports fishing in the Florida Keys, the real mystery of the book is who is Tashtego and the ultimate thrilling answer will certainly surprise the reader.
Eric Davis, as a young man just getting out of high school, works in a hardware store in a small town in Northern Michigan named Indian River. As a youth, one night in a bar he accidentally kills another young man by hitting him over the head with a beer bottle. Eric Davis spends the next eight years in prison and then ships out in the merchant marine where he sails the oceans and learns the love of the sea and literature. He becomes a successful writer and decides to celebrate by visiting South Florida.
After a disastrous short marriage in Miami, he sobers up and decides that society is no place for him. Eric Davis moves to a small island in the Caribbean, where he lives alone on his beach with his three legged dog Nelson and a White Pelican. In his solitude, he writes his stories and sends them to the United States for publishing. Once a month he and Nelson walk to the village where he spends time drinking Red Stripe Beer and Canadian Club Whisky with his best friends Raymond and May.
There comes a night like no other. A ferocious hurricane strikes his island and the life of Eric Davis is seemingly changed forever. In his depression he comes to learn by a magical turn of events, that no man is an island.
The Gingerbread Man is the story, told in many years, of the emotional growth of Eric Davis and the story of the life of the island and her people. In the end, Eric Davis finds that run, run as hard as you can, sometimes you might just catch, the Gingerbread Man.
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