Robert Lindsey (journalist)

Robert Lindsey (born 1935) is a journalist and author of several true crime books, including The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage (1980), the story of Christopher John Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee, who were both convicted of selling information to the Soviets. The Flight of the Falcon: The True Story of the Escape and Manhunt for America's Most Wanted Spy (1983) followed, a chronology of Christopher Boyce's escape from Federal prison and subsequent bank robbing spree.

Robert received a Bachelor's Degree in History from San Jose State College in 1956. In 980 he received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best non-fiction crime book for "The Falcon and the Snowman." He went on to winning the 1989 CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction for A Gathering of Saints: a true story of money, murder and deceit.

Lindsey worked as a reporter and editor at the San Jose Mercury-News and The New York Times, and also served as the Los Angeles bureau chief for The New York Times.

Marlon Brando and Ronald Reagan used Lindsey's assistance when writing their autobiographies, respectively, Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me, and "Ronald Reagan: An American Life." Lindsey's memoir, Ghost Scribbler," was published in 2013.

"A Gathering of Saints: A True Story of Money, Murder and Deceit" tells the story of a series of incidents involving document forger Mark Hofmann and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). During the early 1980s, Hoffman, an LDS document dealer, began to uncover a series of potentially damaging documents implying that Joseph Smith, far from being the angelically inspired founder of a church, was in fact a diviner led to a cache of gold by a spirit that took the form of a white salamander. The quality of Hoffman's forgeries was such that it took some intensive detective work to uncover this, even after a number of document experts had found them to be "genuine". The story of these, together with that of the three bomb blasts that rocked Salt Lake City, is told with a well-researched narrative which carefully explains the complex episode.

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