
I am a nonfiction producer and writer with 20 years of experience covering a wide variety of topics across multiple platforms. Usually, I write about financial crime. Over the years, I have interviewed senior-level politicians, corporate leaders, law enforcement officials, crime victims and perpetrators, informants, and a handful of nuns.
I am currently a freelance senior producer at Kurtis Productions, a Chicago-based company that is an industry leader in the creation of true-crime documentaries. There, I write and produce episodes of CNBC’s long-running financial crime documentary series, American Greed. My stories have profiled Paul Manafort, a Colombian orphan who has spent most of his adult life pretending to be a Saudi prince, one of America’s most notorious cat burglars, and many other fascinating scoundrels.
Prior to my work on American Greed, I was a supervising producer at Current TV, Al Gore’s Emmy Award-winning cable network, where I helped launch a show called infoMania with one of the creator’s of The Daily Show.
With a background in investigative reporting, I have researched and written pitches for numerous nonfiction series, including This Giant Beast that is the Global Economy, a financial docu-series by Adam McKay for Amazon Prime that was produced by the Intellectual Property Corporation and Gary Sanchez Productions. An article I wrote about a Black man who conned dozens of whites in the South during the Jim Crow era, is currently under development as a feature film.
I began my career as a print journalist and have had articles published in papers ranging from the Los Angeles Times to the Point Reyes Light, a Pulitzer-winning community weekly in Marin County, California.
I am the co-author of Call Me Commander: A Former Intelligence Officer and the Journalists Who Uncovered His Scheme to Fleece America, a book that was published by Potomac Books in February 2021 on the life of John Donald Cody.
A graduate of the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, I am also the creator of the comedic web site, Jam Band Fan or Taliban.
I can be reached at daniel@danielfreed.com.