Dan Davis (writer)

Last updated
Dan "Tito" Davis
Dan Davis Tito CPT 2018 G7A1449.jpg
Davis in 2018
BornDaniel E. Davis
(1953-07-10) July 10, 1953 (age 70)
Pierre, South Dakota,
United States
Pen nameDan "Tito" Davis
OccupationAuthor
NationalityAmerican
Education Black Hills State University, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Genre Autobiography
Website
Official website

Dan "Tito" Davis (born 1953) is an American writer. Davis was a fugitive from US authorities between 1994 and 2007, when he was renditioned back to the US from Venezuela. He is the author of the book Gringo: My Life on the Edge as an International Fugitive.

Contents

Education and early life

Dan Davis was born in South Dakota. He was on the wrestling team in high school and became a professional horse jockey afterwards. [1] Davis began selling legal ephedrine pills (white crosses) in 1972, starting with Black Hills State College, before transferring to University of Nevada, Las Vegas [2] where he supplied legal ephedrine pills to the Bandidos Motorcycle Club. [1] He spent five years in prison during the 1980s for tax fraud. [3]

Fugitive years

In 1998 Davis was indicted on state and federal charges, including conspiracy to distribute methamphetamines and marijuana, with additional narcotics charges from 1994—which Davis claims were the result of a friend of his framing him with two pounds of meth. [1] After living in hiding in the US he then fled to Mexico in 1994, where he eluded discovery by US and Mexican officials. He was discovered again in 2006 living and working in the Margarita Islands of Venezuela. He was arrested and deported by Venezuelan authorities under unusual circumstances in 2007, and arrested for the pending American drug charges by US officials upon his return to American soil. [4] Davis and his Venezuelan lawyers have stated that they believe the deportation was actually an example of kidnapping and illegal rendition. [5] It is alleged that the US government paid up to $2 million for Davis's rendition. During his time on the run, he lived in more than fifty different countries, [3] spending much of his time in Colombia under the protection of the Medellin Cartel. [5] In 2008 he was sentenced to ten years in prison. [6]

Writing career

Davis wrote a co wrote with author Peter Conti, a book on his fugitive years entitled Gringo: My Life on the Edge as an International Fugitive in 2017. [1] The book was the number one bestseller on Amazon's Hot New Releases bestseller list. [7] He has toured internationally in support of the book. [8] Davis is also in talks to turn his book into a movie, based in part upon the 500 additional pages he wrote that did not appear in the final manuscript. [9] In 2018, Gringo: My Life on the Edge as an International Fugitive won the Readers' Favorite Gold Medal award in the Non-Fiction Autobiography category [10] On January 4, 2019, Davis sailed to the Antarctic Peninsula on board the Polar Latitudes operated expedition vessel MS Island Sky and completed a seven-continent book tour in Port Lockroy, Antarctica. [11]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernst Zündel</span> German Holocaust denier (1939–2017)

Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel was a German neo-Nazi publisher and pamphleteer of Holocaust denial literature. He was jailed several times: in Canada for publishing literature "likely to incite hatred against an identifiable group", and on charges of being a threat to national security; in the United States, for overstaying his visa; and in Germany for charges of "inciting racial hatred". He lived in Canada from 1958 to 2000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Boris Becker</span> German tennis player (born 1967)

Boris Franz Becker is a German former world No. 1 tennis player. Becker is the youngest-ever winner of the gentlemen's singles Wimbledon Championships title, a feat he accomplished aged 17 in 1985. Becker is regarded as one of the greatest tennis players of all time and was featured in the list of Tennis magazine's 40 greatest players on its 40th anniversary in 2006. He won 64 titles overall, including an Olympic gold medal in doubles in 1992. Becker won 49 singles and 15 doubles titles including six Grand Slam singles titles: three Wimbledon Championships, two Australian Opens and one US Open, 13 Masters titles, three year-end championships and leading Germany to back-to-back championship wins in Davis Cup 1988 and 1989.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Rudolph</span> American domestic terrorist (born 1966)

Eric Robert Rudolph, also known as the Olympic Park Bomber, is an American domestic terrorist convicted for a series of bombings across the Southern United States between 1996 and 1998, which killed two people and injured over 100 others, including the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. His stated motive was an opposition to "the ideals of global socialism" and to "abortion on demand," both of which he claimed were condoned by the United States government. For five years, Rudolph was listed as one of the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives until he was caught in 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Jackson (activist)</span> American author & activist

George Lester Jackson was an American author, activist and convicted felon. While serving an indeterminate sentence for stealing $70 from a gas station in 1961, Jackson became involved in revolutionary activity and co-founded the prison gang Black Guerrilla Family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henri Charrière</span> French writer (1906–1973)

Henri Charrière was a French writer, convicted in 1931 as a murderer by the French courts and pardoned in 1970. He wrote the novel Papillon, a memoir of his incarceration in and escape from a penal colony in French Guiana. While Charrière claimed that Papillon was largely true, modern researchers believe that much of the book’s material came from other inmates, rather than Charrière himself. Charrière denied committing the murder, although he freely admitted to having committed various other petty crimes prior to his incarceration.

Mahmoud Abed Atta is/was an American and alleged militant from the Palestine Liberation Organization who was suspected to be responsible for bombing a bus in 1986, on the West Bank, killing one and severely injuring three.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John McAfee</span> British-American programmer and businessman (1945–2021)

John David McAfee was a British-American computer programmer, businessman, and two-time presidential candidate who unsuccessfully sought the Libertarian Party nomination for president of the United States in 2016 and in 2020. In 1987, he wrote the first commercial anti-virus software, founding McAfee Associates to sell his creation. He resigned in 1994 and sold his remaining stake in the company. McAfee became the company's most vocal critic in later years, urging consumers to uninstall the company's anti-virus software, which he characterized as bloatware. He disavowed the company's continued use of his name in branding, a practice that has persisted in spite of a short-lived corporate rebrand attempt under Intel ownership.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Extraordinary rendition</span> State-sponsored abduction and transfer to a third country

Extraordinary rendition is a euphemism for state-sponsored kidnapping in another jurisdiction and transfer to a third state. The phrase usually refers to a United States-led program used during the War on Terror, which had the purpose of circumventing the source country's laws on interrogation, detention, extradition and/or torture. Extraordinary rendition is a type of extraterritorial abduction, but not all extraterritorial abductions include transfer to a third country.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cubana de Aviación Flight 455</span> 1976 airliner bombing of a Cubana passenger flight

Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 was a Cuban flight from Barbados to Jamaica that was brought down on 6 October 1976 by a terrorist bomb attack. All 73 people on board the Douglas DC-8 aircraft were killed after two time bombs went off and the plane crashed into the sea. The crash killed every member of the Cuban national fencing team.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roscoe Tanner</span> American tennis player (born 1951)

Leonard Roscoe Tanner is a retired American tennis player, who turned professional in 1972 and reached a career-high singles ranking of world No. 4 on July 30, 1979.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gucci Mane</span> American rapper (born 1980)

Radric Delantic Davis, known professionally as Gucci Mane, is an American rapper and record executive. He is credited as a pioneer of the hip hop subgenre trap music, along with fellow Atlanta-based rappers T.I. and Jeezy, as the style gained mainstream popularity into the 2000s and 2010s. In 2005, Gucci Mane debuted with Trap House, followed by his second and third albums, Hard to Kill in 2006 and Back to the Trap House in 2007.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Steinbeck IV</span> American journalist and author

John Ernst Steinbeck IV was an American journalist and author. He was the second child of the Nobel Prize-winning author John Ernst Steinbeck. In 1965, he was drafted into the United States Army and served in Vietnam. He worked as a journalist for Armed Forces Radio and TV, and as a war correspondent for the United States Department of Defense.

In law, rendition is a "surrender" or "handing over" of persons or property, particularly from one jurisdiction to another. For criminal suspects, extradition is the most common type of rendition. Rendition can also be seen as the act of handing over, after the request for extradition has taken place.

Robison Wells is an American novelist and blogger.

Metabolife International, Inc. was a multi-level marketing company based in San Diego, California which manufactured dietary supplements. Metabolife's best-selling product, an ephedra supplement called Metabolife 356, once generated hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales. However, Metabolife 356 and other ephedra-containing supplements were linked to thousands of serious adverse events, including deaths, which caused the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ban the sale of ephedra-containing dietary supplements in 2004.

American prison literature is literature written by Americans who are incarcerated. It is a distinct literary phenomenon that is increasingly studied as such by academics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John H. Wheeler</span> American politician, North Carolina

John Hill Wheeler (1806–1882) was an American attorney, politician, historian, planter and slaveowner. He served as North Carolina State Treasurer (1843–1845), and as United States Minister to Nicaragua (1855–1856).

The Fat Leonard scandal is an ongoing investigation and prosecution of corruption within the United States Navy during the 2000s and 2010s. It has involved ship support contractor Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA), a Thai subsidiary of the Glenn Marine Group. The Washington Post called the scandal "perhaps the worst national-security breach of its kind to hit the Navy since the end of the Cold War." The company's chief executive, president, and chairman, Malaysian national Leonard Glenn Francis bribed a large number of uniformed officers of the United States Seventh Fleet with at least a half million dollars in cash, plus travel expenses, luxury items, parties and prostitutes, in return for classified material about the movements of U.S. ships and submarines, confidential contracting information, and information about active law enforcement investigations into Glenn Defense Marine Asia.

<i>Marching Powder</i> (book) Book by Rusty Young

Marching Powder is a 2003 non-fiction book written by Australian author Rusty Young. It is based on the true story of a British-Tanzanian man, Thomas McFadden, who was apprehended in 1996 at La Paz airport in Bolivia with five kilos of cocaine in his suitcase and incarcerated in San Pedro prison. The book, described as "a gripping expose of life inside" and "the current must-read on the gringo trail", was released in 2003 and became a bestseller and a cult classic, having sold over 600,000 copies.

Gilber Caro is a Venezuelan politician, activist and thrice political prisoner.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "South Dakotan recalls life as international fugitive in memoir". USA Today .
  2. "The Story of Dan "Tito" Davis". Archived from the original on 2018-09-17. Retrieved 2018-09-17.
  3. 1 2 "Dan "Tito" Davis — My Life as an International Fugitive-Tulsa Book Review". 21 September 2017.
  4. "Fugitive from drug charges caught in Venezuela". 24 April 2007.
  5. 1 2 "From Locked Up To Raving Enjoying Everything Life Has to Offer: Exclusive Interview with Author, Dan 'Tito' Davis and his Book Gringo: My Life on the Edge as an International Fugitive". Archived from the original on 2018-08-14. Retrieved 2018-08-14.
  6. "14-year fugitive sentenced in Rapid City to prison". Associated Press. 17 October 2008.
  7. "No Longer On The Run". 2 January 2018.
  8. "Expert fugitive Tito reveals how to 'disappear' in the Philippines". 23 April 2018.
  9. "Dan 'Tito' Davis opens up about real-life memoir 'Gringo' (Includes interview)". 1 May 2018.
  10. "2018 Readers' Favorite Non-fiction - Autobiography Award Winners".
  11. "Dan "Tito" Davis Completes the First Seven Continent Book Tour with Antarctica Signing". 15 January 2019.