About the Author

I didn't set out to write a book.

After obtaining a B.A. with High Honors from UC San Diego and starting graduate studies at UCLA in—consecutively—Molecular Biology, Anthropology, and Business, I was afflicted with a growing, restless desire to travel. A backpack journey through Asia, and then another thorough Central America, didn't help. Somewhere along the way I became briefly involved with film production, and I tried to write.

But I returned to Asia, where for six years I was the sole Westerner in a Chinese family company— at the time a major corporation in the booming timber industry in Indonesia. I fell in love with a Balinese girl named Ni Made Jati; we married and moved to Bali, where we built two successful businesses in tourism—Uluwatu Boutiques and Kori Restaurant. I became a businessman, an entrepreneur, a designer, a father. I learned to speak Indonesian, entered the Hindu religion, and felt that on the Island of the Gods I had found paradise and love and fulfillment.

And then my wife and her sisters launched our family into nightmare. Over the next six years, circumstance forced me to develop an expertise in Indonesian law, and in that peculiar institution known in Indonesia as the "law mafia"—in Bali as the "Mafia of the Gods"—set up to deprive foreign investors like me of their properties, and in my case even of my children.

The case—detailed at uluwatu.com—continues, but my children and I escaped Bali and live safely and happily now in California, where I turned to a talent I knew I had, but had never used. I could always write. Eleven Demons: Secrets of Deincarnation in Bali is a hard-won story.