Diana Blackmon Henriques (born December 1948) is an Americanfinancial journalist andauthor working inNew York City. Since 1989, she has been a reporter on the staff ofThe New York Times working on staff until December 2011 and under contract as a contributing writer thereafter.
Henriques was born inBryan,Texas, and raised primarily inRoanoke,Virginia, where she was introduced tojournalism through theJunior Achievement program at herpublic high school.[1] Graduating in 1966, she was awarded a scholarship to TheGeorge Washington University'sElliott School of International Affairs inWashington, D.C., where she worked on thecampus newspaper,The Hatchet. In September 1969, she graduated with distinction,Phi Beta Kappa, from what is now the university'sElliott School of International Affairs.[2] In May 2011, Henriques was elected to the George Washington University Board of Trustees.
Soon after her marriage in 1969 to Laurence B. Henriques Jr., she was hired as the editor ofThe Lawrence Ledger, a small weekly paper coveringLawrence Township, N.J. After working at several local and regional daily newspapers, includingThe Philadelphia Inquirer, Henriques joinedBarron's magazine as a staff writer in 1986.
In 1989, she was hired byThe New York Times,[3] where she earned the 1999Gerald Loeb Award for Deadline and/or Beat Writing for as part of a team covering the near collapse ofLong-Term Capital Management.[4]
In 2003, she was elected to the board of governors of theSociety of American Business Editors and Writers[5] and served until 2016. In 2007, she was cited by the New York Financial Writers Association for "having made a significant long-term contribution to the advancement of financial journalism".[6]
AtThe New York Times, Henriques has worked on several collaborative projects with reporters from other departments. In 2001, she and the nationaleducation writer examined seriousquality control problems in the nation's scholastic testing industry.[7] After the terrorist attacks of September 2001, she worked with a reporter on the metropolitan desk to cover federal compensation and charitable relief for the survivors of those killed in the attacks. She also chronicled the fate ofCantor Fitzgerald, theWall Street trading house that lost three-quarters of its work force in the collapse of theWorld Trade Center. Her work was included in the "A Nation Challenged" section for whichThe New York Times won aPulitzer Prize in 2002.[3][8]
In 2005, Henriques was a Pulitzer finalist for a series of articles, beginning in July 2004, that exposed the financial exploitation of young soldiers byinsurance andinvestment companies.[9] The articles spurred state regulatory action, congressional hearings, legislative changes, cash refunds for thousands of service members and the adoption of more stringentPentagon rules governing financial solicitations on and around military bases. For her work on those stories, Henriques was awarded theGeorge Polk Award for Military Reporting, theWorth Bingham Prize and theGoldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.[10][11][12]
Henriques had also worked on the business news team whose coverage of the post-Enron corporate scandals was cited as a Pulitzer finalist in 2003, and she was a member of the reporting team that was named a Pulitzer finalist for its coverage of the2008 financial crisis.[13][14]
In 1981–1982, Henriques was a Senior Fellow atPrinceton University'sWoodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where she began researching her first book under a grant from theDaniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation. The book,The Machinery of Greed: Public Authority Abuse and What to Do About It, was published byLexington Books in 1986.[15]
Henriques also is the author of three other books:Fidelity's World: The Secret Life and Public Power of the Mutual Fund Giant (Scribners, 1995);The White Sharks of Wall Street: Thomas Mellon Evans and the Original Corporate Raiders (Scribners, 2000); andThe Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and The Death of Trust (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2011).The Wizard of Lies grew out of her work as the lead reporter in newspaper's coverage of the scandal that erupted on December 11, 2008, with the arrest ofBernard L. Madoff, the founder of a respected Wall Street brokerage firm who confessed in March 2009 to operating a multibillion-dollarPonzi scheme.[16][17] In February 2011,The Times published an exclusive interview with Madoff by Henriques, the first writer to visit him in prison.[18] The interview got wide attention, but a few critics complained thatThe Times had given too much prominence to details about the book for which Henriques conducted the interview. Her editor publicly explained that it was a common practice at the paper to include the name and publisher of books in articles about their newsworthy contents.[19][20]
Henriques is currently on the Board of Trustees of George Washington University, the Audit Committee of the Investigate Reporters and Editors (IRE), and the Advisory Board for the Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS).
The Wizard of Lies was adapted into a movie byHBO and released in May, 2017.[21] The film starsRobert De Niro as Bernie Madoff andMichelle Pfeiffer asRuth Madoff. Henriques appears as herself in scenes recreating her interviews with Madoff in prison.
A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History was published in September, 2017.
Taming the Street: The Old Guard, the New Deal, and FDR's Fight to Regulate American Capitalism was published in 2023 and depicts the beginning of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under Franklin D. Roosevelt.[22][23][24][25]
Henriques and her husband Larry live inHoboken, New Jersey. She isEpiscopalian.
Starting in September 1997, after arepetitive strain injury, Henriques became the first reporter at theNew York Times, and one of the first at any major daily newspaper, to produce all her stories viaspeech recognitionsoftware rather thantyping.[26] After a decade, she continued to use the software for major writing projects, including her two books published after 1997.[22][27]
The Wizard of Lies was written by John Burnham Schwartz, Sam Baum and Sam Levinson, based on Diana Henriques' book, with Laurie Sandell's Truth and Consequences also used as additional source material.
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