--HELEN KELLER

In the fall of 2003, Connecticut adventure journalist Michael Kodas ran into two of his neighbors as they pushed their baby in a stroller in front of his house. George Dijmarescu,
a Romanian defector, and Lhakpa Sherpa, his Nepali wife, have between them climbed Mount Everest a dozen times. The couple, familiar with Kodas’ work as an adventure journalist, invited him to join them on their next trip to the mountain – an expedition of Connecticut climbers. Six months later, high on Mount Everest, Kodas learned there was a dark side to the world’s tallest mountain, and to the couple that had invited him there.

Theft was rampant, bootlegged oxygen tanks failed, prostitutes openly propositioned climbers in the Chinese Base Camp, ropes that lives depended on were cut from the mountain, or vanished before they could ever be tied into. Kodas’ once charming hosts turned hostile and other climbers on the mountain accused them of theft and worse. Eventually George Dijmarescu, the man who had proposed the Connecticut Everest Expedition, beat his wife in front of teammates and left her unconscious outside one of the team’s tents. Dijmarescu, fearing that Kodas would report what he had witnessed on the mountain, promised to kill the journalist, who was forced to turn back from the summit to escape his volatile teammates. But on the other side of Everest, on the same day that Kodas turned back from the summit, another climber had it far worse.

Nils Antezana, a doctor from Washington D.C., reached the top of Everest, but on his descent he collapsed and was abandoned by his guide, an Argentinean named Gustavo Lisi. Other climbers, suspicious of the circumstances of the doctor’s death, contacted the doctor’s daughter, Fabiola, who soon learned how far a mountain guide would go to coax a wealthy client to hire him for the trip to the top of the world. Nils Antezana, his daughter discovered, was not the first client Gustavo Lisi had left for dead on Everest.

Nils Antezana chose to climb with Gustavo because he believed the guide had climbed Everest before. But, in fact, Fabiola learned, Lisi had never been to the top of the world. Gustavo had stolen the photograph he provided as proof of his previous ascent. The man who took the picture lost seven fingers to frostbite after he too was left for dead on Everest. Fabiola’s investigations into Gustavo Lisi uncovered a long list of abandoned clients, forged guiding credentials, swindles, thefts, and a stolen photo from the summit of Everest that the guide, who had never reached the top of the mountain, used to convince the world that he had.

In a Kathmandu hotel the journalist Michael Kodas crossed paths with Fabiola Antezana as they each probed the background of the men who had brought disaster to the Everest expeditions from Washington and Connecticut. In the following two years their investigations took them from London, to Nepal, Tibet, Washington, D.C., the Basque country of Spain, and the Andes of Bolivia. In 2006 Kodas returned to Mount Everest intent not on reaching the top of the world, but of exposing the underworld that is spreading beneath it.

High Crimes is a narrative look at how a big mountain, big money, and big egos are drawing crime and malfeasance to Mount Everest. The book climaxes with a retelling of the 2006 season on Everest, in which 11 climbers died – including David Sharp, who 40 climbers passed on their way to the summit as his life was being frozen out of him.

The death toll of the 2006 season is second only to the disastrous season ten years earlier made famous in Into Thin Air. But a lot has changed on Everest in the decade since Jon Krakauer went to the mountain. And while veteran mountaineers hoped that the cautionary tale of the 1996 disaster on Everest would keep the unqualified away from the mountain, coverage of the tragedy, in fact, dramatically increased the allure of high-altitude mountaineering, both for adventurers who suddenly saw Everest as an attainable goal, and for those who recognized an opportunity to profit from the unprecedented wealth these hordes carried to the mountains. In 1996, 98 climbers reached the summit of Everest. Last spring, nearly 600 did.

Among all the books documenting the glorious adventures in mountains around the world, and the unique perils and challenges of Mount Everest, none details how the recent infusion of wealth into the mountains is reacting with the age-old lust for glory to draw crime to the highest places on the planet, how a mountain’s ability to reduce climbers to their essential selves is revealing villains as well as heroes, greed as well as selflessness. Climbers drawn to the mountains in the quest for purity of spirit and camaraderie as well as the physical challenges are instead finding corruption and treachery.

An award-winning journalist, Michael Kodas has made his mark as an outdoor reporter and photographer with a series of adventure stories and investigations at The Hartford Courant newspaper, where he has been a staff member for 20 years.

In 1989 he followed a group of Vietnam veterans when they returned to Southeast Asia to help the government remove the mines and ordnance they had left behind.

In 1995 he joined a team of journalists from five newspapers for a historic relay hike of the Appalachian Trail. The 36 weekly installments of the series were collected in the illustrated book, An Appalachian Adventure.

In 1987 he circumnavigated Long Island Sound by sea kayak to produce “The Urban Sea,” a series of stories and photographs on the condition of one of America’s most threatened waterways.

In 1988 he wrote and photographed “Troubled Waters,” the Courant’s 18-month series looking at the devastation of New England’s marine environment and fishing industry, for which he spent countless days on trawlers, lobster boats, and research vessels.

In 1999 Kodas climbed Ama Dablam, a 22,494-foot mountain in the Himalaya of Nepal, for a series of stories about the changing role of women in high altitude mountaineering.

In 2000 Kodas concluded a four-year project documenting the recreation and maiden voyage of the Amistad, the cargo schooner on which 53 kidnapped Africans rebelled in 1839 only to be captured and tried in Connecticut.

In 2003, Kodas trained and was certified as a forest fire fighter in order to work with a crew battling blazes in Colorado and Wyoming to produce a story that described in words and photographs the increasing threat of wildfires in the western United States.

His work has also been published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, Newsweek magazine, and Backpacker Magazine. Outside magazine, Mens Journal, and the BBC have also featured Kodas’ investigative journalism.

In 1999 Kodas was part of the team of Courant journalists awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of a workplace massacre of four employees by a disgruntled employee. His work has also been honored in the National Press Photographers Association, the Best of Photojournalism contest, the Pictures of the Year competition, and in competitions held by the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of American Travel Writers’ Lowell Thomas Awards, the Society for Newspaper Design, the New England Associated Press News Executives Association, The Newspaper Association of America, and several other professional organizations.

"High Crimes is both fascinating and terrifying. As someone who shies away from climbing stairs, let alone mountains, I was completely blown away by the high stakes drama and intrigue of this Everest story. Kodas' vivid writing kept me up for two straight nights, and my heart is still racing! The story is tragic, yet somehow also uplifting- a true masterpiece!"



--Ben Mezrich, NY Times Bestselling author of Bringing Down The House, TheTrue Story of Six MIT Kids Who Took Vegas for Millions, and Rigged, The True Story of the Ivy League Kid Who Changed The World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai.

"Seeking to experience the high ambitions of an Everest climb himself, Michael Kodas found instead the little-known underworld of the world's tallest peak. This isn't a pretty portrait of Everest, but its compelling reading for anyone who thinks mountaineering is a noble pursuit."

--Greg Child, author of Over the Edge: The True Story of Four American Climbers’ Kidnap and Escape in the Mountains of Central Asia, preeminent climber, and member of the North Face team of athletes.

Booklist 's January 1 issue includes this review of HIGH CRIMES:

"Kodas, a veteran newspaper journalist and avid climber, knows his subject. . . . There are plenty of books about the allure and the danger of Everest, but this may be the first to explore the mountain's criminal element: the fraudulent commercial guides; the thieves and scoundrels who loot other climbers' camps, stealing vital supplies that can be sold at a profit; the violence among climbers. . . . A strongly written, passionate plea for sanity before it's too late."

“Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kodas finds avarice, theft and worse on the slopes of Mount Everest. . . . A clear-eyed, riveting narrative.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Kodas does an excellent job exposing the ways in which money and ego have corrupted the traditional cultures of both mountaineers and their Sherpa guides. He also brings a painful focus to the delusions, misunderstandings and indifference that allow climbers to literally step over the bodies of dying people on their way to the top.”

—Publishers Weekly

“High Crimes” poses the question: How long before the bad drive out the good? “To climb Everest” has become such a powerful cultural metaphor that some climbers arrive seeking little more than career makeovers. They go up as schoolteachers; they come down as motivational speakers. If you ask a real climber where the best mountaineering is taking place nowadays, they’re likely to agree with Sir Edmund Hillary: anywhere but Everest.

-–The New York Times Book Review