My Query Letter to Literary Agents re: "Watergate Exposed"

[Douglas Caddy]

I am in the initial process of sending query letters to several dozen accredited literary agents concerning “Watergate Exposed,” my book manuscript and movie script that is based on the life story of Robert Merritt, a long-time government informant. My letter inquires whether the literary agent would be interested in representing us in placing the manuscript with a book publisher.

The query letter on my letterhead is reproduced below. Should any member or reader of the Forum know of a literary agent or movie agent who might be interested in the manuscript, please feel free to encourage the agent to establish direct communication with me. Thank you.

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DOUGLAS CADDY

ATTORNEY AT LAW

7941 Katy Freeway

Suite 296

Houston, Texas 77024

713-867-3476

email: electionreform@aol.com

April 6, 2009

[Name and address of literary agent]

Dear [name of agent]

I am writing this query letter at the suggestion of Donald O. Graul, Jr., Executive Director of American Independent Writers, who has consented graciously to the use of his name in this effort to obtain the professional services of your literary agency.

I am the co-author with Robert Merritt of a book manuscript titled:

Watergate Exposed

A Confidential Informant Tells How the Watergate Burglars Were Set-Up and Reveals

Other Monumental Government Dirty Tricks

By Robert Merritt

As told to

Douglas Caddy

Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven

Our manuscript takes up where Jim Hougan’s1984 best seller “Secret Agenda” left off, wherein he wrote on page 320, “Among those who are skeptical of the Ervin Committee’s investigation of the Watergate affair, there is a school of thought that holds that some Washington police knew in advance that the June 16-17 break-in was about to occur. In particular, skeptics as politically disparate as H. R. Haldeman and Carl Oglesby point the finger of suspicion at arresting officer Carl Shoffler.”

Shoffler arrested the Watergate burglars on June 17, 1972. He had recruited Robert Merritt as a Confidential Informant for the police two years earlier and had worked and lived with him in the intervening years. On June 1, 1972 Merritt provided Shoffler with the confidential information of the proposed break-in at Watergate – more than two weeks before the event occurred -- information that Merritt had obtained the day before from a most unlikely source. In reality, the burglars planned the break-in for Sunday, June 18, but Shoffler, utilizing the wire-tapping skills that the government previously had taught him at its Vint Hill Farm Station in Virginia, skillfully enticed the unsuspecting burglars to move the date up by one day so that it would occur on Shoffler’s birthday as a special kind of present to himself. It was the perfect set-up, a unique form of entrapment that ultimately led to the downfall of President Nixon.

Shoffler, upon learning of the proposed break-in from Merritt, brought two other persons into his set-up scheme: a military intelligence agent and a retired CIA agent. The latter, upon hearing Merritt relate the planned break-in, exclaimed that Shoffler was about to become the most famous police detective in U.S. history.

But Watergate Exposed is more than an earthshaking rewriting of the history of the greatest presidential scandal in American history. For Merritt, under Shoffler’s tutelage, also became a Confidential Informant for the FBI, ATF, Secret Service and other government entities. His CI services are vetted by documents obtained under FOIA from these agencies and the National Archives. Of special note are FBI documents about its wire-tapping and infiltration of the Institute of Policy Studies and reports prepared at the time by the Office of the Watergate Special Prosecutor after Merritt met with the prosecutor’s staff in 1973, accompanied by his distinguished attorney, David Isbell of Covington and Burling.

Even after Watergate broke, Merritt continued his CI role, becoming involved in mind-bending activities of all kinds in the nation’s capital.

Merritt left Washington, D.C. in 1985 as a “fugitive from justice” and since that time has lived in New York City. For most of these years, even though he was a “fugitive,” he worked directly as a CI for the FBI, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the New York Police Department and other law enforcement agencies, his real identity being unknown all the while to these law enforcement entities. This was done with the assistance from Shoffler, his long-time mentor. Eventually all charges against Merritt were dropped and a judge ordered his criminal record expunged.

Merritt entered my life three days after the Watergate arrests on June 17, 1972, although I was not aware of this at the time. It was only in 1977 – five years later -- when I read an interview with him in the gay publication, The Advocate, that I first learned he had been recruited by the Washington, D.C. Police and the FBI to establish an intimate relationship with me. This effort occurred when I was the attorney for the Watergate defendants, although the defendants themselves and the general public were unaware at the time of my gay sexual orientation. On two occasions – in June 1972 and in February 1973 -- law enforcement agents attempted to enlist Merritt in establishing a sexual liaison with me, offering him tens of thousands of dollars if he were to agree to do so. As a gay person himself, he was repulsed by these overtures to entice confidential legal information from me and rejected them outright on both occasions. Hence a relationship of any type was never established, that is until June 2008 when Merritt telephoned to ask that I help him write his manuscript. By way of reference, my own biography appears in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World.

Our manuscript’s table of contents is as follows:

Preface by Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven

Introduction

Chapter I – How the Watergate Burglars Were Set Up: 1970-1972

Chapter II – The Special Watergate Prosecutor’s Interviews of Merritt: 1973

Chapter III – Merritt’s Post-Watergate Period in Washington, D.C.: 1972-1985

Chapter IV – The New York Years 1986- 2009

Chapter V – Flotsam and Jetsam: Dramatic Episodes in Merritt’s Life

Chapter VI – Epilogue by Douglas Caddy: How Judge John Sirica and the original

Watergate prosecutors denied the seven Watergate defendants their

Sixth Amendment’s right to legal counsel.

As indicated in the table of contents, the untold story about Watergate, which makes other books on the scandal obsolete, comprises only about thirty percent of the dramatic twists and turns in Merritt’s life, a confidential informant’s true story that is both stranger and scarier than fiction.

Would your agency be interested in representing us in placing our manuscript with a publisher? A prompt response would be most appreciated.

Sincerely yours,

Douglas Caddy