THE Hollywood REPORTER

How the GLEEFULLY UNSCRUPULOUS BEN MEZRICH became one of the most BANKABLE WRITERS in the business.

- Simon van Zuylen-Wood

Ben Mezrich owns a magic radio. It’s an antique, the stand-up kind families used to gather round, stare at, and listen to, with a large dial that resembles a marine compass. He bought it for $50 in the late ’90s, back when he was a mid-list author deep in debt and contemplating giving up writing for an M.B.A., after wandering into a yard sale. For years, he kept the radio at his high-rise apartment in Boston before transporting it to his country home in the village of Quechee, Vermont, where it now lives in an extra bedroom he uses as a writer’s studio. One day in August, padding around in pink shorts and white socks, Mezrich, a bespectacled 55-year-old with spiked hair, leads me upstairs to behold it. The studio is sparse: Besides the radio, there is a desk, an unmade bed, a ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ puzzle, and the rudimentary word-processing device he uses, called a Neo2.

At some point after he bought the radio, Mezrich decided it possessed the genielike ability to grant him three wishes, so long as he kissed it when the lights were turned off and “The Crystal Ship,” by the Doors, was playing. The first thing he wished for was to meet his future wife: “I asked the radio for Tonya. I just described her exactly. Well, not exactly, but, like, I wished for a beautiful, model-y, smart girl.” That very night, at a Boston nightclub, he met Tonya Chen, a dental student who would go on to become a local TV personality and charity-circuit fixture. (They married in 2006.) Mezrich’s buddies started coming over to try to kiss the radio, but he wouldn’t let them.

Next was his career. He asked the radio for his book Bringing Down the House, about a card-counting MIT blackjack team, to become a New York