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Gerald Posner has apparently landed a TV deal for Miami Babylon, a book that New Times has proved includes dozens of plagiarized passages.
Cary Woods, a producer and Plum TV cofounder, tells the New York Post he plans to turn Babylon into a “tropical” version of The Wire.
The Post reports that Woods — whose production credits include Godzilla, Cop Land, and Scream — has teamed with two British production companies to bring the book to the small screen.
New Times first reported on March 16 that Posner had stolen eight passages in Babylon from author Frank Owen’s 2003 Clubland.
Posner — who had left the Daily Beast website in February after plagiarizing — admitted he should have cited Owen’s work, and blamed a new system of end notes in the book.
Two weeks later, we published 16 new passages in Babylon that had been lifted from PBS, Men’s Vogue, Miami New Times, and others.
This time, Posner blamed a “concerted effort underway to destroy my professional reputation.”
Last week — after Posner threatened to sue New Times over our reporting — we wrote about 35 new instances of theft in Secrets of the Kingdom and Why America Slept, Posner’s two most recent books before Babylon.
Riptide has put a call into Plum TV’s corporate headquarters to try to get more information about when a Babylon adaptation could hit the airwaves, but we haven’t heard anything yet.
