Now Available from Headline Books
The Falcon
and the Shaikhs
as told by Luigi Falconi to John Dragonetti.
A story of the USA Gulf Coast Mafia In Dubai and Ras Al Khaimah, 1965-1967
Luigi Falconi
The love child of the local priest and the parish housekeeper, Luigi Falconi was born in Tricarico, Italy, in 1945. Soon after his birth his parents immigrated to the United States. He attended Mary Magdalene High School in Hoboken, New Jersey. Although an honor student with a football scholarship to Notre Dame, he left school to study Kabbalah. When fear of adult circumcision led him to give up the idea of converting to any religion that required surgery, he became an apprentice to a shoemaker on Mackinac Island, Michigan.
A skilled artisan, Luigi designed and crafted Chippewa moccasins while attending Michigan State University, where he earned a BA in 1967 and an MA in 1969. While shoemaking and taking full-time university classes toward his Ph.D. in rocket science, he wrote three unpublished novels and one volume of poetry. The shoe shop burned in 1971, destroying Luigi’s manuscripts and his innocence. Mentally drained from this tragedy, he did the only thing left for an educated shoemaker to do; he became a teacher and, soon after, an administrator.
In 1974, Luigi uprooted his family from the security and comfort of their middle-class American home to become headmaster of a small oil company school in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. He left education in 1978 and went to work in the Middle East oilfields. After thirty-two years in the hot desert sun of Arabia, Luigi, unable to distinguish fact from fiction in his own life, left Dubai and moved to Italy to learn Italian and rediscover the truth.
John Dragonetti
In 1972, the author and his family moved from the USA to Cairo, Egypt, to take the position of Headmaster of the Cairo American College. In 1974 he relocated the family to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to become Headmaster of the American School. Three years later he left the education sector for a new career in business, staying in Dubai with his family until 2013, intermittently residing for brief periods in Doha, Qatar, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Maputo, Mozambique.
As an international businessman, John traveled to numerous Middle Eastern countries, developing a fascination with Arab history, culture, and language.
It was the stories and experiences, of friends and business associates, members of the tribal families, as well longtime resident expatriates, that really enthralled him, and led to the writing of The Falcon and the Shaikhs, a historical fictional account, of the intricate relationships cultivated between pioneering expatriates and the tribal families who laid the foundation of Dubai and Ras Al Khaimah, before the formation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971.
Our Publisher - Headline Books
Luigi says they’re the best. The world agrees – 1054 National Awards, 2023 Independent Publisher of the Year, etc.
Visit headlinebooks.com to see their catalog.
Previous Publications
The Duke of Dubai won critical acclaim and was a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
The Falcon and the Shaikhs can be considered as a prequel to his first novel, The Duke of Dubai, a fictional parody of some of the real-life, eccentric oil field characters who really existed in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.