With decades in the publishing world, Freundlich shaped a string of bestsellers. In one year at Crown Publishers 4 of Freundlich’s books were New York Times Number 1 bestsellers. And alongside commercial success, as editor-in chief of Harper’s Magazine Press, he published Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize winner, PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK.

Freundlich was always fascinated by New York City crime. He grew up in Brooklyn in the heyday of the Gambino crime family. In fact, two of his aunts married men connected to Italian and Jewish crime families. This fascination with crime attracted Freundlich to authors whose subject was the Mafia and police corruption. He published authors who had directed the entire system of illegal payoffs to cops and elected officials, including judges. He published the story of the undercover cop whose story became the blockbuster movie, THE PRINCE OF THE CITY. He ghostwrote the story of the cop who was intimately involved in THE FRENCH CONNECTION.

Freundlich makes no bones about it; these men often became his friends. He got to know that when they weren’t being devious, they were often very, very funny. They had a language all their own. It is a language that millions of Americans heard in a movie like Goodfellas or a television series like The Sopranos.

Freundlich brings these stories and these voices to life in BROOKLYN TOUGH, where our two central characters, Jewish and Sicilian brothers-in-law, wonder how close you can get to the Mafia and not lose your humanity and in a style that summons up the comic spirit of Woody Allen and Jimmy Breslin.

Freundlich left the publishing world and almost this world all together, on account of alcoholism. His recovery from alcoholism explains how with the acclaimed recovery therapist, Pia Mellody, he co-authored the bestseller in mental health circles, The Intimacy Factor, which has been a constant seller for more than a decade.

The stories in CATS AND DRUNKS grow out of Freundlich’s decades of tragic companionship with his fellow drunks. The stories are hilarious, but there is a part of them which is surprisingly spiritual. And it grows out of Freundlich’s discovery that in the love of the cats who he came to adore he found the strength to get sober and allow a Higher Power into his life.