Upon graduation from college, Sabbag went to work as a general assignment reporter for
the Washington Daily News, a Scripps Howard tabloid in the nation’s capital.
Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade, in which Forsman was given the pseudonym Zachary Swan, was published in hardcover three years later by the
Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Hunter Thompson called it "a flat-out ballbuster,"
The New Yorker "a triumphant piece of reporting." The 1978 paperback, published by Avon Books, was a bestseller. Novelist
Robert Stone called
Snowblind "One of the best books about drugs ever written." In 1999
Snowblind was issued in a limited edition designed by British artist
Damien Hirst. Bound in mirrored glass, numbered and signed by both author and artist, each book contains a rolled hundred-dollar bill whose U.S. Treasury serial number corresponds to the series number of the book. A copy of the museum-quality piece was presented personally to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth by the book’s publisher, Jamie Byng of
Canongate Books. Since the publication of his first book, Sabbag’s feature writing has appeared regularly in numerous national magazines, including
Rolling Stone, Playboy, Men’s Journal New York, the
New York Times Magazine and the
Los Angeles Times Magazine. For his second book,
Too Tough to Die, Sabbag secured the cooperation of the
United States Marshals Service. The book, a
Reader’s Digest selection for "Today’s Best Nonfiction," led four years later to his
New York Times Magazine cover story "The Invisible Family," the most comprehensive inside look at the federal
Witness Security Program (popularly known as the "witness protection program") ever afforded a journalist by the Department of Justice. HBO purchased the motion picture rights to the article, and its film,
Witness Protection, which Sabbag co-wrote, was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards, including Best Picture. In 2002 Sabbag published
Smokescreen: A True Adventure (originally titled
Loaded: A Misadventure on the Marijuana Trail), about failed filmmaker Allen Long, who in the late 1970s smuggled more than 900,000 pounds of Colombian marijuana into the United States. British rights to the book were purchased by Canongate Books, which promoted the book with a "Smugglers' Tour," in which Sabbag and Long appeared before audiences at various venues in the U.K. with celebrity smuggler and bestselling author
Howard Marks (also known as "Mr. Nice").
Smokescreen was a bestseller (Canongate’s first) in its British edition, making the hardcover lists of both the
Sunday Times and the
Observer. Sabbag in 2009 published
Down Around Midnight, a memoir of the fatal plane crash he survived in the wake of ''Snowblind's'' publication thirty years earlier. Sabbag is a member of the
Authors Guild and
Writers Guild of America. He is represented by the William Morris Endeavor agency. ==Bibliography==