A story of drug dealing and murder at the home base of special forces operatives sounds like a tailor-made logline for a series. Which it will be, after HBO won a bidding war over multiple other outlets for rights to a recently published nonfiction book.
The premium outlet has landed rights to author Seth Harp’s book The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. HBO plans to develop a series based on the book, with Harp and former HBO Films president Len Amato (via his company Crash & Salvage) executive producing. A search for a writer/showrunner to adapt the material is underway.
Published by Viking on Aug. 12, The Fort Bragg Cartel is set to debut at No. 2 on the combined print/ebook New York Times bestseller list, and No. 5 among hardcover sales, this weekend. Excerpts have appeared in Rolling Stone, where Harp is a contributing editor.
Harp, an investigative journalist and Iraq war veteran, delves into a string of unsolved killings in and near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the U.S. military’s premier special operations base. The book reveals a network of drug trafficking conspiracies that corrupt police abetted and that the military covered up. Harp is repped by CAA.
Amato was head of HBO Films from 2007-20, shepherding original movies including The Normal Heart, Recount, Fahrenheit 451 and Temple Grandin, among many others, during his tenure. He was an executive producer of HBO’s limited series White House Plumbers in 2023.
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