ProPublica’s Eisinger taking book leave to write “The Chickenshit Club”

Jesse Eisinger, an investigative business journalist for ProPublica, is taking a book leave for the next year.

Eisinger tells Talking Biz News that he will be writing on white collar crime and (non)punishment, tracing the Department of Justice’s inaction from the Enron case to the present day with detours back to the 1930s and the 1970s.

The book is tentatively titled “The Chickenshit Club” and will be published by Simon & Schuster.

Eisinger also writes a regular column for The New York Times’s Dealbook section.

In April 2011, he and Jake Bernstein were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series of stories on questionable Wall Street practices that helped make the financial crisis the worst since the Great Depression. He and Bernstein were also finalists for the 2011 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for the series.

Prior to joining ProPublica, Eisinger was the Wall Street editor of Conde Nast Portfolio, where he wrote a November 2007 cover story titled “Wall Street Requiem,” in which he predicted the demise of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

Before joining Portfolio, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, where he was the founding writer of two market commentary columns, and he played a leading role in exposing accounting fraud at Belgium-based Lernout & Hauspie.

During his tenure at The Wall Street Journal’s European edition in London, Eisinger won a “Best in Business” award from the UK-based World Leadership Forum for his coverage of accounting irregularities at the Irish drug maker Elan Corp. Earlier in his career, he covered biotechnology and pharmaceuticals for TheStreet.com and Dow Jones Newswires.