The brutal murder that frames the story of The Honored Dead hadn’t happened yet when Joseph Braude arrived in Casablanca to embed in a unit of the Moroccan police. He went to Morocco because he was interested in the relationship between authoritarian states and the masses they patrol. He believed that the most poignant meeting place of the two is a police precinct, where ordinary people viscerally encounter the power of their government. But he hardly expected that he would encounter a killing that touched him personally – or that he would grow deeply involved with the strange network of people surrounding the crime.
He came to his odyssey in Morocco from the perspective of a writer who had already experienced both sides of criminal justice. In the 1990s Braude was a confidential informant to the FBI on counterterrorism cases. In 2004 he faced Federal prosecution for illegally importing Iraqi artifacts to the United States, and pled guilty to the charges. This background added layers of sensitivity and complexity to his experience in Casablanca, and he came back from Morocco transformed by what he had seen.