Mr. Auletta has turned the spotlight on businessmen throughout his career as an author and columnist.
This Coney Island, N.Y., native, whose parents ran a sporting goods store there when he was young, has written seven books. He is perhaps best known for chronicling the demise of the big three TV networks in "Three Blind Mice" in 1991.
Little happened to change Mr. Auletta's viewpoint: In a 1998 interview with Lou Dobbs, the author said the network business is still a "lousy" one.
Another of Mr. Auletta's well-known books is "Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman," in which he examined the sale of the Lehman Brothers investment bank to Shearson/American Express. It was published in 1986.
The story came to him one Sunday in 1984 when he was searching for a newspaper in a Long Island coffee shop and found Peter G. Peterson, chairman of the investment bank, discussing the bank's sale, according to a Time article. "It sounded like a delicious story," Mr. Auletta told the magazine.
Mr. Peterson did not find the finished product so appetizing. "Mr. Auletta reduced a complicated business story to a simplistic morality play," he told Time.
But the Time reporter, James S. Kunen, saw it differently. He wrote of Mr. Auletta, "All of his books have been notable for their scrupulous objectivity."
Before turning to journalism, Mr. Auletta worked as a speechwriter and strategist for Robert F. Kennedy and for New York Democrat Howard Samuels.
Mr. Auletta also covers telecommunications and media for The New Yorker and has excelled at explaining this complex area for a general readership. In fact, 17 of his New Yorker essays comprised his 1997 book, "The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway," which features stories on Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner and other moguls.
Mr. Auletta also has worked for the Village Voice, New York Daily News and New York magazine.