As a special agent, he spent decades investigating fraud. Now he’s writing a new chapter
From Northeastern University track star to U.S. special agent investigating fraudsters and now author, Bryan Tenney’s life path has been anything but straightforward.
Bryan Tenney was first bitten by the writing bug when he was a senior at Northeastern University in 1990. Writing for the university’s yearbook, “The Cauldron,” he was drawn to the act of bringing a story to life and discovered a dream he never even knew he had: to be an author.
It took 35 years, but Tenney’s long-harbored dream finally became a reality when, in 2025, he published his first novel, “The Founders,” which Tenney labels a historical fiction meets buddy comedy meets political thriller.
But Tenney’s path to becoming a writer, much like the rest of his life, has been far from straightforward. He went from being a Northeastern track star to becoming an auditor at a top tier accounting firm to volunteering with the Peace Corps and, for most of his professional life, investigating fraudsters as a U.S. Special Agent. But through it all, he never lost sight of his passion. Getting people to feel something with his words, whether they’re laughing, crying or sitting on the edge of their seats, was a compulsion.
“I always wanted to be a writer, and I wrote here and there when I had the time,” Tenney said. “For me, writing has always been pretty easy. For some reason, it just flows.”
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Northeastern has been central to Tenny’s journey as both a writer and civil servant. He grew up in Milford, Massachusetts, surrounded by Huskies: His father and aunt had both graduated from the university in 1968, his uncle in 1965, and his brother in 1993.
Although he was dedicated to his studies, the biggest part of Tenney’s life at Northeastern was his place on the track and cross-country team. The team had incredible success, and Tenney even won the 1990 Greater Boston 10,000-meter Championship.
By the time Tenney graduated with a degree in accounting and finance, he had secured an auditing job at one of the “Big Four” accounting firms, known then as Coopers and Lybrand (now PwC or PricewaterhouseCoopers). But after working there for a year, Tenney realized his heart wasn’t in it.
While job hunting at Northeastern’s career resource center in 1991, he spotted an ad for the Peace Corps, an American agency that sends volunteers to assist with development projects in other countries. Intrigued, he applied and was accepted as a volunteer in 1992.
He spent the next two years stationed in Armenia, where he had his first taste of public service: He and his Peace Corps roommate started a youth baseball program to teach Armenian children how to play the sport. Tenney also met and married the woman who would be his wife for 24 years, Astrik Sahakian, before their divorce in 2021.
“If I’d never seen that little ad on the wall, my life would’ve gone down a totally different track,” Tenney said.
Tenney returned to the U.S. in 1994 and sat at a career crossroads. The experience in Armenia inspired him to explore work in the world of international diplomacy. After earning a master’s degree in international law and diplomacy from Tufts University in 1997, Tenney decided government work was the best way for him to have an impact. He went straight into the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Inspector General and spent the next 26 years working for the State Department, 21 of those as a globe-trotting special agent investigating fraudsters. For more than two decades, Tenney tracked down white-collar criminals.
“Getting into the State Department, working for the Office of the Inspector General and then investigating, essentially, fraud at embassies actually tied in well with both his work at the accounting company and the international experience he got through the Peace Corps,” said Rick Black, a longtime friend who graduated from Northeastern alongside Tenney and ran track at the university.
One standout case in 2005 involved a cashier embezzling close to $250,000 from the U.S. embassy in Maputu, Mozambique.
Tenney and his team devised a peculiar plan to bring the cashier to justice. They called him and asked if he would come to the U.S. to train special agents in how he had committed fraud to help combat future financial crime.
“Believe it or not, he took us up on the offer,” Tenney said.
Two months later, the cashier arrived at Charleston International Airport in South Carolina, where Tenney and his fellow agents were waiting to arrest him. Ultimately, he was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
“For some people, that’s not that bad of a deal,” Tenney said.
Tenney’s ability to talk with people and, in turn, get them to talk was a vital skill in a job that relies heavily on interviews with suspects and complainants, said Lisa Warfelli, a special agent who worked with Tenney for years.
“Bryan stands out as one of the best interviewers I’ve ever worked with because his positivity, his friendliness, puts people at ease,” Warfelli said. “I don’t think folks understand the importance of that, of being able to just make eye contact and start a conversation.”
Even as he was pursuing criminals, he didn’t let go of writing, dipping back into it in his free time. He would toy around with memoirs, recollecting his days as a Peace Corps volunteer, or write fiction based in the world of track and cross-country. But after a 1998 trip to Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, sparked Tenney’s interest in how the former president’s role influenced contemporary America, wrote a few chapters of a historical fiction novel about the president, which would eventually become “The Founders.”
For almost two decades, he tinkered with the idea before returning to it in earnest in 2018 at the request of his daughter, who read a draft of the first chapter and wanted to know how it ended.
“The Founders” takes place in a 2022 America run by fictional President Ryan Bribe, who is tearing apart presidential norms left and right. At the same time, Jefferson and George Washington mysteriously rise from the dead and, together, embark on a series of adventures. All the while, they must figure out why they’ve returned and navigate a country that looks radically different from the one they founded.
“We all think about, what would the Founding Fathers think about what’s going on today?” Tenney said. “I try to answer that.”
In writing “The Founders,” Tenney’s goal was to write a page-turner but one that engaged with the complicated legacy of the country’s founders, recognizing both their flaws and the aspirational vision they had for the country.
Now retired from public service, Tenney is fully committed to living out his dream as a writer. He’s doing a small book tour for “The Founders,” which includes a book signing at the Northeastern Bookstory on May 16 at 1 p.m. He’s also already working on memoirs about his time as a special agent and his experience in the Peace Corps.
“One of my friends already asked me to write a sequel to “The Founders,” but we’ll see how this [first] one goes,” Tenney said.
