Award-Winning Author Aaron Pufal Announces You Are Family, a Follow-Up to Chasing Legends

PORT ANGELES, WA, UNITED STATES, September 9, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Aaron Pufal, author of the award winning Chasing Legends: Motorcycle Stories from the Podcast Trail, has announced his second book, You Are Family: A Yacht Captain, a Fixer, and a CIA Asset Inside the World of the Ultra Rich, a full length memoir scheduled for publication in 2027.

The book grew out of reader response to the first. Chasing Legends gave Pufal's own life a single chapter, and readers and podcast listeners kept asking what was behind the doors he had walked past: twenty five years as a yacht captain, estate manager, and fixer for billionaires and royalty. Pufal describes the result as a tell all, with the names attached.

Why now

Pufal gives three reasons for writing the book now.

The first is time. "There are more days behind me than ahead of me," Pufal said. "I spent twenty five years keeping other people's secrets, and I decided they were not going to be buried with me."

The second is Iowa. Pufal spent fourteen years working for the family of Christine Sand, wife of Rob Sand, Iowa's state auditor and the Democratic candidate for governor. The family's financial support for the campaign is a matter of public record in Iowa campaign finance disclosures. Pufal says he watched that support take shape from inside the household, before there was a campaign to report on, and the book tells that story.

"I ran the life that money paid for: the eighty million dollar Aspen ranch, the yachts, the jets, and the problems that needed solving quietly. I booked it, staffed it, paid for it, and cleaned up after it," Pufal said. "When I started saying so in public, my comments were deleted, I was banned from the campaign's page, and then the family's lawyers got in touch. A comment can be deleted. An account can be banned. A book cannot."

The third is the Gulf. Before Iowa, Pufal captained a one hundred twenty foot tri deck motor yacht for a member of the UAE royal family, a vessel that regularly hosted ambassadors, envoys, and senior figures of the region. Pufal says he was approached inside the United States embassy in Abu Dhabi while applying for a fiance visa and recruited to report on his employer and on the guests who came aboard. The handler who recruited him has since died, which is part of why Pufal says the account can be told now.

"I was an immigrant applying for the right to marry the woman I loved. It was not my government yet. They held everything I wanted and owed me nothing," Pufal said. "I am telling it because the collection of compromising material is running rampant through yachting and the whole world of the ultra rich it serves. Everybody close to that kind of money is collecting or being collected on, and most do not know which."

Told from the inside

"They tell you that you are family," Pufal said. "You go to the weddings. You hold the secrets. The day you know too much you stop being an employee and start being a liability. Then they are finished with you, and you find out what family was worth."

The memoir ends in Aspen in the spring of 2024. Pufal had spent more than a year managing a property the family bought for just under forty million dollars and sold for eighty. When the sale closed, he was let go without a bonus. Pufal says he kept the documents, photographs, and messages from twenty five years of work, dated and in order, and that the book rests on that record rather than on recollection alone.

"They kept the money. I kept the record," Pufal said.

Aaron Pufal
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