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In the 1970s, New York City’s 77th Precinct was known as “the Alamo.” In Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights, Brooklyn—neighborhoods notorious for drugs and violent crime—some of the worst criminals wore police uniforms and carried badges. Henry Winter was a good cop when he first entered the infamous 77th station house that was already infamous as a home to the dregs of the NYPD. Before long, he and fellow officer Anthony Magno found themselves deeply entrenched in the Alamo’s culture of extortion, lies, corruption, and crime—and they were regularly supplementing their incomes by ripping off thieves, drug dealers, junkies, and honest citizens alike. But the gravy train couldn’t stay on the rails forever. Winter and Magno were caught and faced a devastating choice: They could betray their crooked friends and colleagues by helping investigators expose the rot that festered at the Alamo’s core—or spend the next several years behind bars.

They were just doing their jobs -- serving and protecting -- when the unimaginable happened: Officers Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini became moving targets, ambushed from behind at a Manhattan housing project. Jones lay dead in a pool of his own blood, and Piagentini lived long enough to beg for his life -- before he was riddled with twenty-two bullet holes by members of a deadly hit squad hell-bent on taking out the men and women of law enforcement. 

Masterfully building suspense on every page, Robert K. Tanenbaum reconstructs the vicious murders of Jones and Piagentini and the manhunt for the suspects, and brings to life his courtroom prosecution of the killers -- revealing the triumphs and failures of America's legal system.