RECOMMENDED Reading
Submitted by Member Joe Wolff
The Cop and the Stalker is a true story of what happened when a highly decorated New York City cop and a career criminal are put on a collision course with the help of US Customs and an overzealous federal prosecutor. It is also a story of raw courage and the friendship of two youths growing up in Yonkers, New York. Vinny Davis worked as a plainclothes cop in the highest crime neighborhoods of the Bronx in the eighties and nineties. He would stop at nothing to put the bad guys behind bars.
Richie Sabol was a malevolent psychopath career criminal who preyed on the weak. His first trip to state prison was for armed robbery, but when he was paroled, he was more violent than before. He had moved on to beating people with baseball bats and shooting a drug dealer in the head while robbing him. His crime spree ranged up and down the East Coast until he sold two kilos of coke and got sentenced to twenty years in federal prison. Two years later, he's back on the streets of New York. He's now working for the feds with the promise he can deliver the Lucchese crime family on a silver platter. And the justice department will do and say anything to ensure that he keeps his word at any cost. Note: Vincent Davis is a Member of Hernando 10-13 Club to purchase Vinny's book scroll down to the amazon link button at bottom of this page
Submitted by Club Member Ray Diaz
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.
Submitted by Club Member Ray Diaz
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.
