Badge of the Assassin [Paperback]

A blood-chilling true-crime account from former district attorney andNew York Timesbestselling author Robert K. Tanenbaum

BADGE OF THE ASSASSIN

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.Chapter One

North of the Triborough Bridge, the Harlem River slices sharply to the northwest, narrowing Manhattan Island down to a tadpole tail of land. At 142nd Street, Fifth Avenue, the dividing line between the East Side and the West Side, runs up against the river and comes to a stop. Lenox Avenue, which is Harlem's name for Sixth, extends northward as far as 147th, and then it, too, runs out of land. Seventh lasts all the way to 154th, just one block short of the Macombs Dam Bridge, which leads across the river to the Bronx and Yankee Stadium.

From the air, the triangle of land bordered on the south by 155th Street, on the west by the sheer cliff known as Coogan's Bluff, and on the east by the Harlem River doesn't look like it belongs to New York. Beyond it, to the south and west, one can see the huddled tenements of Harlem pressed to each other like subway riders in the morning. But in the triangle itself, known generally as the Colonial Park district, the tenements have long since been leveled, to be replaced by two distinct sets of ungalÓP