Hardback: Badge of the Assassin (1979) is the true story of one of the most intense manhunts in police history and of the young district attorney who brought a trio of cop killers to justice.
In rare instances, a book about a criminal episode transcends its immediate subject and achieves a stature beyond the conventional true crime genre. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood is a case in point along with Thomas Thompson's Blood and Money. Badge of the Assassin belongs in that company.
The story begins with a brutal double murder: at a Harlem housing project in May 1971, two on-duty New York City policemen are ruthlessly gunned down by members of the self-proclaimed Black Liberation Army. An agonizing cross-country manhunt for the killers ensues, leading detectives into every corner of the black revolutionary underworld: to San Francisco, to New Orleans, to a rundown farm in a small town in Mississippi where one of the murder weapons (the "badge of the assassin") is found buried under five feet of soil.
Robert Tanenbaum, a dynamic and indefatigable young district attorney, led the investigation and acted as the prosecutor in the case, which culminated in two dramatic trials of The People v Herman Bell, et al. Tanenbaum and novelist Philip Rosenberg make the reader a participant in the four-year struggle for justice, recreating every scene of the spellbinding human drama - from the actual shootings through a series of brilliantly engineered arrests to the tension and excitement of the courtroom.
Badge of the Assassin is the true story of a shocking crime, told with all the skill and subtlety of first-rate fiction.
About the authors: New York Times bestselling author Robert K Tanenbaum is a nationally known attorney and legal expert. He is one of the country’s most respected trial lawyers and has never lost a felony case. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Tanenbaum attended the University of California at Berkeley on a basketball scholarship. He received his law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. At the outset of his distinguished career, he was an Assistant D.A. in New York County, where he ran the Homicide Bureau, served as Chief of the Criminal Courts, and was in charge of the D.A.’s legal staff training program. Mel Glass, John Keenan, and D.A. Frank Hogan were his esteemed mentors, and Echoes of My Soul is a tribute to them, written at the request of Mel Glass with his active involvement.
Tanenbaum’s tireless quest for justice led him to be appointed Deputy Chief Counsel for the Congressional committee investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Following an esteemed career as a successful prosecuting attorney and high profile defender, he served two terms as Mayor of Beverly Hills and continues to teach law in California, New York and Pennsylvania. A popular media guest, he regularly appears on television shows as a legal commentator.
He is the author of three non-fiction books, including The Piano Teacher: The True Story of a Psychotic Killer and Badge of the Assassin, the true account of his investigation and trials of self-proclaimed members of the Black Liberation Army who assassinated two NYPD police officers – later adapted into a movie starring James Woods as Tanenbaum. He is also the bestselling author of the Butch Karp series featuring two fictional District Attorneys in New York. A native of New York, Robert Tanenbaum currently lives with his family in Beverly Hills, California.
Philip Rosenberg is a screenwriter and the author of The Seventh Hero, a study of the writings of Thomas Carlyle; his other two books are a highly acclaimed novel, Contract on Cherry Street and Point Blank (with Sonny Grosso).
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