Rookie Cop: DeepUndercover in the Jewish Defense League

Before becoming Chief of Police in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Richard Rosenthal spent twenty years in the New York City Police Department, where he ran the Heavy Weapons and Undercover Weapons Training programs and, as a detective in the Bronx dealt with homicide, narcotics, and armed robbery. Before joining the NYPD, he worked for U.S. Air Force military intelligence as a Russian language specialist. Pocket Books published his two popular books of police craft, Sky Cops and K-9 Cops, as well as his novel, The Murder of Old Comrades, "a spicy police procedural about KGB assassins on the loose in Manhattan," according to The Wall Street Journal, which "put Mr. Rosenthal on the map in big-league publishing."

"A strange true tale of a Jewish NYPD cadet recruited into the department's elite intelligence unit to spy on the Jewish Defense League, offering vivid portraits of a politically incendiary era and revealing secrets of intrusive police tactics...This is a well-tuned portrait of the stress and acrimony that permeates such radical cliques, and of the lonely, paranoid personalities at their centers - and it offers insights into the radically charged violence of the early 1970s...Rosenthal has a fine eye for human detail and a cop's mordant sensibility. Altogether an exciting tale of unusual police practices, and a solid portrait of a quintessential fringe radical group inhabiting insecure, volatile times.-Kirkus Reviews (June 15, 2000)

Excerpted from Chapter One

Sol Hurok immigrated to the United States from the village of Pogar, Russia in 1906 and made a small living for himself by producing concerts for New York City's burgeoning labor societies. Over the years, the workers' craving for high-brow entertainment grew to such an extent that his concerts were staged in the enormous amusement hall built by P.T. Barnum, the Hippodrome. Hurok became the personal manager of the great Afro-American contralto Marian Anderson and arranged the first U.S. tour for the young violin sensation and son of a poor Israeli barber, Itzak Perlman. Within several generations Hurok became known as The Impresario, importing such world class entertai