Badge of the Assassin

New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc. Very Good/Very Good. 1979. First Edition, First Impression. Hard Cover. 8vo 0525060707 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Cream cloth spine over boards, bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership inscription. 343 pages clean and tight. In rare instances, a book about a criminal episode transcends its immediate stll)ject 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-deity 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 whe: e 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, re-creating 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. ROBERT TANENBAUM spent over eight years with the New York County District Attorney's office, serving as chief of the Criminal Courts Bureau from May 1975 to October 1976. He was then appointed deputy chief counsel in charge of the U.S. House of Representatives investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Mr. Tanenbaum is now practicing law in Los Angeles. PHILIP RQSENBERG is 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). .