The 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.

“Engrossing….The incredible story of a hit squad sent to kill cops….The accounts of the two murder trials in New York…and an intervening chase down to a remote farm in Mississippi…are almost as suspenseful as the stalking and capture of the killers.” — The New York Times