Chief‪!‬

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Cigar-chomping Albert Seedman rose to become the NYPD’s Chief of Detectives in 1971, displaying an uncanny knack for “catching” the biggest cases, including the murder of Kitty Genovese, the most famous victim in New York history. Stalked and stabbed to death while her neighbors did nothing, her case begot the "Bystander Effect" invoked in nearly every Psych 101 textbook.

2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the murder of Kitty Genovese. The inside story of the blood-chilling moment when Seedman and his detectives realized they were interrogating not just a burglar but Kitty's killer is told only in Chief!

The inside story is also told of the assassinations of Mafia bosses Joe Gallo and Joe Colombo, the cop executions by the Black Liberation Army, and the explosion of a Greenwich Village townhouse turned into a bomb factory by Weathermen radicals. Seedman solved them all, and these are his gripping stories, told with co-author Peter Hellman. 

But his last case was one the higher-ups wouldn’t let him solve, and it is here in this new digital edition. On April 14, 1972, a white cop who thought he was answering a “10-13” (officer in need of assistance) was fatally shot at a Nation of Islam (Black Muslim) Mosque in Harlem. Seedman raced to the scene to take charge of the investigation, but higher authority, perhaps as high as Mayor John Lindsay, fearing a racially motivated riot, ordered Seedman to abandon the crime scene. Two weeks after the shooting, Seedman was the subject of a cover story in the New York Times Magazine and resigned abruptly as the highest-profile chief of detectives in NYPD history – but without revealing the reason for his resignation. “I loved the police department so much that I didn’t want to drag it through the mud,” says Seedman in 2011 at age 92, explaining why he waited so long.  But after 39 years, the time had come to tell the truth about the slaying of patrolman Phillip Cardillo. 

 In the gripping new Introduction to this edition, Seedman speaks from the heart about what happened that day at the Harlem Mosque—the only case that he was not permitted  to solve.