And if things got hot, there were no rules of engagement for private cops like him.The place was alive with frat boys.
The rise of "secure," gated communities, private cops, private roads, private parks, private schools, private playgrounds — private, private, private —exacerbates biased treatment against the young, the colored and the presumably poor.
Office buildings, yards and parking lots ought to be guarded by private security, freeing cops to patrol trains and protect us from terrorists.
Now retired, General Conforti — often called simply Il Generale — is renowned in the international circle of beat cops, private detectives, insurance executives, customs agents, and state prosecutors involved in the recovery of stolen art.
But the vast and rich fiction that has grown up around the law has been mostly fascinated by criminals and their victims, and the criminals' antagonists in the form of cops, private eyes and attorneys.
New York authors (and yes, New York is just as much somebody's hometown as Spokane or Port Silva) have hesitated to re-structure the formulas of their series novels, although just about every cop, private eye and amateur sleuth has clearly been changed by the events of 9/11.
They are Columbo, Kojak, Rockford, Barnaby Jones and all the other cops and private eyes who ever made an impression in television.
Think of those 746 cards in that catalog of very private lives — soldiers, sailors, cops, bikers, dancers, students — united only by their encounters with one man who decided to turn his own secret history into a time capsule.
The impossibility of consummation may be the author's wry comment on the constant intrusions into private lives — by thuggish cops, nosy neighbors, husbands who may or may not be in the secret police — under a totalitarian regime.
While this point is pretty much lost on the dour cops and private eyes of hard-boiled fiction, amateur sleuths have no problem finding the laughs in the midst of murder.
Yes, the estate had been sealed off by cops and private guards as 75,000 gathered following Presley's death on August 17, 1977.
