My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire City
Hachette Books
September 2015
On Sale: September 8, 2015
Featuring: Ray Kelly
318 pages ISBN: 0316383813 EAN: 9780316383813 Kindle: B00RTY0EZQ Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
Two-time New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly
opens up about his remarkable life, taking us inside fifty
years of law enforcement leadership, offering chilling
stories of terrorist plots after 9/11, and sharing his
candid insights into the challenges and controversies cops
face today.
The son of a milkman and a
Macy's dressing room checker, Ray Kelly grew up on New York
City's Upper West Side, a middle-class neighborhood where
Irish and Puerto Rican kids played stickball and tussled in
the streets. He entered the police academy and served as a
marine in Vietnam, living and fighting by the values that
would carry him through a half century of
leadership-justice, decisiveness, integrity, courage, and
loyalty.
Kelly soared through the NYPD ranks in
decades marked by poverty, drugs, civil unrest, and a murder
rate that, at its peak, spiked to over two thousand per
year. Kelly came to be known as a tough leader, a fixer who
could go into a troubled precinct and clean it up. That
reputation catapulted him into his first stint as
commissioner, under Mayor David Dinkins, where Kelly oversaw
the police response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
and spearheaded programs that would help usher in the city's
historic drop in crime.
Eight years later, in the
chaotic wake of the 9/11 attacks, newly elected mayor
Michael Bloomberg tapped Kelly to be NYC's top cop once
again. After a decade working with Interpol, serving as
undersecretary of the Treasury for enforcement, overseeing
U.S. Customs, and commanding an international police force
in Haiti, Kelly understood that New York's security was
synonymous with our national security. Believing that the
city could not afford to rely solely on "the feds," he
succeeded in transforming the NYPD from a traditional police
department into a resource-rich
counterterrorism-and-intelligence force.
In this
vital memoir, Kelly reveals the inside stories of his life
in the hot seat of "the capital of the world"-from the
terror plots that nearly brought a city to its knees to his
dealings with politicians, including Presidents Bill
Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama as well as Mayors
Rudolph Giuliani, Bloomberg, and Bill DeBlasio. He addresses
criticisms and controversies like the so-called
stop-question-and-frisk program and the rebuilding of the
World Trade Center and offers his insights into the
challenges that have recently consumed our nation's police
forces, even as the need for vigilance remains as acute as ever.
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