No Lights, No Sirens: The Corruption and Redemption of an Inner City Cop - Softcover

Cea, Robert

3.89

149 ratings by Goodreads

9780060587130: No Lights, No Sirens: The Corruption and Redemption of an Inner City Cop

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006058713X ISBN 13: 9780060587130

Publisher: HarperTorch, 2006

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No Lights, No Sirens is the harrowing true story of an officer who, on his way to becoming one of the most highly decorated cops in NYPD history, lost his soul...

Robert Cea began his career as an idealistic young man, a gifted lawman who would right wrongs and make the world a better place by putting away the bad guys. But whatever he'd learned at the academy did not prepare him for the streets, the thugs, or the depravity he'd encounter. "I'd sworn it would never get to me," he writes, "that I'd never turn into the monsters I was chasing. I was wrong." And become a monster he did, during his relentless journey into the criminal netherworld.

Brutally authentic, as gritty and graphic as the life itself, Cea's story takes readers into the cruisers and onto the streets to show how the law was–and continues to be–routinely bent to stay one step ahead of the criminals. Cea painstakingly reveals his slow downward spiral into the depths of hell that would shatter his conscience, destroy his marriage, and corrupt his mind. It would all lead to a final attempt at redemption that would nearly cost him his life.

Illuminating a hidden side of law enforcement that cannot be imagined, No Lights, No Sirens is as gripping as it is terrifying, a morality tale with repercussions for us all.

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About the Author:

Robert Cea retired in his early thirties as a highly decorated police officer. He now splits his time between the East and West Coasts, developing projects in film and television. He lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly:

Virtually every clich� in every noirish police melodrama ever filmed by Hollywood turns out to be the God's-honest truth, to judge by this pulpy memoir. Cea, a television writer who recently sold three network pilots, chronicles his former career as a NYPD officer during the 1980s, from his bushy-tailed academy stint to his soul-destroying ordeal in the "Badlands" of Brooklyn. His beat is a Dantean landscape populated by-in order of decreasing humanity-whores, crackheads, junkyard dogs, "scumbag" defense attorneys and Internal Affairs desk-jockeys who don't understand that you can't play by the rules when you're on the street. Cea soon finds himself "test-i-lying" to prevent perps from being sprung on technicalities and plying snitches with stolen heroin in exchange for information. The oft-scripted existential dilemma of law enforcement-"'to fight them, you have to BECOME THEM!'"-duly wrecks his marriage and sends him into a funk of paranoia and rage. Cea apparently has an exact recall of events and conversations from decades ago, but the lavish detail piles up more stereotype than gritty verisimilitude. He faithfully quotes every "yo" and "bitch" uttered by the trash-talking ghetto poets he encounters and arrests, and his reconstructions of his own lurid arias to the nihilistic honor of cops-"'a filthy toilet bowl full of maggots is what this city is....and the only ones who stand between the babies and the furnace are saps like me! ME!'"-go on for pages. Somewhere in here there's an intriguing account of gradual corruption and the weird psychological dynamic between cops and criminals, but it's buried beneath a hackneyed, overwrought screenplay-in-waiting.
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