Crime Does Not Pay: City of Roses

Portland, Oregon, in the 1970s. Portland is often called the Rose City, but the denizens that inhabit its underbelly rarely smell so sweet. Dirty cops, dirty robbers. These shady characters and their illicit connections reveal the boiling corruption in Phil Stanford's true crime stories. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Welcome to the City of Roses. 
Dark Horse is currently publishing archive editions of the 1950's most vile crime comics, Crime Does Not Pay, and is now creating new crime stories under that title. This is the first of them.

Phil Stanford is a true crime writer with a special interest in political corruption. His latest book, White House Call Girl, will be published this summer (2013) by Feral House Press.

White House Call Girl is the real story behind the infamous 1972 Watergate break-in that led to the downfall of the President Richard Nixon, and features an ex-stripper and call girl madam by the name of Heidi Rikan. Many of the book's most important revelations are, in fact, based on Stanford's recent discovery of Heidi's little black book.

Stanford's other books include Portland Confidential, which won the Independent Publisher's "Best True Crime" award for 2005. The Peyton-Allan Files (2010) solves a 1960 lover's lane murder for which two men were wrongfully convicted.

His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, the Washingtonian, Rolling Stone, and Columbia Journalism Review. He has worked as a magazine editor and a licensed private investigator, and was a columnist for the Oregonian and the Portland Tribune.

As a journalist, Stanford is best known for his continuing work on the 1989 murder/cover-up of Oregon Corrections director Michael Francke. His 1994 Oregonian series on the "Happy Face Killer" case resulted in two innocent people being released from prison. The author lives in Portland, OR..