Rock Solid: Two Cops' Obsessive Manhunt for One of America's Most Dangerous Criminals

Relates how two New York City cops risked their lives to find the kingpin of a Lower East Side drug ring

Detective Bose and Sergeant Barchiesi of the New York City police department became partners in 1985, a time when both were concerned about activity in and around 507 E. 11th Street. The building, owned by the city, had been taken over by drug dealers, who turned it into a sort of fortress, with secret passages, concealed exits and the like. It became a drug supermarket, with customers queueing in block-long lines 24 hours a day. Behind the enterprise was Alejandro "Tito" Lopez, who reportedly committed some 19 murders. How Bose and Barchiesi devoted the next four years to a monomaniacal nationwide quest to arrest Lopez is the subject of this absorbing book, written with novelist LeMoult. The drug lord is now serving a 33-years-to-life sentence. Unfortunately, Bose and Barchiesi became disillusioned with the department and only Bose continues to serve. Their account of the self-protective timidity of the NYPD brass is profoundly depressing. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Investigation and pursuit by N.Y.C. cops Bose and Barchiesi of a big-time coke dealer--as told to paperback novelist Dolph LeMoult (co-author, Blood Tide, 1991, etc.). On March 27, 1988, Alejandro Lopez, guarded by snarling pit bulls on his Puerto Rican estate, was run to ground by NYPD officers Bose and Barchiesi, ending a three-year manhunt that had begun with their arrest of a small-time pusher outside a building in Manhattan's Alphabet City. Word on the street was that ``The Rock,'' as the building was called, was the place to buy Rock Solid, Lopez's brand of cocaine. The two cops found that The Rock yielded numerous beatings, stabbings, shootings, and homicides: Lopez's name was spoken only in whispers by terrified neighborhood people. Often, queues of men and women--some with small children in tow--stretched around the block. Inside The Rock were dealing rooms with iron-grilled wickets, from which underlings, with coke on the counter and MAC-10 machine guns below, served customers. Escape hatches in the secure rooms led to tunnels and steel security doors. Bose and Barchiesi became increasingly obsessed with shutting down this operation (going on under the nose of the 9th Precinct) and soon zeroed in on Lopez, an incredibly elusive multimillionaire who nevertheless delivered his own product to his store in ``I Love New York'' shopping bags. How could such a Mordred in his castle stronghold, with his evil fiefdom, be allowed to exist six blocks from a precinct house? The authors indict a frozen bureaucracy (when they took urgent extradition papers to Commissioner Ward's office, they were stopped by a clerk who told them that the Commissioner did not sign documents on computer paper--only those on rag bond), as well as by ``the unwillingness of law enforcement agencies to enter buildings, and their obsessive fear of violating citizens' rights.'' As contemporary as it comes; the real deal on the inner-city drug business. (Eight pages of b&w photographs--some grisly.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

New York City policemen Bose and Barchiesi spent four years waging their own war on drugs against a major cocaine ring, which resulted in the conviction of ringleader Alejandro Lopez. The gang, using the brand name "Rock Solid," operated on the Lower East Side and was implicated in 19 murders. This is strictly a good guys-bad guys story. In addition to the drug dealers, referred to as "scumbags" throughout, the authors vent their wrath on the police bureaucracy and legalities which they felt tied their hands. Although one-sided, this book provides insight into the drug wars, and it is appropriate for larger crime collections.
- Gregor A. Preston, Univ. of California Lib., Davis
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.