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Sign up today90 Church
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Learn moreMad Men meets The Wire in this gripping true-crime memoir by a former agent at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1960s New York.
Before Nixon famously declared a “war on drugs,” there was the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
New York City, mid-1960s. The war in Vietnam was on the nation’s tongue—but so was something else. Clandestine and chaotic, but equally ruthless, the agents of the bureau were feared by the Mafia, dealers, pimps, prostitutes—anyone who did his or her business on the streets. With few rules and almost no oversight, the battle-hardened agents of the bureau were often more vicious than the criminals they chased.
Agent Dean Unkefer was a naïve kid with notions of justice and fair play when he joined up. But all that quickly changed once he got thrown into the lion’s den of 90 Church, the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, where he was shocked to see the agents he revered were often more like thugs than lawmen.
When he finally got the chance to prove his mettle by going undercover in the field, the lines became increasingly blurred. As he spiraled into the hell of addiction and watched his life become a complex balancing act of lies and half-truths, he began to wonder what side he was really on.
90 Church is both the unbelievable memoir of one man’s confrontation with the dark corners of the human experience and a fascinating window into a little-known time in American history. Learn the story of the agents who make the DEA look like choirboys.
Dean Unkefer is a former agent with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He lives in Nashville.
Keith Szarabajka has appeared in many films, including The Dark Knight, Missing, and A Perfect World, and on such television shows as The Equalizer, Angel, Cold Case, Golden Years, and Profit. Szarabajka has also appeared in several episodes of Selected Shorts for National Public Radio. He won the 2001 Audie Award for Unabridged Fiction for his reading of Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and has won several Earphones Awards.
Reviews
“[Unkefer’s] blistering true-crime memoir of addiction and undercover work is unlike any we’ve ever read.”
“With a variety of sub-plots and the actions of the other agents at the bureau, the novel reads like a mafia- and drug-ridden version of In the Garden of Good and Evil but with a more literal look into the bounds of human morality…90 Church is a fascinating and harrowing tale of one man’s journey for justice and the concessions he had to make to obtain it. Agent Unkefer’s story is an incredible larger-than-life exposé of the true cost of justice and just how far some are willing to go to obtain it.”
“The book has the same feel as Peter Maas’ Serpico and Robert Daley’s Prince of the City, both nonfiction accounts (later turned into popular films) of cops who struggled to keep their moral and ethical equilibriums. For anyone interested in true crime from the cop’s point of view.”
“This memoir reads like a fast-paced novel…Public libraries should purchase this book as a source of information about the FBN and its trampling on individuals’ constitutional rights; Universal Pictures is planning a related movie.”
“A grim, fevered memoir of pre-Drug Enforcement Administration anti-drug warriors raising havoc in New York City.”
“A wild, terrifying, unpredictable ride with ruthless, violent men…With unerring pace and clear style, ex-agent Unkefer creates an irresistible and sometimes funny—but ultimately heartbreaking—first-person narrative of his own, and his agency’s, self-destruction…I found it shocking on multiple levels—the treachery of the agents to themselves, the informants, the criminals, their bureau, society, and their families. And in the end, the war on drugs wasn’t theirs to lose—or win.”
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