KEVIN STEVENS

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The Cops Are Robbers

the cops are robbers

“Like the proverbial hooker who cries rape, Clemente, a bent cop, voices protest: he was not accorded the deference due an officer during investigations into allegations linking him to a bank heist but, rather, was treated as a suspect. On the job he himself was always humane, an attribute he stresses perhaps to temper his admission of personal corruption and which also may underpin his charge that corruption is indigenous to law enforcement. One year into his 30-year sentence for robbing a bank in his Massachusetts hometown of Medford in 1980 and while awaiting trial for a scam involving civil service exams, this former police lieutenant here throws himself on the reader’s sympathy, aided by Stevens, with arguments that his five brethren in the robbery, two of them junkies, turned out to be less than honorable, and that his mistress, a ‘manipulator’ who testified against him, played him for a ‘sucker.’ Clemente’s wife and son have only cameo roles in his memoir, the roles one senses they are assigned in his life as well.” Publishers Weekly