Brooklyn’s district attorney has quietly been penning more than legal documents since he was elected to office 16 years ago.
In his free time, Charles “Joe” Hynes has written an insider crime novel called “Triple Homicide” that will be stores this June.
Covering the New York Police Department between the 1960s and 1990s, the novel focuses on the lives of an uncle and nephew who were nearly ruined by institutional corruption and the “blue wall of silence” within the ranks of the department.
Although the dates don’t match up with history, recognizable portraits of a slew of famous and infamous city figures from the recent past are painted in the novel.
Characters such as Michael G. Keating, a “superb chief” and “retired colonel in the United States Marine Corps,” and Mayor W. Carlton Richardson, a “maverick” unafraid to take on institutional corruption, draw parallels to Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Mayor Giuliani.
While in his prologue Mr. Hynes writes, “The story I’m about to tell you is mostly true,” he told The New York Sun yesterday that the novel is purely a work of fiction based on his experiences with police corruption.
As the special state prosecutor for the New York City criminal justice system, Mr. Hynes headed up an undercover probe in Brooklyn that ended with the arrests of 12 corrupt police officers in 1986.
The investigation uncovered what is widely considered one of the largest police corruption scandals in city history.
Mr. Hynes wrote the novel in about three years, but it took him another 13 years to get it published, he said.
“I write like a lawyer, with a beginning, middle, and end,” Mr. Hynes said.
It wasn’t until recently, when he began working with editor, Sean Desmond, that the novel came together, he said. Mr. Desmond was able to take the two separate stories of police officers and intertwine them, similar to the film “Crash,” Mr. Hynes said.
The district attorney’s vast experience as a civil prosecutor should bring validity to the novel, a professor of law and police studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Eugene O’Donnell, said.
Among other positions, Mr. Hynes created the Crimes Against Children Bureau in the city, and was the special prosecutor appointed to investigate the racially charged murder of Michael Griffith in the Howard Beach section of Queens.
“He is a tried and true New York City prosecutor,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “No one can question his prowess.”
Mr. Hynes is not the first person in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office to write a novel. In 2001, Mr. Hynes demoted one of his prosecutors, Robert Reuland, for a comment he made in a New York magazine interview while promoting his novel “Hollowpoint.” In the interview, Mr. Reuland said Brooklyn was the best place to work as a prosecutor because “we’ve got more dead bodies per square inch than anybody.”
Mr. Reuland sued the district attorney on the basis of free speech and was awarded $30,000 in 2004. The decision was upheld in a federal appeals court last year.
Mr. Hynes said yesterday that his situation wasn’t similar to that of Mr. Reuland.
“He was using his position to sell his book,” Mr. Hynes said.
Mr. Reuland declined to comment on the case, but said he wished Mr. Hynes the best.
The eventual tearing down of the “blue wall of silence” and police corruption is a major theme in “Triple Homicide.” In the author’s note, Mr. Hynes pays tribute to Mr. Kelly for setting up a system that reformed the police department during his first term under Mayor Dinkins.
When asked what he thought about one of his colleagues writing a book, Mr. Kelly said: “It’s not surprising to me that Joe Hynes would take a literary turn. He is Irish and a New Yorker, a powerful combination that has produced great writers.”