A New York Police Officer's relentless journey into the criminal netherworld, told with brutal truth and honesty. Perhaps Neitzsche described Rob Cea's life best, way before he was born: ''Take care when chasing the animals; for you can very well become the animal you are chasing.'' No Lights, No Sirens is a sojourn so dirty and nasty it defies belief. Rob Cea starts off as an idealistic young cop, a true believer in the system for which he works tirelessly. He is sadly mistaken. The system he tried so hard to appease ultimately led to his downfall and the ruination of his life. What separates this from other copβandβrobber stories is the brutal authenticity from the cop himself. We will see and hear exactly what is discussed in a patrol car. We will see how the law wasβand isβroutinely bent to make collars stick any way possible. And we will see how Cea slowly spirals to depths of hell. No Lights, No Sirens is simplistic in its scope: A young idealistic boy becomes a man through fire, and then becomes exactly what he has been chasing for so long, a hardened man possessed by demons. With rapid fire and gritty narrative, Cea writes about his fall to the depths, and his salvation. We see the dark side of detective work in New York's most crimeβriddled neighborhoods from a first-hand view never before seen.
From Publishers Weekly
Virtually every clichΓ© in every noirish police melodrama ever filmed by Hollywood turns out to be the God's-honest truth, to judge by this pulpy memoir. Cea, a television writer who recently sold three network pilots, chronicles his former career as a NYPD officer during the 1980s, from his bushy-tailed academy stint to his soul-destroying ordeal in the ''Badlands'' of Brooklyn. His beat is a Dantean landscape populated by-in order of decreasing humanity-whores, crackheads, junkyard dogs, ''scumbag'' defense attorneys and Internal Affairs desk-jockeys who don't understand that you can't play by the rules when you're on the street. Cea soon finds himself ''test-i-lying'' to prevent perps from being sprung on technicalities and plying snitches with stolen heroin in exchange for information. The oft-scripted existential dilemma of law enforcement-'''to fight them, you have to BECOME THEM!'''-duly wrecks his marriage and sends him into a funk of paranoia and rage. Cea apparently has an exact recall of events and conversations from decades ago, but the lavish detail piles up more stereotype than gritty verisimilitude. He faithfully quotes every ''yo'' and ''bitch'' uttered by the trash-talking ghetto poets he encounters and arrests, and his reconstructions of his own lurid arias to the nihilistic honor of cops-'''a filthy toilet bowl full of maggots is what this city is....and the only ones who stand between the babies and the furnace are saps like me! ME!'''-go on for pages. Somewhere in here there's an intriguing account of gradual corruption and the weird psychological dynamic between cops and criminals, but it's buried beneath a hackneyed, overwrought screenplay-in-waiting.
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From Booklist
When he retired from the NYPD, the author was the fifth-most-decorated officer in the department's history. And he was still only in his early thirties. So why would an ambitious, aggressive, highly respected detective end his career so early? Because, like others before him, Cea had fought bitter battles with his own conscience over the way he did his job. The book explores one of a police officer's toughest dilemmas: When and how much is it necessary to bend the rules in order to catch the bad guys? This isn't a story of police corruption in the manner of Serpico or Prince of the City. This one is about moral corruption, about one man's personal descent into dishonesty. There is much to learn from Cea's frank and sometimes shocking memoir, which is written in honest, gritty prose. This may gather the kind of off-the-book-pages coverage necessary to reach a mass audience, but its strongest appeal will be to aficionados of true-crime and cop nonfiction. David Pitt
Copyright Β© American Library Association. All rights reserved
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