Blue on Blue ─ An Insider's Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops

This eye-opening, richly authentic memoir by the longest serving chief of NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau reveals what it’s like to expose and put away the bad cops—so that they won’t tarnish the majority who wear the uniform.

Charles Campisi headed the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau from 1996 through 2014, gaining a reputation as hard-nosed and incorruptible. During Campisi’s years at IAB, the number of New Yorkers shot by cops every year and the number of cops failing integrity tests plummeted. But to achieve those exemplary results, Campisi had to triple IAB’s staff, hire the very best detectives, and put the word out that corrupt cops wouldn’t be tolerated.

In Blue on Blue, Campisi brings us into the real world of cops: We listen in on wiretaps. We experience the rush of exposing those who’ve betrayed their oath. We learn of new threats to the force. We also see the investigations that stretched IAB’s capacities in the 1990s: from the choking death of Anthony Baez to the killing of Amadou Diallo, who was shot nineteen times by police. Along the way, we obtain fascinating glimpses of the mayors and police officials Campisi served under, from Rudy Guliani, Mike Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio to Howard Safir, Bernard Kerik, Ray Kelly, and Bill Bratton.

The most authentic, deep-textured portrait of life inside the NYPD since Ed Conlon’s Blue Blood, Campisi’s story describes what it’s like to fulfill a childhood dream of joining the world’s largest police force, only to spend almost half of his career putting bad cops behind bars. “A compelling, fascinating, and often harrowing read…A riveting history, wonderful for general readers and essential for all modern police forces to study and absorb” (Caleb Carr, author of The Alienist).

Charles Campisi was Chief of the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau from 1996 to 2014. In his years on the job he developed model strategies for investigating corruption, which have been adopted by law enforcement agencies across the US and abroad. A graduate of the FBI National Academy and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, he currently works as a Senior VP at the private investigation firm Cyber Diligence. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York.

Gordon Dillow has been a reporter, columnist, and war correspondent for more than thirty years. He has written for a number of newspapers, including the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Times, and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and is the author of Fire in the Sky and coauthor of Where the Money Is, Uppity, and Blue on Blue. He lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.