Vandal Squad: Inside the New York City Transit Police Department, 1984-2004
Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: Graffiti writers have become a pop culture fixture, and their outlaw mystique has helped spark a cottage industry of books devoted to their work. But as Robert DeNiro said inHeat, "There is a flip side to that coin." InVandal Squad, Bronx-born Joseph Rivera chronicles his cat-and-mouse police work putting away many of the perps on New York City's Top 40 Vandal List: "Just seeing their faces when they turned and realized they were about to get bagged was priceless." InWarriors-era '70s New York, subway trains became a playground for vandals, and in 1980 the New York City Transit Police Vandal Squad was formed to combat these attacks with creative undercover work. Rivera's voice is authentically gruff in a just-the-facts-please style, but many surprises pop up throughout (he enlisted a popular tagger to design the logo for the Vandal Squad softball team jerseys). Rivera's work, coupled with Rudy Guiliani's zero-tolerance "Quality of Life" regime in the '90s, cleaned up (or as some might argue, removed character from) the subways and city streets, butVandal Squadtakes you back to a much grittier Manhattan.--Brad Thomas Parsons