The Firestone Syndrome

The experience and trials I faced as a young cop in Los Angeles during the 60's and 70's at the notorious Los Angeles County Firestone Sheriff's Station led me to write this book. It is a novel based on an historical era and times, and it is the reader's prerogative to determine if this could happen anywhere at anytime.

This story is a hard, realistic, intense and sometimes sadly humorous look at street cops and the inside politics of the largest sheriff's department in the world. It follows an idealistic young deputy as he struggles with those politics and simultaneously battles what he perceives to be his own inability to use the lethal force that would gain him entrance into the "in" group.

My objective was to depict how power, control and money play an important part in major law enforcement departments, regardless of the idealistic virtues taught in academy courses. I wanted also to show how all-powerful "information" is used and misused to gain rank, wield power and sometimes destroy lives.