I looked up what I guessed at earlier: John Katzenbach wrote
In the Heat of the Summer, which was made into the movie The
Mean Season with Kurt Russell (not Jeff Bridges, but I've
always had a theory these two are the same person).
I also thought of another very good hardboiled journalist
book, J.J. Maloney's I Speak for the Dead (his prison novel,
The Chain, is also very good, rivals Edward Bunker's work).
Turns out he knew of what he spoke, both as a crime reporter
and as a felon. I found this fascinating obit on the internet
Crime Magazine he launched
(crimemagazine.com/j-j.htm), which has links to the
investigative articles mentioned:
J. J. Maloney, an award-winning journalist and founder and
editor of Crime Magazine, passed away December 31, 1999, at
his mother's home in Webster Groves, Mo. He was 59. Mr.
Maloney, who lived in Kansas City, had been visiting his
mother for the holidays. He suffered from acute bronchial
congestion and had recently undergone a bout with pneumonia.
He was an inveterate smoker. Mr. Maloney launched Crime
Magazine, an Internet publication, on October 26, 1998. He
described the site (www.crimemagazine.com) as "an
encyclopedia of crime: from prisons and parole to serial
killers and assassinations, books and movies to unsolved
murders and fugitives, from gangsters to cops." Crime
Magazine is one of the Internet's most frequently visited
sites about true crime. The site has garnered seven Internet
awards, including the Medaille d'Or for Web Site Excellence
and the Gold Star for Outstanding Quality from Juno
Enterprises. In addition, Mr. Maloney was crime editor for
ODP, an Internet clearinghouse. Born in St. Louis in 1940,
Mr. Maloney spent 3 1/2 years in reform schools and 13 years
in prison, serving four life sentences for a murder and armed
robbery he committed at age 19. As a convict, Mr. Maloney
educated himself and became an artist, poet and eventually a
book reviewer for the Kansas City Star. In 1972 he was
paroled and began work the next day as a reporter for the
Kansas City Star. By January of 1973, Mr. Maloney had been
hired full-time as a reporter for The Star. The prison series
he co-authored with Harry Jones, Jr., won the American Bar
Association's Silver Gavel, and the Kansas Bar/Media Award.
By 1977, Mr. Maloney was one of the newspaper's top
investigative reporters, and did most of the paper's coverage
of the Mafia's infiltration of River Quay.
"When The Kansas City Star hired J. J. Maloney as a reporter
in 1972, it hired more than a convicted murderer with
literary talent. It hired a lightning rod," said Arthur
Brisbane, then the editor and now the publisher of The Star,
upon the publication in 1992 of Mr. Maloney's book The
Pariah's Handbook, A Literary Guide to the Underworld.
"For six years, Maloney managed to be where the fire and
thunder raged. Sometimes he sparked trouble himself. He was a
controversial figure who battled crooks and editors, not
necessarily in that order. He also inspired loyalty in some,
who saw in him the stuff of greatness," Brisbane said. In
early 1980, Mr. Maloney, as a reporter for The Register in
Orange County, Calif., broke the Freeway Killer Story and
coined the phrase
"Freeway Killer." At one point the Los Angeles County
Sheriff's Department publicly said the Freeway Killer was a
figment of The Register's imagination. William Bonin was
subsequently arrested, convicted of 14 murders, and executed
in early 1996. After Bonin's arrest, Maloney went on
television and revealed the existence of a second freeway
killer and that man, Randy Craft, is presently awaiting
execution in California. Mr. Maloney had two stints as editor
of the New Times, an alternative newspaper in Kansas City
that ceased publishing at the end of October 1997. From
September 1991 through December 1993, he was the paper's
first editor. After working five years as a paralegal and
investigator for Willard Bunch, a criminal defense attorney,
Mr. Maloney returned to the New Times in May of 1997 to write
a two-part investigative report based on his final case with
Mr. Bunch. In the understated, straight-forward,
piston-driving prose that distinguished his writing from as
far back as his prison days, he recounted in scrupulous
detail how an ATF agent and an assistant U.S. attorney
conspired to frame five innocent people in the deaths of six
Kansas City firefighters tragically killed in 1988. The
articles further revealed the charade of a trial a U.S.
District judge presided over that culminated in the
convictions of all five defendants, and their subsequent
sentencing to life in prison without the possibility of
parole. For these articles, the Missouri Bar Association
awarded Mr. Maloney its "Excellence in Legal Journalism
Award." The complete text of these articles, along with many
other of Mr. Maloney's articles and essays, is available on
this web site. In the course of working for The Kansas City
Star and The Register in Orange County, Mr. Maloney was
nominated for the Pulitzer Prize five times. He won the
American Bar Association's highest award, The Silver Gavel,
and he was the winner of the American Society of Newspaper
Publishers award for the Best Investigative Story. Mr.
Maloney is the author of two novels, I Speak for the Dead
(1982) and The Chain (1986) and a volume of poetry, Beyond
the Wall (1973). He is survived by his mother, Bernice Siebel
of Webster Groves, Mo., who visited her son in prison every
month without fail and who wrote him a letter every single
day he was incarcerated. Mr. Maloney was buried in Sunset
Cemetery in Afton, Mo.
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