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In 1992, a number of Massachusetts police agencies were merged to form the
Massachusetts Department of State Police. Among the former agencies is the Metropolitan
District Commission’s Police Department (MDC). But, in 1980, when six men
dynamited their way into a bank in Medford, Massachusetts, the MDC was an active police department. Besides using dynamite to access the vault and getting away with an estimate $25 million in cash, diamonds
and gold, what makes this bank heist most unusual is that three of the robbers were police officers, including MDC Captain
Gerald Clemente.
While in prison for the robbery, Gerald Clemente penned The Cops are Robbers. In addition to giving the details of the robbery, Gerald Clemente tells how drugs,
gambling and greed exposed the near-perfect crime. Additionally, the book covers
other areas of police corruption such as “supervisors selling answers to exams to a large number of cops so they could
"buy" their promotion for $3,000, instead of earning it by studying.”
One reader of The Cops
Are Robbers: A Convicted Cop's True Story of Police Corruption said, “When I first picked this book
up I thought it would offer insight into the dark world of police corruption. Well, I was wrong. This book only shows what
one individual's thoughts and actions were at the time of their crimes. This book could have been excellent had it showed
how corruption exists inside a police force in general. instead the author chose to write from an individual standpoint.”
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Publisher’s Weekly said of The
Cops Are Robbers: A Convicted Cop's True Story of Police Corruption, “Like the proverbial hooker who
cries rape, Clemente, a bent cop, voices protest: he was not accorded the deference due an officer during investigations into
allegations linking him to a bank heist but, rather, was treated as a suspect. On the job he himself was always humane, an
attribute he stresses perhaps to temper his admission of personal corruption and which also may underpin his charge that corruption
is indigenous to law enforcement. One year into his 30-year sentence for robbing a bank in his Massachusetts hometown of Medford
in 1980and while awaiting trial for a scam involving civil service exams this former police lieutenant here throws himself
on the reader's sympathy, aided by Stevens, a book editor, with arguments that his five brethren in the robbery, two of
them junkies, turned out to be less than honorable, and that his mistress, a "manipulator" who testified against
him, played him for a "sucker." Clemente's wife and son have only cameo roles in his memoir, the roles one senses
they are assigned in his life as well.”
About
the Metropolitan District Commission’s Police Department In 1992, a number of Massachusetts police agencies were merged to form the Massachusetts Department of
State Police. Among the former agencies is the Metropolitan District Commission’s Police Department
(MDC).
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