Good Fellas: On Philip Gourevitch's "A Cold Case"
On February 18, 1970, a small-time hood named Frank Koehler got into an alcohol-fuelled altercation with two nightclub proprietors, Rich Glennon and Pete McGinn, outside a West Side bar called Channel Seven. Later the same evening, Koehler persuaded Glennon to bring him to McGinn's nearby apartment so that they could patch things up 'like gentlemen.' Once inside Koehler shot both men to death and then walked out of the apartment building and onto Fifty-fifth street. He was not seen again for twenty-seven years.
A Cold Case is reporter Philip Gourevitch's masterful 2001 telling of the Koehler affair and of the dogged investigative work led by then-assistant district attorney Andy Rosenzweig to re-open the case and bring Koehler to justice. This is crime writing at its absolute zenith -- dry, precise, insightful -- and the result is like if you took one of those dippy TV-procedural shows and somehow exploded it into a higher dimension of remorseless psychological realism and cold-as-concrete poetry. An outstanding piece of research and writing; a classic of the genre.