In an age of rampant corruption and violence, Richard "Bo" Dietl was the strongest cop on New York's meanest streets -- and he did things his way, no holds barred. In fifteen years he made over 1,400 felony arrests compared to the average cop's career total of 180. But after 75 medals and awards, and countless brushes with death, he broke the city's most notorious case -- the Harlem convent rape -- and faced a blue wall of police department resentments and politics. He knew his time was coming to an end. The Bo Dietl Story From his rookie days to the dangerous work on the police decoy unit to his moonlighting as a bodyguard for Arab sheiks, this is the true story of the maverick cop who made the busts, the headlines and the controversies. Now Bo Dietl tells what it's really like inside the raw and deadly world of a big-city cop -- and how one man became a legend from the station house to the streets. Bo Dietl is a former NYPD detective who started his own investigative and security firm, Beau Dietl Associates (BDA). He also started a production company after serving as executive producer for the major motion picture One Tough Cop . He regularly appears on various Fox News shows and has written two books. Follow him on Twitter: @BoDietl. Chapter One October 10, 1981 Ordinarily, you get blown down by the noise of a live stationhouse. Cops are just naturally loud. They walk like elephants, they bang things around, they yell instead of talk. It's the kind of place, if you wanna be heard, you gotta speak up. It's not like walking into a library. So I was a little surprised when I didn't hear the usual uproar when I came to work that night. I never knew that silence could be so loud. I was doing decoys out of the Two Five Precinct in East Harlem. This is a Saturday, which is my busy season. All the muggers will be out shopping for victims. My head is getting set like cement for sitting in some pissy doorway waiting for someone to attack me, which is what decoy duty is all about. Then I walk into this, this...I don't know what to make of it. Usually, you can hear the bitching a mile away. Especially on a Saturday. Prisoners are bitching about getting busted. Civilians are bitching about politicians and landlords. Cops are bitching about all the bitching. But not tonight. None of the sergeants were yelling for coffee. The prisoners were actually meek. The cops were quiet. It was like walking into a tomb. Bo Dietl, a veteran plainclothes police officer, made an educated guess. A cop's been shot. Nothing else could explain the reverential hush. "What's going on?" he asked one of the pale detectives. The detective hesitated, weighing whether or not to answer. Then he remembered that Bo was a cop, a member of the family, and replied: "They raped a nun." I know that I felt my knees get soft. It was a blow. No doubt about it. Some things you don't expect. Even if you've seen everything. Even if you're made of stone. Even if you expect it. I was shocked. Then I thought what everybody thought: Nothing is sacred. "From the convent?" asked Bo. The detective nodded. "They raped her inside." Our Lady of Mount Carmel Convent stood like an unsteady high-wire walker on 116th Street and an avenue called Pleasant. It teetered on the line where the last defiant Italians waited to be pushed into the suburbs by the approaching blacks and Hispanics. The holdouts accepted the inevitability of their dislocation with a mixture of fatalism and rage. One by one, the outposts fell. And the small flock of nuns who lived in such open innocence among them were like symbols of their own vulnerability. "Inside the convent?" asked Bo. "Inside," replied the detective. Not that they hadn't all feared just that. Not that they hadn't been listening with some third ear for that bulletin, for that social rumble that would signal a final shifting of the ground. Bo and his partner, Detective Tommy Colleran (known for sufficient cause as "Cowboy"), jumped into their unmarked cruiser and ran the lights to the brick convent. It was ten blocks, and Bo turned on the siren and smacked the magnetic dome light on the roof as if he were on a hot run, as if there were still some chance to save the nun. At the convent, the police cars with their flashing lights were scattered like rage. A street full of blinking fists. It was grim. Not one break in the action. You know, one of the things cops do, we have a very soothing influence on a crime scene. Someone's in charge. You can relax. It's safe. But not here. The tension was still very high. Here, it's like we were the victims. Bo spotted an old friend, Pete Christianson, taking charge. They had gone through the Police Academy together more than a decade ago. Their careers had taken different turns, but going through the academy together remains an old school tie. Now Christianson was a detective working in the Manhattan Sex Crimes Unit, already, planting the flag of the unit ov