Retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins sits down with former NYPD officer Jimmy Dennedy and NYC Brooklyn prosecutor Michael Vecchione for a gripping discussion on violent crime, justice, and redemption.

Jimmy recounts the shocking murder of NYPD officers Rocco Laurie and Gregory Foster by the Black Liberation Army, while Michael reveals the challenges of prosecuting those responsible.
The conversation then shifts to something unexpected—redemption. After retiring, Jimmy began working in prison ministry, where he witnessed firsthand how even hardened criminals, including mobsters, can change their lives.

This episode dives deep into:
The reality of cop killings in New York City
The struggle to prosecute violent offenders
Inside stories from mob cases
Redemption and transformation inside prisons

Get the book Hard Guys Cry.

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[0:00] Hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in studio, Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective and now turned podcaster. And I have another retired cop here on the show, Jimmy Dennedy. Jimmy, I tell you what, I had it down, Dennedy, like Kennedy. And our friend who’s been on here several times, Michael Vecchione. Welcome, Michael. Welcome, Jimmy. Thank you very much for having us, Gary. Thank you. All right. Michael has several books out there. He’s, he’s prosecuted the mob. That’s how I got onto him. He prosecuted the, he had something to do with the mob cops, Louis Eppolito. And I can’t remember exactly now. I should have made a note on that, Michael. What was the name of that book?

[0:48] The name of the book? Friends of the Family. Friends of the Family. Is that those two New York PD coppers that were in the pay of? Louis Eppolito and Louis Eppolito was one of the cops. And you know what, Gary? during the, when Jimmy, when you talk to Jimmy, Jimmy has a kind of a, an odd situation regarding Louie Eppolito. And, and it’s a good story. I think he should tell you, tell your listeners. All right. Great. We look forward to that, Jimmy and Jimmy Denity, who was a New York city policeman. And he has a book, tough dies to cry. Hard guys cry. Let me do that over again. Yeah. I said, I left, I had it written down here and he had Jimmy Denity is here with us. He is a retired New York City copper, and he has a book, Hard Guy’s Cry. So welcome, Jimmy.

[1:34] Good morning. Thank you very much for having me. All right, Michael, you and Jimmy, did you guys work together a little bit on the job? Did you know each other back then? Yeah, we certainly did. We’ve probably known each other now for maybe 45 or more years. I got to know Jimmy because I got assigned a case involving, unfortunately, the death, the murder of two New York City police officers who were assigned to Jimmy’s precinct at the time in Bed-Stuy. And it was a case that had been tried twice before I got it. And there were hung juries in both of the cases. And the DA at that point was going to just simply decide to not prosecute it anymore. And the head of the policeman’s union went to the DA, the district attorney, and said, listen, just give it one more shot. So I was at the time the head of a group called the Major Offense Bureau in the Brooklyn DA’s office. And I got, I’ll never forget this. I was sitting at my desk and the boss of the unit, the bureau that I was part of, came into my office and said, come with me. We’ll go to see the DA.

[2:41] I didn’t know. I thought maybe I was in trouble for some reason, but I sat down and he said, listen, I want to give you one more shot. I want to take this case to trial one more time and you are the guy that we want to do it. So I was happy to do it. I tried a lot of cases by that point. And, and the best part of the whole situation, Gary is I met Jimmy Danity. That was, he, we became fast friends and I got to tell you a little funny story. He had been involved in the two other trials.

[3:11] But when he sat down with me, the first thing he said to me was, or one of the first things was, do you eat lunch? I said, yeah, of course I eat lunch. Why? He said, the guy that tried the case before you and the one before him, they didn’t eat lunch. And by the time the afternoon came, their energy was all waned, had waned. And he said, so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to have lunch on your desk every time you come back for the lunch break from the trial. And he did. There was a sandwich waiting for me every day when I came back, and he is the guy that brought it to me. But before the trial, we went out. Me, Jimmy, and detective from the Homicide Bureau, who was assigned to the case.

[3:57] Tony Martin, went out to the scene. And again, another one of these scenes, which I’ll never forget. The scene was in the middle of Bed-Stuy on Troop Avenue. Jimmy, that was the, yeah.

[4:10] Willoughby and Troop. Willoughby and Troop. So we’re on the street and the three of us are standing there right on the sidewalk. And we look around and I said to Tony, did you hit every one of these buildings looking for witnesses? Because there was a problem with the case with the witnesses. One had died in a very strange way. And so he looked around I don’t know if you remember this, Jimmy And he pointed to a building Diagonally across from the spot Where the two cops were shot And he said, Mike We never went into that building, And Jimmy and Tony went into the building, canvassed it and came up with two new witnesses. And so it was a wonderful experience working with Jimmy. He was a hard worker. He really was tied to this case in the sense that these guys were his friends. They were two guys who were gunned down for really no reason by a member of the Black Liberation Army at the time who was part of the Attica riots here in New York. He was actually one of the guys who started the Attica riots in New York. And he was out and he was with another guy. And we believe that they were going to meet another one of their fellow.

[5:27] I don’t want to call them gang members, to set up a robbery. And that’s why they were in Brooklyn. And the case had so many ups and downs and twists and turns. And it was something which I obviously will never forget. But the best part about it, I’ll repeat myself, is that I met Jimmy Denity. And he and I have been friends from that point on until today. And so let me just get to the book because Hard Guy’s Cry to me was a labor of love. It really was. I got a call one afternoon and I’m sitting out on my deck and Jimmy calls me and we just got to talking and he asked me about doing a book about his life and his story. And I said, it’s great. There are lots of books out there about cops and street cops and what they’ve done on the street. He said, so he said, oh, but he started to now expand on it. And then he told me the second part of his career, which was the prison ministry in the federal prison and a state prison here in New York. And I said, Jimmy, you buried the lead. That’s the part of this book that I can sell to a publisher. Because Gary, you probably know this. You probably interviewed these guys who do books when they retire. This was just going to be one of those. Jimmy’s career on the street was terrific.

[6:47] The only problem was there are lots of guys who have books out there like that. So when he told me the story about his prison ministry, I was working at the time with a partner of mine, Jerry Schmetterer, who has now passed away. And we both talked about it and we said, this is definitely a story. This is definitely a book. And it’s been a long journey, Jim, until we got to this point. We’ve had COVID. We’ve had the Minneapolis, the guy in Minneapolis who was killed and agents saying to us, nobody wants to publish a book about a good cop. Nobody wants to do that. You can’t sell this until I didnR...