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Gangland Wire

How to Research and Write Crime Fiction

Gangland Wire

Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 623 Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Intelligence detective Gary Jenkins interviews a mystery and thriller fiction writer, Jode Millman about her research and writing process. In Ms. Millman’s recent thriller, Hooker Avenue, she was inspired by a true crime involving sex workers in the Hudson Valley of New York. She also had a personal connection to those crimes. During the late 1990s, eight sex workers disappeared from the mean streets of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and for two years, the police took little action to locate them. Finally, in September 1998, after one woman escaped from the attacker’s clutches, the john, Kendall Francois, admitted to killing the women, and he buried them in his home. The perpetrator had solicited the women on the steps of Ms. Millman’s law office. Naturally, these heinous crimes and the lost lives of the victims haunted her. I wanted to discover whether Hollywood has perpetuated the early 20th Century stereotype of sex workers as boozy, broke, and burned out. She wanted to break through the Hollywood image of a sex worker and depict these women in their true form. Support the Podcast Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwireClick here to “buy me a cup of coffee” To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup  click here To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here.  To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos. To subscribe on iTunes click here, please give me a review and help others find the podcast.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome all you wiretappers back here in the studio of Gangland Wire.

0:03.3

I have a really interesting, a little bit different show.

0:05.7

You know, we usually deal with organized crime.

0:07.8

Well, this is this isn't your mafia style organized crime, but it's a crime.

0:14.5

We're talking to talk about a crime or series of crimes that I know I worked on myself as part of a surveillance team and doing some

0:22.6

investigation of.

0:23.8

And it's the serial killings of at risk vulnerable women and primarily street prostitutes

0:31.0

or other women who are drug addicts and on the streets a lot.

0:34.9

And they're always at risk that put themselves in bad situations

0:38.4

and there's bad people out there that that will victimize them and get away with it because

0:44.6

they're kind of like in society a little bit like throwaway people and so when I learned about

0:50.2

Jody's book, Hooker Avenue, there it is, folks, and you can see, you see her.

0:55.0

Jody, hey, how you doing? Good to have you here. Hey, Gary, how are you? Thanks for having me on the show.

0:59.5

I always feel funny talking about somebody or talking about what I'm doing, and you just sit there,

1:04.1

you know, the guest, you're just sitting there watching. But anyhow, so it's great to have you here. What I want to know about, of course, is we talked before is about how you learned about the police procedures.

1:14.4

And when you wrote that book, because I know you tried to get it accurate.

1:18.0

I've read enough of that to know that you try real hard to get the police procedures accurate.

1:22.6

And the community reaction to these kinds of series of crimes.

1:26.6

And it's always interesting, I think. And so I just

1:30.0

like to have interesting shows about crime and not always the mafia. So, Joni, tell us a little bit about

1:36.5

how you got to write Hooker Avenue. Where did you come from? I look at your career and it's, it's,

1:42.8

you're a Renaissance woman. So tell us about that.

...

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