I'm Roberta Glass and you're listening to my True Crime Report.

Today I have a very special guest on Martin Pride.

He is a writer and police officer from Chicago and he's also the second vice president of the Chicago

Fraternal Order of Police.

He is also the author of three books, The Wagon and

Other Stories from the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns. He also writes a fantastic

blog that you can find at www.fop7blog.org, where he counters the misinformation and phony narratives prevalent in Chicago's

true crime reporting. That blog is an invaluable source of information for this podcast.

I'm so pleased he agreed to come on this show. Welcome Martin Pride. So you became a cop late in

life. What made you want to become a cop in your mid-30s? Well, I needed a job. I'd been in the

service industry. I had wanted to be a writer and I'd lived lived that sort of broke life, and I was tired of it.

I wanted to pinch a decent income.

I had met cops when I was a doorman who kind of put the bug in my ear.

I had been dealing with my parents with their declining years, so I just kind of wandered into it,

and I filled out the forms and took the tests and slowly moved my way into it.

You call Chicago a crooked city where only the sociopaths are free.

Why?

Well, you know, as a writer, I would consider myself a regional writer, and when you're a regional

writer, you try to get to the core of what makes that region, what it is. In Chicago, it's obviously

corruption. And I had spent much of my life looking at Chicago's corruption from different points

of view, different ways. As a writer, it never worked

until I discovered these murder cases. And when I saw the process by which convicted killers

...