Inspiration for THE FRIENDSHIP OF CRIMINALS
By Robert Glinski
In the summer of ’93, I moved to Philadelphia to begin my first year of law school. Forty-eight hours after signing my lease, a full-scale mob war broke out a few blocks from my apartment. The city – doing its best imitation of a Scorsese film set - was instantly electrified with shoot-outs, bombings, chalk outlines, and police press conferences.
For a 22 year-old kid from the Midwest, I was hooked.
Waiting for the school year to start, my daily routine amounted to physically tracking down all the mob locations and sites mentioned in the morning’s newspaper. That summer and fall – with a street map torn from a phone book - I quite literally learned my new city and its unique style of crime one footstep at a time.
For the next three years, I read everything written about Philly’s fascinating underworld, even taking a semester-long clinical with the Assistant US Attorney who’d led the most successful prosecution of the mob in fifty years. After graduating I was hired by one of Philly’s top defense attorneys and spent the next decade trying a wide-range of cases, some for the citizens of Port Richmond - the neighborhood highlighted in my book.
The characters from the city's neighborhoods – as well as the lawyers who mentored me along the way - were as fascinating as the trials themselves. One client in particular inspired THE FRIENDSHIP OF CRIMINALS when he told me the story of a real-life mobster demanding he and his neighborhood pay a street tax. I’ve never forgotten his response – “We told them to come get it.”
I held onto this story for years – searching for the right way to incorporate it into a novel – when I came across a newspaper article detailing a well-coordinated truck robbery of pharmaceutical drugs. I immediately realized the theft of a high-end, high-demand drug was the perfect opportunity to fuse together all the rich Philadelphia settings, rivalries, alliances, traditions, and characters I’d been soaking in since my first days in the city.
By Robert Glinski
In the summer of ’93, I moved to Philadelphia to begin my first year of law school. Forty-eight hours after signing my lease, a full-scale mob war broke out a few blocks from my apartment. The city – doing its best imitation of a Scorsese film set - was instantly electrified with shoot-outs, bombings, chalk outlines, and police press conferences.
For a 22 year-old kid from the Midwest, I was hooked.
Waiting for the school year to start, my daily routine amounted to physically tracking down all the mob locations and sites mentioned in the morning’s newspaper. That summer and fall – with a street map torn from a phone book - I quite literally learned my new city and its unique style of crime one footstep at a time.
For the next three years, I read everything written about Philly’s fascinating underworld, even taking a semester-long clinical with the Assistant US Attorney who’d led the most successful prosecution of the mob in fifty years. After graduating I was hired by one of Philly’s top defense attorneys and spent the next decade trying a wide-range of cases, some for the citizens of Port Richmond - the neighborhood highlighted in my book.
The characters from the city's neighborhoods – as well as the lawyers who mentored me along the way - were as fascinating as the trials themselves. One client in particular inspired THE FRIENDSHIP OF CRIMINALS when he told me the story of a real-life mobster demanding he and his neighborhood pay a street tax. I’ve never forgotten his response – “We told them to come get it.”
I held onto this story for years – searching for the right way to incorporate it into a novel – when I came across a newspaper article detailing a well-coordinated truck robbery of pharmaceutical drugs. I immediately realized the theft of a high-end, high-demand drug was the perfect opportunity to fuse together all the rich Philadelphia settings, rivalries, alliances, traditions, and characters I’d been soaking in since my first days in the city.