ESCAPING THE KILL ZONE

A retired cop takes on killers, con artists, and pornographers in Powell’s action-packed memoir.

The author revisits his career in law enforcement, security, and investigations, starting with his stint in the Los Angeles Police Department during the 1970s as a patrolman and operative in the plain-clothes Zebra unit—he saw everything from burglaries to gang shootouts to the grisly rape and murder of a young boy, which he traced to a teenaged serial killer. At the age of 28, he became a bodyguard for Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt; he depicts the porn mogul, who used a wheelchair after being injured by a sniper’s bullet, as a paranoid but roguishly charming drug addict, and his security detail as a snake pit of intrigue. (He alleges that Flynt’s security chief plotted to kill him and was responsible for an arson attack on his house after he quit.) Powell then became a private investigator taking oddball cases. These included an assignment from Flynt’s rival, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, to dig up evidence that Flynt bribed a judge to win a favorable decision in Guccione’s libel suit against him; the haunting murder of a young mother found bludgeoned to death in a Louisiana swamp; and a picaresque adventure infiltrating a boiler-room operation, run by a mobster called Fat Tony, that sold shoddy products under counterfeited brand names over the phone. The author paints a vivid portrait of policing and of himself as an aggressive cop who loved the adrenaline—he once pursued a burglar onto an 18-inch-wide high-rise ledge—but was driven by the horrors he witnessed to booze, pills, and therapy. His vigorous, evocative prose blends colorful character sketches and investigative savvy (“because a screwdriver was used to stab Catherine in the chest seventeen times, and not a knife or another sharp-bladed weapon, I was leaning toward the reasoning that this killing was not premeditated”) with hair-raising, cinematic tension (“I reached out to feel the man’s carotid artery, when suddenly a shadow came over me from behind and in a calm voice said, ‘Put down your gun, or I swear to God I will kill this baby!’ ”). The result is a captivating read.

A rousing true-life crime saga delivered with old-school grit and panache.