What is it really like to police one of the most violent eras in American history — and then bring law and order to countries shattered by war?

In this powerful interview, former law enforcement officer and author Mike shares what it was like working the streets of New York City during the height of the crack epidemic — a time when violent crime surged and officers faced life-or-death decisions daily. But his career didn’t stop there.

Mike went on to help rebuild policing systems in war-torn nations where governments had collapsed, infrastructure was destroyed, and communities were struggling to survive. From responding to violent crime in NYC to training police forces overseas, this conversation reveals the realities of law enforcement that most people never see.

You’ll learn:

✔ What policing was REALLY like during the crack epidemic

✔ How extreme street experience prepares officers for global missions

✔ What happens when a country has no functioning police force

✔ The psychological toll of high-risk law enforcement

✔ Leadership lessons from chaos, conflict, and rebuilding order

✔ The biggest myths about policing — and the truth behind them

Whether you're interested in law enforcement, military experience, leadership under pressure, or real-world stories from dangerous environments, this episode delivers raw insight from someone who has lived it.

If you enjoy conversations about service, resilience, and the realities behind the badge, make sure to subscribe for more interviews with veterans, leaders, and professionals operating in high-stakes roles.

http://jbbyrnenypd.com

Mentioned in this episode:

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Hey, Mike.

How you doing, man?

Hey, Fine, thank you.

Good to see you, Don.

That's awesome.

Awesome, man.

So today we've got Mike, former law enforcement and fictional writer.

And I'm looking forward to it, man.

Couple topics that I am extremely interested in is crime and writing.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's right.

Give us a little bit of a background, man.

Where did you kind of grow up and what brought you into the law enforcement world?

I am from Long island, but my family is New York City based.

My father's from the Bronx, my mother's from Manhattan, and my older brother, my father, my uncle, my cousins were all New York City cops, and my brother, who became a lawyer, ended up becoming a Manhattan ada.

So, yeah, I mean, everybody in the family has.

Has kind of a police background or ADA law enforcement background, except for my.

Mom and, man, it almost sounds like Blue Bloods.

It's very similar to Blue Bloods.

Yeah, actually.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it wasn't.

That's not.

It's not based on my family, but it's.

It actually in real life, it's quite close.

So.

Yeah, it's a family tradition.

I was very happy to go on the police force.

It wasn't something I wanted to do my whole life.

Matter of fact, in college, I really didn't want to become a police officer.

And after I graduated, I was having difficulty finding a job, and I kind of eased into it.

And then once I got involved, I really enjoyed it.

I enjoyed the people and I enjoyed the work.

And so I ended up making a career out of it.

Okay.

I remember I was considering getting out of the military and the New York City Police Department, man, was going from post to post all through the United States recruiting law enforcement.

And I remember looking at the salaries and.

And everything else, and I was like, man, you know, six.

Six years on.

On the job and, and you're making like six figures.

And I'm like, wow.

You know, and then, then I looked at what the, you know, the average cost and the average salary was in New York City.

New York City is expensive.

Yeah, yeah.

We all had two jobs.

I did a lot of security on the side, and a lot of my colleagues were involved in security companies and things.

So it's.

Yeah, it's hard to make it in New York City on, On a civil servant salary.

Very expensive place.

Yeah, I, I bet.

You know, however, I think, you know, as far as somebody who is learning policing?

I would venture to guess that that would be a great area to, to learn it because you're going to see a lot of different things from little things all the way up to major stuff, you know, and hopefully as your, your knowledge base grows, then the severity of the, the problems, you know, and the complexion grows.

But, well, I'm an old timer.

88, 89 into the early 90s.

It was over 2,000 murders.

So it was a crazy place and a really, a fantastic place to learn the job.

And one of the things I discovered later on when I started doing international police work and police consulting.

New York City has the best police force in the world.

And it's, and it's actually for a bad reason.

If you're a police officer in Germany and you become a homicide investigator, they only have like 20, 30 homicides a year in the whole country.

You know, how many homicides are you going to do in Germany or, or England?

Great Britain?

They just, and someone like me coming up, I had a friend who came out of Narcotics.

He's got, he got his detective shield and he showed up at the squad and he had four homicides sitting on his desk.

You know, in Germany or Great Britain or some of these other Western European countries, you know, you would do 20 years of investigative work before you get one or two homicide cases.

So essentially we get good at it because we have so many of them.

We're just so good at it because, and I say we, I haven't been with NYPD in a long time, but we're good at it because we have a lot of crime and we learn.

And so we, we learn from all these, we learn from our mistakes.

We have a patrol guide, used to be a, about as thick as a Bible, and now it's almost two Bibles.

And essentially it's a lessons learned.

About more than half of that is these are very tragic things that happen.

And now here, here are the steps to avoid those tragic things.

So, so yeah, if you're talking about, you know, I went out, I made an arrest, two hours on the street.

I went to Times Square and I made an arrest.

I was on the street two hours.

Yeah, back then was crazy.

Now it's like Disney World, but, and I'm glad it's Disney World.

I don't want those days back.

Yeah, I think, I think that kind of goes with a Trend even in the, the military.

And our 1st Battalion, his 2nd Battalion had all deployed.

And I remember asking him, I said, you know, when are we going to get our chance?

You know, just eager to get into the fight.

And I remember him telling me, watch what you wish for because you might just get it.

And six years later, you know, I found myself saying, man, when is it somebody else's turn?

I am tired, you know, and I think it's the same way in the law enforcement world because a lot of guests that I came on, you know, they want that excitement and then mid career, ladder career, they're like, man, I really wish that the worst thing I had to deal with was a drunk kid.

Yeah, there is a, there are, there are, there is a lot of boredom involved, especially on patrol.

But if you're in a heavy precinct, you have these lulls and, and it can go for a whole shift.

Actually, back in those times it was rare that we go a whole shift, but you had something akin to what we call a quiet night.

And cops were very superstitious.

If you, if you got in a patrol car and said, oh, it's quiet tonight, people would get angry.

They would say, because as soon as they say that, the radio starts crackling and you're flying around and getting into all kinds of stuff.

But it was, it was a very busy time back then.

There was a lot of crime.

And I, I, I'm really glad that it's not that way anymore.

Really improve.

It's getting, it's getting bad again, but Nothing like that late 80s, early 90s era when I, when I came out of the academy and started doing patrol.

It was, it was an interesting place, you know, you learn fast.

Yeah, I bet, I bet.

You know, the other thing too, I think that type of what you see on the TVs, right.

And I know we're going to get into this when we dig into your book a little bit, but people grow up watching these, these cop shows and stuff like that and they think that's what it's like, you know, and they learn real quick that it's, it's nothing like that, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

I had, I had soldiers that told me they joined the military because they thought it was going to be like Call of Duty, like the video game Call of Duty.

And they learned real Quick.

It's not, you know, it's, it's hours and hours of boredom with minutes worth of excitement and adrenaline.

Okay, so you, I was gonna say I don't, I don't know the military experience.

I, I went directly from college into the police academy, so I, I didn't serve.

I wish I did.

But it's interesting that yeah, you guys kind of have the same thing where you know, I know you trained very hard for these, you know, short, shorter type of engagements.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not, you know, the people don't realize how much it takes out of you.

Just the adrenaline and your mind thought process and everything when, when it's over with.

It may have lasted 15, 20 minutes at the most, you know, but you, it's exhausting.

Like you played a full football game and, and I'm sure it's the same way in law enforcement.

You know, going to a domestic call and you're walking up to the door and then you hear gunshots or you hear somebody's screaming and your fight or flight just skyrocket.

Yeah.

You know, when the adrenaline gets going, decision making goes down and that's why I know, you know, the military is very strict on training and you relying on your training because when bullets start whizzing past your head, you, you have to rely on your training you don't want because your decision making is going to come way down, your heart rate's going to go up and there's all these physical, like Saving Private Ryan.

They, I thought they really captured it.

People getting tunnel, like the camera had tunnel vision trying to get it from the soldiers view.

Cops have that in the most, not, not like a combat.

I, I don't want to do, you know, comparisons between combat and police work.

I don't have the combat experience but a lot of the physical stresses I think are similar and it just happened a little bit differently.

And thankfully police are police.

We have a little different, a little bit different philosophy when it comes to particularly shooting combat type situations that we can take cover and wait for backup.

Like where the military, they train you to like move and you know, go after where the shots are coming from and, and you know, we, we, we have a, well, we're not really heavily equipped.

You know, I, I never, I never fired a long arm shotgun.

If you handed me a shotgun, I would probably end up like Tim Waltz trying to load it.

You know, I wouldn't know.

We didn't carry shotguns in New York.

I only, I only shot a 9 millimeter and revolver And I, I, I did get to play around in Kosovo.

Some of the military guys were at the range and they, uh, they let me shoot a machine gun.

It was very interesting for me.

But, but professionally, you know, we're not trained for the heavy stuff.

Yeah.

So that's why we kind of, you know, take cover and call in some emergency service or somebody else.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

You know, we, you're not any different than, than us.

We do the same thing.

You know, we may be carrying rifles and have a sidearm, but realistically, when you get into that situation and you find out, you know, hey, we're even evenly matched, you know, we got the same amount of number of people or we're way under staff for, for this assault, we're going to do the same thing.

We're going to seek cover and, and call in for reinforcements or artillery or you know, an aircraft, somebody, you know.

Yeah.

To help even these odds and put it in our favor.

You know, we're not dealing with, you know, award winning blue chip stocks and hopefully it's right.

It's you're either right and you live or you're wrong and you die.

So, you know, you want the odds in your favor as much as you can.

Absolutely.

So let me ask you this.

I know throughout your career you've done some training and you're on to bigger and better things.

Where did writing, where did your interest in writing come from?

I am from the Irish tradition, corner of the bar, storytelling.

That's where I'm coming from.

And I gave up drinking 11 years ago, so I'm not in the bar telling stories anymore.

And when you stop drinking, you have a lot more time on your hands.

And yeah, my hope was that I could take the old corner of the bar, Irish storytelling, and see if that could translate into a book.

And I also thought that the story about the police missions in Kosovo needed to be told.

And nobody really knows about it except for people, let's say, who were reading the newspaper at that time.

And so this was, this is 25 years ago, people who were following the news might have known that police officers from around the US were deployed to Bosnia.

They were deployed to Haiti, they were Indonesia, also East Timor.

And these are all United nations missions.

And I went on the one to Kosovo and we worked in Kosovo.

There were about 60 different countries there and several thousand police officers.

Because when that, when that conflict ended, the Serbian, mostly ethnic Serbian police, they left.

They, they, they went up north above what was then the administrative line.

It's now the country's border, and they had no police force.

So we didn't go in there as advisors in Bosnia.

We went there as advisors.

We were unarmed, and we just went in there to try and help the police have legitimacy and make sure that there wasn't any really bad decisions based on ethnicity with the policing.

And we were heavily involved with training.

But Kosovo, I wore a gun belt.

I made arrests in Kosovo, and we were enforcing the law.

But the problem in Kosovo was they had no judiciary.

They had really one.

One or two prisons that held a minimal number of people.

And so it was a really difficult place to walk into.

You have all these different officers from all over the world.

They have different levels of training.

We all spoke English, so English was.

I had a huge advantage on the UN Mission because the.

The.

The language for the mission is English.

And so I'm a native speaker, and I used to help out my.

My colleagues.

A lot of them spoke English really well, but.

And I speak Spanish, and I know how difficult it is to write in Spanish.

You know, it's a real different thing to hold a conversation Spanish and now have to write a report in Spanish would terrify me.

So when my colleagues had.

Write reports in English.

Give me that.

You know, in New York, we'd scratch these out, like, in five minutes.

You know, there's like, standard kind of language.

You know, perpetrator did, without permission or authority, take, you know, property.

And you're describing a robbery.

And then, you know, I mean, you just tell me what the crime is, and then I fill in time, date, and everything.

I can do it in five minutes.

And some of my colleagues would spend two hours, you know, trying to write that report.

Yeah, it was an advantage being a native English speaker.

Yeah.

You know, it's.

It's interesting that you said that.

I never really thought about that.

My time in Bosnia, like I said, I believe it was like 98 is.

Is when I was there, and 97, 98, somewhere around there.

But my whole job was I.

They were back to rebuilding, you know, so I went out every single day with our.

Our scout platoons, and we pulled over, had, you know, checks and.

And cars that came through it.

If they had the wrong license plates on them, you know, we would hook up to them, tell them to the local police or local military area, and then they would get a ticket and make them register their vehicle, because that's what we were doing.

We were trying to re.

Establish a government.

I never thought about the law enforcement side.

I was really young.

You know, I was probably 22, 21, 22.

Somewhere around there.

And it just never dawned on me that we were doing what a police force should be doing.

And we've never seen a police force, you know.

Yeah, but I don't think anybody understands what war does to countries.

It doesn't matter who wins or lose.

The one thing guaranteed is when it's over with, the country will become a third world country again.

Yeah, it was pretty chaotic there.

Yeah, it wasn't nice.

Kosovo, as far as police missions went.

The people who initially got there in 99 and.

A lot of the roads had military vehicles transiting them, and those roads just kind of buckled.

And so it was off roading everywhere you went.

And.

And we didn't have really much heat or electricity, was only a couple hours a day.

Running water was kind of a luxury if you had it.

So it was a hardship.

And then eventually things just improved and improved and later on.

It was a wonderful place.

Pristina and some of those surrounding cities, they're lovely now, but they were really tough places to live shortly after the war, especially, you know, you take electricity and water for granted, you know, until you don't have it.

I mean, you can do that when you're camping.

That's cool.

But not when you're living there for a year.

Yeah, yeah, we.

We drove from Hungary there.

And I can't remember the name of that.

That river that you crossed going from Croatia into Bosnia, but I remember when I crossed, man, it was.

It was.

If it's a big river, the Danube.

It is a big.

Yeah, the Danube runs all the way through that old region.

Yeah, that was.

I know the bridge there was.

Was blown as soon as the war.

Started from the Croatians.

Yeah, they wanted to spill over.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I remember when we came off that bridge to the left, it's weird the things that you remember, you know, but I remember seeing a school and all the 50 cal hole rounds that had been shot into that school, you know, and I remember seeing people burning their stuff in their yard to stay warm because like you said, electricity was, you know, not constant.

And man, the kids, you know, if it wasn't concrete or asphalt, they didn't walk on it.

You know, nobody walked into their.

Their yards because of all the land.

Yeah, heavily.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's crazy the things that we take for granted and don't even think about.

And.

Yeah, I just I don't remember seeing my times there.

I don't remember seeing law enforcement.

I don't remember seeing, like, medical ambulances and stuff like that.

And it's hard, the things.

Not many.

Yeah, there's same.

Yeah, I just, you know, there's still in the wall.

I. I was in Sarajevo about six months ago, and.

And it was my first time there.

I traveled a lot in former Yugoslavia, but Bosnia was one place.

I didn't really spend much time at all there.

And I got.

I got to go to Sarajevo for a week.

And I saw a lot of the bullet holes they left, I don't know, to memorialize the war there.

But, yeah, it was a beautiful city.

I mean, and it all.

It was more interesting to watch the news, the old clips of the shelling that was happening from the mountains, because they got these beautiful mountains kind of pressed up against the city.

And the Serbian.

Serbian forces were up in the mountains, and the city was under siege for a long period of time.

And it was pretty interesting, you know, to see where World War I started.

They have the.

The car that Archduke Ferdinand was driving in it.

They have it on a corner, or at least it's a replica, or.

I. I couldn't tell if it was the original or a replica, but that was kind of interesting.

And just seeing, you know, bullet holes and, you know that they were coming from pretty close by where the siege was occurring.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So, you know, I never got the opportunity to actually go to Kosovo.

I know people that.

That went to some of those areas.

What was it about the law enforcement there that made you want to kind of help tell their story?

Well, we created a police force from scratch.

I mean, they had no police force, and the internationals came in, and the US probably had the most influence in setting up the police academy, but we essentially trained up a police force.

And when I arrived, probably the first graduating class from the police academy were coming out onto the streets.

And so I was a field training officer in a town called Lippion, which is just south of Pristina.

And.

But what I discussed earlier, it was hard to be a field training officer there because Kosovo didn't have much crime at all.

They had really big.

And.

And people get a little sensitive up there about the using the word terrorism.

But.

But they.

They had to go.

The Serbs, they.

They had horrible things happen both in Bosnia and in Kosovo with these paramilitaries.

They.

They let these paramilitaries loose.

They wreaked havoc.

And then after the war was over, I was there for the payback.

So when people read the book, my hope is that people aren't saying, oh, you're.

You're showing only what bad things the Albanians did.

And they, they were the victims before that time.

But that's what I was there for, because it was the payback.

The Serpent Forces, the Yugoslav army went in.

They allowed these paramilitaries to go in and commit atrocities all over the country.

When they pulled back and the police force pulled back, I come in as a police officer.

My colleagues are from Austria, Egypt, Jordan, Finland, Fiji.

I kid you not.

We had two guys from Fiji.

Yeah, Northern Irish, 6 Royal Ulster Constabulary guys from Northern Ireland.

Then there's some kind of interesting interaction in the book because I'm an Irish Catholic.

You know, my, my origin is Irish Catholic.

And these guys are, you know, Belfast Northern Irish Protestants.

And I, I had a great.

I had a great time working with them, actually.

There was like seven of them.

A couple of them were pretty bigoted, actually, and I, I that in the book.

But the other guys, you know, they were fantastic and really, really good cops too.

They were tough guys.

They were really tough.

Yeah, we get riots there.

So we, you know, who better to do riots with than Royal Ulster Constabulary guys?

You know, we, they really, they liked riots.

It's.

It was, you know, what.

And something I mentioned in the book, like, we knew a riot was going to happen, and these guys are like, oh, let's, you know, let's go.

You know, they were saying, I don't even want to go to a ride, man.

You know, because I'm duty bound.

You know, I'll go.

It's not going to make my week, you know, so that was fun aspect.

The international officers there.

I had to.

And the funny thing about the United nations, they always put the.

This.

I don't know how they came up with this, but they would find someone who really spoke English very poorly and put them on the radio.

So our radio was a lot of fun.

You know, we had a Jordanian officer and he would say, oh, habibi.

He would say, you cannot imagine.

So he actually, he pressed.

He pressed the mic.

So you hear him press the mic and then he go.

And you wait for the Excel, because he's gonna take a drag.

My friend, you cannot imagine.

We have a problem.

You go to nick7 and there's a problem there, and you go there and you kick them on the radio and you.

And you kick them.

Yeah, okay.

You're like, we don't.

The guy was a great guy.

It was just a blast he said, yeah, it was funny because we would mix our lingo.

Like the, the Irish, the Northern Irish guys had this.

They, they would say, you cheeky bastards or you cheeky.

You know, cheeky was the word that they used and sake was another.

Like they had this terminology.

Like, other people would adopt it.

And like my, my friend from Jordan who was on the radio, he'd say, my friend, you go and you kick these cheeky bastards.

You know, like the Northern Irish.

So the Northern Irish guy, they describe people as Muppets.

You know, these Muppets don't know what they're doing.

You know, I came away from there calling people Muppets.

And the one, I can imagine.

Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.

I'd say I could imagine that, you know, you guys and, and Irish are looking at some of these other officers and just shaking their head because, because there has to be plenty of crime in Ireland too, you know.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's not a, that's not.

They didn't grow up soft in, in.

Ireland and No, no tough guys.

And, and I had a really good time with them back then.

I was drinking still, so we, we would go out the drinks and, and, and working with them was a pleasure.

I thought, I thought the Finns were, were great because the Finnish battalion had by area Olympian and they were a little bit strange.

The way they talk was very interesting because I don't.

Have you ever heard of Finnish person speaking Finnish in Chinese?

They got like, like one of the, my unfortunate.

I don't know if it's a claim to fame.

I, I, I gave them the nickname the Ducks because they sell when they talk.

And, and so I heard one of my friends like, yeah, we got to go tell the ducks that, you know, and he means the finish, you know, but they were good sports because they know that we were goofing on them about their just strange kind of, it's not even an accident language.

And they were, they were, they were very nice.

They let us go into their cafeteria, into their mess hall, and they had these saunas.

Like, the sauna is a big thing with the fins.

And they let a lot of us use the saunas.

They let us use their weight room.

So I, I was happy that we had Finnish battalion working our area.

That's who we had a call.

If we had some trouble that got really big, we would call on Finnish battalion to come.

I would prefer to be in the American sector.

And in the book I, I discussed that where my protagonist really wants to go to Jalon because they have, they have a PX there that's the size of Walmart steel.

And it's just you.

And you got, at that time was the big red one.

If you, if you call for help, the big red one is coming, you know, and, and that's a good feeling because in other places you call for help, the, the Italians or the French, they might want to finish their lunch before they get in their vehicles to go help you, you know, so.

Oh, I can't even imagine relying on the French.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, they were, they were up in North Mitchevice.

They, they were in a pretty tough part of the country because North Mitrovica, it was predominantly Serbian and on the other side of the Ibar river was Albanian.

And they had a bridge that connected it.

And it was just trouble there all the time.

It was a real.

That was a really difficult place to work.

I worked in the second most difficult place.

Well, Lipia, because Libyan was mixed.

It was, it was a Serbian, mostly Serbian town.

And, but the village, it was surrounded by big villages.

I shouldn't say big village.

They look like small villages, but there's a lot of people living there.

And traditionally Albanian households, they have large families and they admit they live in compounds.

So I remember going to a job and.

And there's like a high wall and you slide open and I saw dozens of kids and they were like, yeah, you know, that's, that's just two families living there, two brothers.

They have like a compound.

So there's a lot of.

There was the Albanians out, maybe outnumbered the Serbians in Lithium, but they were all in the villages around it.

And so that's where the friction was.

And then north and South Mitsubisha, there was a lot of friction between the ethnicities.

But let's, let's dig into a little bit of your book, kind of give everybody an idea of what your book takes place.

I know it's, it's fiction.

And let's kind of dig into.

I, I set out to.

And so they were dealing with wartime.

And so it had that kind of serious side, but there was a lot of comedy with them at the camp.

And I mean, my patrol partner, one of my patrol partners in Kosovo was a Russian psychiatrist.

He was a police psychiatrist.

He'd Never done.

I'm driving around.

This guy's nice guy.

We're driving around.

I said, hey, where did you work?

He said, well, he was maybe like administrative type things.

And I was like, no.

Where did you, you know, do patrol or do you.

Were you an investigator or anything like that?

He said, no, I'm a psychiatrist, a police psychiatrist.

And he.

He had two.

Two jobs.

One was interviewing people to come on the job and then.

And then also working with officers who were having problems.

He was doing those types of cases also, but he never did patrol.

And so I'm thinking between the Irish guys and the Jordanian guy on the radio and having a Russian psychiatrist as a partner, I could find gold, you know, comedy wise.

I thought, this is comedy gold.

But probably my mistake was as far as making a comedy goes, I had some brutal murders in there.

And it.

They didn't.

They didn't jive very well with the book.

It.

Like, they're pretty and they're.

And they're actual cases.

I did change the name of the villages.

I did.

I did.

I did a lot of changes for various reasons.

I didn't want to get into the.

The real finer parts of the case.

About the case.

But they're real cases, and I. I put them in there.

And so when it came time for my Beta readers to read it, they said, you know, the comedy thing just doesn't work with the murder.

And they.

But they like the.

The.

The suspense.

It became a suspense thriller and like that better.

And so I took a lot of the comedy out and I really worked on the suspense thriller aspects of it and solving the case.

So these actual crimes probably done by several different splinter groups from the Kosovo Liberation Army.

So the Kosovo Liberation army, they were not doing the payback against the renate, the Serbs who remained in Kosovo.

It was, I would say, real die hard.

Maybe they had a KLA background.

They kind of.

The KLA put down their weapons.

A lot of them joined the police force.

And so in the book, I have.

I have a.

That I'm training.

He was a war hero in.

In the Kosovo conflict with the Coastal Liberation Army.

And so that's created kind of an interesting kind of situation where I'm working with a guy who's a former Coastal Liberation army guy, and people are shooting bazookas and.

And throwing hand grenades on people's lawns to terrorize Serbs who remained.

And.

And not just Serbs, these kind of hardcore leftovers.

They killed their Albanian opponents.

So they were Albanian political opponents who got killed by them.

And so this was, this is what was going on when I was there.

So I, my hope is that people who really are keen or astute and they know the situation, I hope they don't look for an angle because, quite frankly, I really enjoyed working there.

I, I love the Albanian people and I had good Albanian friends up there.

Serbs are great.

And I don't, I don't, I know they did the most atrocities, but I, I would, I sip rocky with Serbia, Serbian people there.

And I didn't want to take a side.

I just wanted to kind of relay what, what this whole looked like from the eyes of a American police officer.

Yeah.

So I, I try to make a comedy.

The beginning of the book is Remain the same.

So you, you're a writer, you're familiar with the Campbell's Hero journey.

So for your listeners journey, you have this person, they start off and then they get an invitation.

So Harry Potter lived under the stairway.

Then he gets an invitation to Hogwarts and he finds out he's a wizard.

And then you have a protagonist, Harry Potter, he has allies, Dumbledore, and the villain is Voldemort.

And same thing with Star wars, he's a farmer.

And then Droid tells him, you know, about Obi Wan Kenobi, and, and he gets an invitation to go on the adventure, and he wants, Then he becomes a Jedi, and you have people helping.

Him, and then you have people, people against him.

And so this Campbell's Hero journey accounts for like 75 of all of the classic stories in the world I tried to form.

Essentially, I, I, the reason I left was because I, and went to.

Was because I was single and I was taking adventure.

I thought it'd be a great adventure.

Like, I'm just somebody, you know, people who say, oh, whoever dies with the most toys wins.

Yeah.

Remember that bumper sticker?

Yep.

I, I kind of felt like whoever dies with the best stories wins, you know, so I'm like, I agree.

Let's go to, let's go to Kosovo.

So that's not compelling for the protagonist.

Loosely based on me.

It's not, it's not an autobiography or a memoir, anything like that.

It's.

Right, it's.

But it is loosely based on me, and I just treated it as like, he needs a better reason to go to Kosovo.

So I had two actual police mistakes, big mistakes that caused problems.

And one of them was a lost police radio and the other.

And I don't know if you want me to tell that, but essentially my police radio, it got lost.

And then my.

We're driving in the patrol car in Manhattan and we hear, hello.

Hello.

The way it got lost was I put it on the roof of the car and I'm filling out paperwork.

And then I gave the paperwork back and I drove over on the roof of the car.

I mean, who hasn't done that in their life?

Radio fell off.

And then I realized it's not.

The radio is not on my belt.

And so the women broadcasting, she had this like this Demento's New York accent.

She's like, hel.

It sounded like Joe Pesky's sister, you know, like, like this central dispatch, like, you know, message, you know, with the message.

And then, then they started saying an alarm and unauthorized transmission.

And then she just kept talking.

She shut up and she started talking to, like she's switching the channels.

And I'm describing in the book, I say she spoke to the Bronx and Brooklyn and Staten Island.

She didn't because that radio only covers Manhattan.

But she spoke to Manhattan and that really happened.

And that kind of hurts the protagonist JB's career.

The second story that I wanted to damage the protagonist a little more so that when the, when the invitation to go to Kosovo comes, he's like, I'm ready to go.

I'm out of here.

The other one was a story related to me by my friend, my next door neighbors at NYPD Homicide Lieutenant and I, I.

He knew I was writing the book.

And I said, you have like a story that someone really damaged their career, but funny at the same time.

I think I asked him for that when I was writing the comedy.

This is when I was really looking for more comedic type things.

And he said this, he said, I gotta tell you this one from one of his relatives in Florida.

He went to a crime scene and the crime scene unit hadn't arrived yet.

And he had to wait for them because they were busy on another job.

So they roped off the scene.

And it was, it was like a trench, but it wasn't, it wasn't a canal, it was just a trench.

And he's guarding this.

And he didn't realize that like 25 miles north of where he was, there was a massive downpour of rain.

And that they opened in Florida.

They open up all these different gates and the water came rushing down and the body got washed away while he was guarding it.

So it's on the crime scene and the, and he loses the body, you know, so the, the crime scene rhymes.

Like, where's the body?

Like, it got washed into the lake.

So I use That I put it, I put that true story, but not, it didn't happen in New York and it didn't happen to jb, but I put that one as like a second straw that broke the camel's back to send JB on the hero's journey.

Yeah.

You know, it's funny.

When you talked about trying to make it a comedy.

Right.

The one thing I'm confident on is that most law enforcement, first responders, firefighters, soldiers, we all kind of have a very dark sense of humor, you know.

Oh, yeah.

And a lot of it is because that's how we deal with some of the stuff that we see day in, day out.

And it's hard to relay the comedy that you see in that type of stuff, you know, and get it across to somebody who doesn't deal with this day in and day out.

And see, you know, there is some funny situations that happen in some serious situations, you know, and if you look for them and, and you can separate yourself from what's going on, you know.

Absolutely.

You know, I had a soldier who was a paramedic, and some of the stories that he told me, you know, would not go well with, with most civilians, but I, I laughed my ass off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The, the, the book for your listeners, I have to say it's men's fiction.

The guys that have read it loved it.

Women are about 50.

50.

About 50 of the women really, really enjoyed it.

But, like, 50 were, they didn't like it, at least in the early stages.

These were mostly friends and family, so they wouldn't exactly tell me why, you know, but the guys enjoyed it.

I, I mean, I consider it men's fiction.

There's not a category called men's fiction there.

There's a category called women's fiction, but men tend not to read fiction.

They're not.

And there was an article in the New York Times about this where men don't read fiction.

They love, like, true crime, they love autobiographies, they love books about war.

I read Blackhawk Down.

I read Lone Survivor.

Like, I like these books too, you know, I, I, this is what maybe that maybe the only true men's fiction writer that I know is Nelson DeMille.

I love Nelson DeMille.

I actually copied him, his style, because I put the protagonist, J.B. byrne, in first person.

So you're in his head, he's talking, he's telling you the story, but the antagonist is in third person.

And until they meet.

And that's what Nelson DeMille did with, with John Corey.

But the main difference between the, the funny stuff with John Corey was that DeMille was really good at wisecracking.

Like this detective is very funny and he's wisecracking and tells jokes, whereas the comedy from jb, JB Byrne is more situational, more like crazy situations, you know, talking, getting drunk with his Russian psychiatrist and you know, hanging out with the, the Northern Irish guys.

And so that's, that's maybe the main difference, comedy wise.

So I, I would say if you're a DeMille fan, if you like the John Corey books, I think you would really enjoy this book because I, I tried to copy a lot of what the Mill did, you know, just different experience, you know.

So.

Yeah, yeah, you know, it is really.

You're spot on there.

You know, even myself, I read a lot of, you know, biography type stuff and I love documentaries.

You know, I'd rather watch a good documentary than a fictional movie.

And, and so what you're saying about, you know, most men, you're spot on.

That, that very is true.

And then when you add these kind of things to it, I think where that falls into is the category, like you're going to get a lot of probably like law enforcement type people that are going to be interested in these kind of books because.

I hope so.

I hope so.

But you know, I think an author friend of mine who writes police type stories, something he pointed out and we laughed about, was that he said cops don't read that much.

Not that they're.

Not that they don't read.

Like they don't read fiction.

Definitely don't read fiction, you know, so they're, they're, they're a tough audience.

So.

And one of my other friends made fun of me.

He's like, who's your target audience?

And I'm thinking, ah, police, maybe military types.

And he said, why, why is your target audience people who don't read that much?

You know, maybe I should have, you know, put a feminine angle in there somewhere and try to appeal to women because women are voracious readers of fiction, you know, but it's just not.

So it's a, it's a real dude adventure.

It's like all men.

Yeah.

You know, you're in 5,000 miles from home and all this stuff is going on.

And so that's, that's.

I had a, had to be.

It actually hurt me a little bit trying to be true to the story.

The ending was really hard for me because I kept thinking, well, would that have really happened?

You know, and, and it's fiction, you don't have to write, you know, what would really happen.

You want to write to keep the audience entertained, to keep them, you know, glued.

And.

And I.

So I struggled a lot with some of the scenes in there because I.

In my mind, I. I almost was thinking, like, like a memoir.

Like, oh, I can't say this.

This.

This would, you know, this wouldn't have gone down like this.

You know, so it kind of.

Maybe I did that to myself, you know, maybe somebody else, you know, a more accomplished writer of fiction would have no problem just saying, yeah, you know, they.

They were explosions and, you know, a medevac and all that, you know, But.

Well, let me ask you this.

I know for me, like, even as a kid, before I went in the military, you know, my book choices was a lot of, like, Vietnam War story type, even fictional Vietnam War Story.

But that era, just, for whatever reason, even today, it still really just attracted my attention.

And even after 20 years in the military, I still like reading, you know, those kind of stories, you know, fictional or nonfiction, either one.

But I still find myself, like, my daring.

The part that is important to me is I don't care if the storyline is accurate, but the uniform better be correct and the verbiage better be correct.

You know, words that a soldier is going to use and stuff like that.

When you wrote your book, did you find yourself saying, you know, those same types of things, making sure that, you know, the life choices that.

That a person's going to make in that career, the words that.

The language they're going to use and how they're going to talk to each other.

Was.

Was that important to you as well as writing the story?

Yeah, I. Yeah, because in New York, we don't say badge, we say shield.

And.

And I think in the book, I make an exception there because people know, oh, the badge.

So I'm.

I think I did refer it as a badge, but I, like, I. I almost didn't want to type that.

It's the shield, you know, and.

Yeah, the rank of detective sergeant, you know, because, you know, detective is such a kind of glorified rank, but there's.

There's no rank detective sergeant in the nypd.

You're either a detective or you're a sergeant.

You might be a sergeant who does detective work, but you're not a detective sergeant.

But.

So.

But the.

I see that on TV and movies and.

No, that they have very small things.

It's fine.

Yeah.

It's like I'm.

I'm much further away now from New York City.

Police, I imagine if any NYPD cops or even some retired cops probably looking at me like, who the hell is that guy?

I've been out for a long time.

But, yeah, it was a.

But it was a wonderful experience, and I. I wanted to kind of record that for history.

Uh, in.

I. I gave a lot of thought to a memoir, and I wasn't even up to chapter three before I realized I was boring, you know, as a memoir guy.

You know, even with all this interesting stuff, I needed.

I needed to.

To have the freedom to make stuff fiction, you know, to just say, you know, fictional, and then give me the freedom to embellish a little bit or omit a little bit, you know.

But the book is.

The book is based on.

On real events, and.

And that's actually what, like I said earlier, undermined the comedic aspect was that, yeah, these.

These were pretty brutal crimes, and they did happen while I was there.

Yeah.

Well, before we get into, you know, where everybody can get the books and follow you and all that stuff, what.

What's next?

Are you planning on making this a series, or do you have other books in mind that you would like to.

To start working on?

I. I plan to.

To write another book.

I just haven't gotten around to it.

The protagonist in the book has.

Has add, and that.

That's loosely based on me.

I.

When I was a child, I had add, and I think I mostly grew out of it.

A lot of people do grow out of their add.

Like, I don't have it.

Like, when I was a kid, I couldn't concentrate at all as a kid.

I didn't have the adhd.

I didn't have any behavioral problems, but I was always sitting in a classroom looking at the teacher, and my brain was surfing in Hawaii.

You know, I was not taking in what the teacher was saying unless it was really interesting for me, and then I would take in, you know, what they were saying.

But I eventually managed to graduate from college and get a master's degree, so you can't.

But I had to work a little bit harder.

The master's degree was the easiest because I was 35 years old, and I was really interested in the topic.

I. I have a master's in international terrorism.

So I was reading those books, and I was fascinated.

You know, like the old Bruce Hoffman book, and there's several authors.

I was digging it and I was enjoying writing papers.

So the.

The ADD factor makes it.

I don't have it where I would be taking those amphetamines or anything like that, but I sometimes wish I could take the amphetamines.

I get palpitations, you know, but if I could take those amphetamines and sit down, I could probably knock out a whole novel and no problem.

But it just takes me a long time.

So that's a very long winded answer.

But it would take me a long time to finish it.

But I've.

I had no problem.

I really want to see if this book can have a certain level of success.

I would definitely be encouraged.

And if I.

If I go to Ukraine as a police consultant, I want to see how that goes.

I. I'm getting kind of older now, and I'm getting closer to retirement, but if the right position opens up in Ukraine, hopefully that conflict will be resolved.

Then the land of broken toys.

Ukraine might be the next book.

We'll see.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Still out.

I'm still out in the field doing this stuff.

I. I've been.

I was in Mexico writing curriculums for police academies.

I. I was in Saudi Arabia for two years.

I got.

I'll tell you this joke if.

I don't know if you have time for a joke, but this one's been around the Internet.

It's a little bit of an old joke, but maybe your listeners are.

I hope they're not all familiar with this one, but you ever hear the one about the talking dog?

Maybe, I don't know, Guys driving down.

Guys driving down a country road, and he's really tired and he wants to get out and stretch, and he sees a sign that says talking dog for sound.

He says, you know what?

Let me go take a look at this.

This might be a good story for the pub.

He pulls over, drives up the farmers road, sees the farmer, gets out of the car.

He said, hey, you have a talking dog for sale?

He said, yep.

He said, where is.

He said, over there.

He goes over to a fence, and there's a dog sitting behind the fence.

He said, so you can talk, huh?

I was like, yeah, I can talk.

I've been talking since I was a puppy.

The guy's like, oh, my God.

He says, the dog said, CIA discovered me.

They sent me overseas.

My mission was to befriend certain people, get in the room, listen everything that's going on, and report back.

Said, I did that for a couple years, and then I got tired of being overseas, so I came back to the u. S. And I was working for the dea, FBI, same thing.

Befriend somebody, get in the room, listen to what they're saying, Repeat the conversations back and then after that, I started working for.

I wanted to settle down, have some puppies.

So I'm working for the local police in county.

And now I'm retired here in the farm.

And the guy's just blown away.

Turns to the farmer, he said, how much do you want for that dog?

He said, 20 bucks.

He said, 20 bucks for that dog?

He said, that dog's a fucking liar.

He didn't do any of that stuff.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

So the reason I say that is because I'm saying all the places that I've been, right?

It's.

I sound like maybe I'm an intel guy.

No, I, I get involved with programs that deliver equipment and training from the Department of Justice and the State Department.

We deliver equipment and training and things like that.

I'm not doing any, you know, but the.

Funny, the.

This actually worked to my advantage when I had.

The reason I stopped drinking was atrial fibrillation.

And I, I went to New York.

I was working in Belgrade.

I flew to New York.

And I'm.

I'm seeing one doctor.

He was treating me for gout.

And this is like a drinker's, you know, and atrial fibrillation are both.

Yeah.

And I said, hey, overseas, I got to get on a plane in a week, and I really need to see a cardiac, you know, electric specialists that handles atrial fibrillation.

And he, and he started talking to me about what I did, and I was like, yeah, you know, Kosovo.

I've been in Saudi Arabia.

And he just automatically thought I was doing wet work, you know, for some outfit in the CIA.

And I'm like, no, no, I, I, I deliver training, I deliver equipment.

He's like, yeah, you know, but it worked in my favor because I wasn't able to get an appointment with, like, the, the.

This guy was at nyu.

He called up a.

The top cardiologist there and said, this guy's overseas.

We had a 9, 11 here, and we need to take care of people who are taking care of us.

And, And I, like, heard.

I'm.

I'm just kind of giving you the gist of the conversation.

I don't remember his exact words, but I, I was thankful that this guy thought I was doing a lot more for the country.

I mean, I'm serving the country, but, you know, not, not like, you know, a super sleuth.

And I was in the, the top cardiac guy for atrial fibrillation.

I was in his office the next day, you know, setting up an appointment to get the, I had the ablation procedure done and I was back on the plane to Belgrade.

So yeah, I was thankful that the doctors there, you know, 9 11, kind of scarred a lot of New Yorkers.

And so I was thankful that the guy that, that doctor thought I was, you know, really good, you know, doing something to help America and that he wanted to help me.

It was nice.

Yeah.

Well, why don't we go and tell everybody where, where they can find your books and, and where they can follow you and, and learn more and all that good stuff.

It's, it's, it's on Amazon.

It's called the Land of Broken Toys.

Kosovo, let's see.

Yep.

And yeah, it's on, it's on a couple other sites.

I did the, the print Amazon direct.

So, you know, direct print.

So when, when somebody orders it, they print it out and send it out.

That's, that's the setup I have.

But it's available.

It's, it's more costly.

I've seen it available on other, in other places and maybe even Barnes and noble.

I'm not 100% sure.

I probably should have checked that before.

But the book, I would buy it from Amazon is all I can say.

And my, my email address is on there.

I, I'm using the protagonist's name as my email address.

JB Burn.com and so my, my email address is JB J, B, Y, R N E NYPD.

All lowercase, one word, gmail.com.

and the website is the same.

JB Burn nypd.com no.

Awesome.

But I, I hope that anybody who reads it who want, because so far a lot of the people read it had questions about what's actually happened and what, you know, happen or whatever.

And I'm happy to answer those questions if, if you go on the website and, and, and, or send an email, I'll put it on the blog.

I'll answer on the blog.

You know, more than happy to communicate with, with the readers, hopefully.

Guys, start reading some fiction.

Yeah.

Well, I hope all of you guys got something out of this.

Make sure when you go by, not if, when you go buy the book and you get it, make sure you leave a review.

It helps authors out tremendously.

It's very important with the algorithms of the way Amazon works.

So make sure that if you buy, you read, then you go back and give a review.

And I appreciate all of you guys that listen to the show and you support us and support the guests that come on.

Make sure you reach out to Mike and ask because he's doing some amazing things.

In real life as well.

So hit him up, ask some questions and.

And learn a little bit about all the things that go on outside of our.

Our country and our world.

So thank you for the.

For your service.

Just a message out to your.

To your audience.

You know, I know.

I know you have a.

A big audience of former military, and.

And I. I always, when I can, say thank you for your service.

I appreciate that.

Thank you.

I hope all of y' all guys have a great day.

And to you as well.

I'm sorry.

It.

Thank you.

Don't forget.

Don't let the day kick your ass.

Kick the day's ass.