Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
ROGER HINTERTHUER, true crime novelist, details his first novel, "Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied," Thursday at the Carnegie Library. Hinterthuer spent 30 years on the force in Milwaukee, where he was exposed to the wild and the unimaginable.
By IAN MINIELLY
Ironwood - The Carnegie Library in Ironwood hosted first-time novelist Roger Hinterthuer Thursday afternoon.
Hinterthuer's first book, "Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied," which he said is regular District Attorney speak, details his and others' work to solve a crime ring operated by the Outlaws, a 1 percenter biker gang.
The 1 percenters claim their moniker as the bad 1 percent of bikers, compared to the good 99 percent who populate motorcycle clubs.
Justice denied occurred during Hinterthuer's 30 years on the Milwaukee Police Department. The Outlaws, they were confident, had built a bomb that killed a bunch of people, but they could not pin anything on the gang. The police did not have a bomb maker or location of the bomb-making, let alone the people involved with any certainty, so the case went unsolved for many years.
The problem for the Outlaws was they were stealing automobiles and transporting them across state lines, which made the crime a federal offense and brought additional resources to bear in the case, opening up the bomb case to further scrutiny.
Eventually, the case broke when one of the Outlaws was caught up in a different conviction and, according to Hinterthuer, agreed to provide the story if his girlfriend would be released from prison and he could be placed in protective custody.
Hinterthuer did not let the cat out of the bag during his discussion about how everything unfolded or the people involved, but he wove a tale of intrigue and detective work that he turned into a novel Randomhouse was willing to publish and that was named one of the New York Times top 10 reads for the summer of 2017.
In the words of Hinterthuer, "The truth is stranger than fiction." He said he would not be able to think up the crazy things he encountered in real life, so for his second book, he is in the process of writing a collection of short stories of things people would not want to know that happen in the line of police work.
