Neal Hirschfeld is a former editor and reporter for the New York Daily News. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer, Newsday, and Good Housekeeping, among many other publications. His collaboration with Kathy Burke, Detective, was published by Scribner. Detective has been optioned by Sony Television and Larkin-Goldstein Productions. Producers Michael Larkin and Michael Goldstein have plans to turn Detective into a television series. Hirschfeld’s latest collaboration with federal undercover agent Louis Diaz, Dancing with the Devil, will offer an account of Diaz’s front-page cases and the operation that brought down legendary drug kingpin Nicky Barnes, the most murderous drug czar in American history. Dancing with the Devil will be published by Pocket Books.

by Kathy Burke with Neal Hirschfeld

Detective has been optioned by Sony Television and Larkin-Goldstein Productions, and is currently in development with Sony Pictures.

Detective is the story of undercover cop Kathy Burke’s career. During her 23-year career on the New York City police force, Burke would become the most highly decorated female detective in the 160-year history of the department. Her success didn’t come without struggle from both criminals and from the members of her own department. Despite harassment from superior officers and her fellow cops, Burke was eventually assigned to working undercover as a member of the elite Major Case Squad, the squad that investigates the highest-profile cases in New York City.

Kathy Burke survived one of the worst traumas that can happen to a police officer - the shooting death of a partner while they were working on a case and then being the subject of false rumors blaming her for it. After recovering from her own injuries, Burke goes on to become a counselor with the New York City Police Department Self-Support Group - an organization for police officers who have been shot, stabbed, maimed or otherwise injured in the line of duty, and which played an important role in “debriefing” Ground Zero cops who didn’t know they even needed an outlet in order to heal.

by Louis Diaz

In American Gangster, the Feds took down infamous heroin dealer Frank Lucas. But the kingpin behind Lucas’s criminal reign, Leroy “Nicky” Barnes, remained “Mr. Untouchable.” Until one undercover agent proved tough enough—or crazy enough—to infiltrate his domain and nail the most dangerous drug czar in American history.

Growing up in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where physical violence was a daily reality at home, at school, and on the streets, Louis “Louie” Diaz had what it took to survive—and to one day become what he vowed to be: a man of uncompromising principles who is both “compassionate on the inside, fierce on the outside.” These were the qualities, along with his street fighter’s steely nerves and hair-trigger temper, that drove Diaz from his savage beginnings and early forays into the world of organized crime to become one of the DEA’s bravest undercover agents—the man who was instrumental in taking down some of the nation’s and the world’s most notorious crime rings.

In an unforgettable and utterly engaging first-person narrative, Diaz tells his gritty, colorful, painful, and even humorous life story—a story with all the raw emotional power and bare-knuckle action of Wiseguy and Serpico. From his headline making cases of Nicky Barnes and the Medellin cartel…to his accounts of outwitting a key villain linked to the record-breaking heist known as The Great English Train Robbery…to his all-out confrontations with murderous gun-runners and drug dealers on the mean streets of New York…to leading commando raids on clandestine cocaine labs inside the Bolivian jungle, Dancing With the Devil is an explosive memoir that stands as a classic of true crime literature.