Subtitle: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City’s Lower East Side

     With the blistering narrative spirit of The French Connection, the insights of a seasoned insider, and a relentless voice that reads like the city’s own, Alphaville is at once the story of a dedicated New York cop and of New York City itself.
     A raw, gritty memoir—part true-life cop thriller, part unputdownable history of a storied time and place—that will grip you by the throat until the explosive end.
     In 1988, Alphabet City burned with heroin, radicalism, and antipolice sentiment. Working as a plainclothes narcotics cop in the most high-voltage neighborhood in Manhattan, Detective Sergeant Mike Codella earned the nickname "Rambo" from the local dealers, as well as a $50,000 bounty on his head.
     The son of a cop who grew up in a mob neighborhood in Brooklyn, Codella understood the unwritten laws of the shadowy businesses that ruled the streets. He knew that the further east you got from the relative safety of Fifth Avenue, Washington Square Park, and NYU, the deeper you entered the sea of human misery, greed, addiction, violence, and all the things that come with an illegal retail drug trade run wild.
     With his partner, Gio, Codella made it his personal mission to put away Davey Blue Eyes—a stone-cold murderer and the head of Alphabet City’s heroin supply chain.
     Despite the hell they endured—all the beatings and gunshots, the footchases, and close calls—Codella and Gio always saw Alphabet City the same way: worth saving.
     Alphaville, Codella’s riveting, no-holds-barred memoir, resurrects the vicious streets that Davey Blue Eyes owned and tells the story of how Codella bagged the so-called Forty Thieves that surrounded Davey, slowly working his way to the head of the snake one scale at a time.

     Philip Carlo, New York Times bestselling author of Ice Man: "Alphaville is a quick, nitty-gritty, page-turning read that will leave you breathless.. Though the book is a true account, its characters are so colorful and vivid it reads more like a well-paced novel."
     Tom Folsom, New York Times Bestselling author of The Mad Ones: "A balls-out cop tale from the bad old days of New York City. Watch your back in Alphaville."
     R. J. Ellory, author of A Quiet Belief in Angels: "Nerve-shreddingly real. Addictive, brilliant, and compelling. A staggeringly well-written true-life drama, which had me breathless from the first page to the last. Stunning!"
     Publishers Weekly: "Written in a hyper-noir style reminiscent of Richard Price and George Pelecanos, this memoir features all the stuff of an excellent police procedural complete with drug gang rivalries, beatings, killings, and endless dealer collars and convictions. Raw, bloody, and very real, Codella’s book is a historical snapshot of what was one of Gotham’s most dangerous neighborhoods and the men who brought order to its frightening mayhem."
     T. J. English, New York Times bestselling author of Havana Nocturne: "A blistering cop’s-eye view of the drug war during the heady years of the late 1980s. Codella and Bennett take the reader down alleyways and into shooting galleries, capturing the mood and patter of a time when a cop nicknamed Rambo and a gang of smack dealers called the Forty Thieves were caught in a dance to the death. You will feel as though you are pounding the pavement and dodging bullets. Alphaville is the real deal."
     Selwyn Raab, author of Five Families: "A narcotics cop’s frontline exposure of the battles to eradicate one of America’s most drug-infested landscapes. A penetrating primer on how street-savvy investigators struggle to overcome corruption, hit men, frustrating internal rivalries, and bureaucratic red tape in an often disheartening campaign to relieve the miseries generated by well-heeled, sadistic traffickers on a captive community."

     Was a New York City cop for twenty years.
     He worked and supervised in the DEA, Secret Service Task Force, Special Frauds Squad, Missing Persons Squad, Operation 8, and several other outstanding and prestigious units throughout the city.
     He retired from the NYPD in 2003 as a Detective Sergeant.
     He now divides his time between television and film work, being a professional fight trainer, and running his Renzo Gracie Brazilian Jiu Jitsu academy with his family.

     A writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the erstwhile New York Sun, among other publications; a guitar player who has performed and recorded with the A-Bones, Hasil Adkins, Action Swingers, Yo La Tengo, and Andre Williams, to name a few; and the writer and director of two award-winning short films, both aired on the Independent Film Channel.
     A Manhattan native and resident of the Lower East Side for twenty years—including the period covered in Alphaville—he now lives and works in Brooklyn.

     Has appeared in many films, including The Dark Knight, Missing, and A Perfect World, and on such television shows as The Equalizer, Angel, Cold Case, Golden Years, and Profit .
     Szarabajka has also appeared in several episodes of Selected Stories for National Public Radio.
     He won the 2001 Audie® Award for Unabridged Fiction for his reading of Tom Robbins’ Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates.