ABOUT FRED ROSEN
Best-selling author specializing in true crime and crime history
Consultant: Discovery Channel, Jupiter Entertainment, E!
Adjunct Professor, Criminal Justice, SUNY
NEW BOOK: “Trails of Death,” Titletown Publishing
Mini Bio:
Fred Rosen is the author of over 25 books. As a native of Brooklyn, he saw few trees growing up there. True Crime author and historian. Investigative reporter. University professor. NY Mets fan. Comic book geek.
Full Bio:
Fred Rosen is a veteran true crime author with over 25 books published world-wide including the classic “Lobster Boy,” Rosen is also the award winning crime historian who wrote “The Historical Atlas of American Crime.” A former columnist for The New York Times, he is an Adjunct Professor of Criminal Justice at Ulster County Community College of SUNY. His frequent media appearances as a crime expert include Dateline NBC, Inside Edition and MSNBC. He’s written for all the major magazines including Cosmopolitan, Penthouse, and The Reader’s Digest.
Fred Rosen grew up in Brooklyn wanting to leap motorcycles at a single bound like Steve McQueen. His father used to tell him stories of an offer he had from a childhood friend, later executed for murder, to join Murder, Incorporated. Instead, his father stayed straight and became a furrier who on his death bed, asked his son why he had’t followed his friend into a life of crime. ”Because you have a conscience,” his son replied. It took him years before he realized that anecdote of his father’s really affected his life in his choice of profession.
He studied film at the University of Southern California’s legendary Film School. That’s where he first figured out there were class and economic differences. In Brooklyn, everyone was the same. Years later, he was standing at 34th and Park when a strong wind blew up the street and with it came an idea from an editor — “Write a true crime book for me.” Then a journalism professor at Hofstra University, he became in his spare time, an investigative reporter who specialized in homicides.
He hoped to be as good a detective as Lew Archer. One day, he was. It was the same day he was denied tenure at Hofstra University. He was in a hotel room in Tampa, Florida with an even bigger problem than losing his job. Holding a key piece of evidence that he as a reporter had gotten access to, a videotape that he knew would convict someone of murder, he had to decide what to do with it. What’s not in his book on the case, Lobster Boy. each book has a different story. Not the one you read but the one the author lives. Like the one dedicated to his college professor, John DiGiovanni, one of only six who died during the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1995.
Email: frosen@hvc.rr.com