Forget It, Jake, It’s Schenectady The True Story Behind The Place Behind the Pines

Stranger things do tend to happen in Schenectady— once a booming metropolis nicknamed the “ City That Lights and Hauls the World” thanks to the dominating presence of General Electric and the American Locomotive Company, though those days are ancient history. GE has nearly abandoned the city, and ALCO closed up shot over fifty years ago. Hence, the title of this book: Forget It, Jake, It’ s Schenectady: A Police Department Under Siege, and the Man Who Led It, a nod to the bleak conclusion of the classic film Chinatown, one of cinema’ s most devastating expressions of abject resignation and defeat. A chance meeting between onetime Schenectady Police Chief Gregory Kaczmarek and author David Bushman in a Lyft car that Kaczmarek was driving was the genesis of this book, originally intended to track the rise and fall of a veteran cop with what appear to be two defining traits— an almost inhuman capacity for perseverance and a truly remarkable ability to attract notoriety and criticism. However, as the author’ s research— including interviews with over two dozen people who lived through the events depicted in these pages.

David Bushman is the author of four books, including, Murder at Teal’s Pond: Hazel Drew and the Mystery That Inspired Twin Peaks (2022), Conversations with Mark Frost (2020), and the editor of a new Dr. Who essay book (2022). He is a former television curator at The Paley Center for Media and TV editor at Variety. He is cofounder and copresident of Fayetteville Mafia Press.