[1][2] In 2011, he retired as the chief of police of Wellfleet, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, where he served for over 20 years.
[3][4] As a rookie cop for the NYPD,[5] he was assigned to work undercover in the JDL; it is the subject of his fourth book.
Richard Rosenthal spent twenty years in the New York City Police Department, where he ran the Heavy Weapons and Undercover Weapons Training programs and ... dealt with homicide, narcotics, and armed robbery.
Before joining the NYPD, he worked for U.S. Air Force military intelligence as a Russian language specialist.
... [H]is novel, The Murder of Old Comrades, "a spicy police procedural about KGB assassins on the loose in Manhattan," according to The Wall Street Journal, ... "put Mr. Rosenthal on the map in big-league publishing."