The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Detective’s Quota by David Cuomo, Elizabeth Pulido

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

The Detective’s Quota by David Cuomo, Elizabeth Pulido https://www.amazon.com/-/he/David-Cuomo/dp/1664157980 For many years, the Chicago south side neighborhood was virtually free of crime. Every once in awhile someone would commit a burglary, or a theft, and the police charged with keeping the neighborhood free of crime almost always captured the offender. However, in the year of 2010, three Bridgeport women were found raped and murdered in an alley adjacent to White Sox Park. As such crimes were rare in the area, the entire police department, fearing for the safety of women, went on a massive manhunt for the killer. That manhunt took a strange unexpected turn, as the evidence the department gathered indicated that one of its own members, namely John McBride, may have murdered the woman. This novels traces the investigation which led to John McBride’s arrest and his trial.

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Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Voss show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast. podcast, but it's not endorsement or review of any kind. Anyway, we have an amazing young man today. We're going to be talking about. His book is series, books, and some of the stuff that he's done. So we're going to be with him. David Cuomo joins us on the show.

He's the author of The Detective's Quota. February 25th, 2021. It came out. All those great books written during COVID, evidently. Welcome the show, David. How are you? I'm very well today. Thanks for asking.

So give us sannie. dot coms or website, social media, emails, wherever you want people to find out more about you on the interwebs. Right. I do have a website, and I think you connect to it on Google with my name. Okay. And there'll be a link to it on the Chris Foss show as well. So give us the 30,000 overview.

What's inside your book on this? Well, let me start by explaining that I wrote this book in 2021. I am a former assistant state attorney in Chicago. I tried many murder cases during my career. And what prompted me to write this book was actually the George Floyd murder. Oh, really? And here's why. I felt that even though that murder was captured on videotape,

that there were a lot of people in our country who still believed that the police did not do any wrong. And you see, that bothered me. And so what I did is I remembered some cases that I had tried when I was a prosecutor. And I sort of put them together and came up with this book. This book is in part a discussion of police misconduct. It's a discussion of why the police make errors, why the police cross the line. And like I said, I wrote it because of I wanted to say something about this George Ford. situation. So that's what the book is about. It's about justice. It's about police misconduct. It's

even a little bit about racism. Oh, really? There's a touch of that in there. Okay. Okay. Now, we've had authors on, this is a novel, correct? Right. Well, yes, it is a novel. It is based, however, on four different cases that I actually tried when I was an assistant state attorney. Oh, wow. What I did is I kind of like took parts of different cases and I kind of combined them together. So what winds up happening is it is a novel. It is fictional, but it's fictional inspired by real stories. That might be the best way to explain it.

You know, it's funny. We have a lot of authors like yourself on the show that were detectives or police officers for a long time. Some of them worked in the murder division. so they saw some pretty crazy stuff. I'm sure you did as a district attorney's. The office, and they can pull these great stories, and then like you say, they can kind of mix and match them. And the same thing with our military folks.

They bring a lot of great, you know, they write a lot of those great Tom Clancy stories and different things because they have that background. So they have this rich, you know, experience. Everyone writes from their experience, right? Right. So you guys have this rich experience of stories. and of course if you if you can merge a few of them together you can build a multi-layered

or multi-layered you know actually this these cases that I based the book on was in the 1980s I did not get around to writing this book for 40 years basically wow right right now so you brought this from your experience tell us a little bit about yourself I didn't I do a bio on you so Tell us a little about yourself and your background and some of the things that have helped you kind of develop these stories over the decades. Well, I graduated from Loyola University Law School in 1983. And after then, I joined the Cook County State Attorney's Office as a prosecutor, spent many years there, tried all sorts of cases, murder cases, rape cases, you have it. While I was in the state attorney's office, I, on occasion, was made. a supervisor. I argued in the Illinois Supreme Court many times. I think, you know, I never kept

track of the numbers, but I think I have tried over 75 first-degree murder cases in about a 10-year period. Right now, you know, I stopped practicing law about five years ago, and I have adopted this new idea about being an author. So that's what I'm doing right now. I am writing books and they are based, they're all based on my prior experience and hopefully I can make a go of it. And you've got other books that are coming on the way that are part of this series that this book launches. Is that correct? Right. Basically, all, it's five books altogether.

Basically, they all have the same characters in there. And, you know, these characters that I have in the books, they face certain dilemmas. And those dilemmas are repeated in each one of my books. I mean, and basically, I think the best way to describe the genre of these books is that they are murder mysteries. Right. The detective's quota, if you were to read it, you would not be able to figure out who the murderer was until you get to the end of the book. And that's the same. That's true, the other books also.

But I wanted to, I'd like to say this, I wanted to do more than just be. a murder mystery. I wanted to really talk about like what what are justice issues in these books. So you weave all that into the story as well then. Right. Right. No, I wrote the first one, the detective's quota, because of the idea that I wanted to start a discussion about, about police, misconduct, and justice. Actually, after I wrote the book, I got personally contacted by, you know, through Facebook and through my email from several people that wanted to start a group discussion about the book and we did that for about maybe a year or so. I had three or four people that I would routinely talk to, talk about the book, talk about my interest in further books.

And it was a nice thing you do, you know, just to have a collaboration in talking to people that were interested in these kinds of subjects. And you spent many years in the state attorney's office. How did that experience shape you personally and influence your writing? Well, I believe that I sort of changed a bit after I was in the state attorney's office. When I first applied to go there, I was very much interested in just trying cases, the idea of trying the right kind of case that didn't occur to me. But what changed was I became more and more protective of the police, more and more interested in putting people in jail, which I did very successfully.

So I kind of became conservative is the word I'm trying to find. Conservative when it comes to enforcing the law. And here, the George Floyd case is a perfect example of that. I believe that the police in that case should have been. prosecuted. Yeah. So that's kind of the change. I mean, I went in as a 25-year-old young man fresh from law school, not quite sure where I fit in, and then over the course of years, I grew this conservatism. Oh, wow. And I think that goes into my books. I mean, the books I've written, the ones that are on the, you know, are going to be published soon, they're all

about that conflict, if you will, between the police and the public, when it comes to police misconduct. Now, tell us about your protagonist, who's the main character leading in this, and what makes him a compelling character? Well, here, the main character in the detective's quota is, his name is John McBride. He is a Chicago police detective who is highly regarded, who works for, very hard, who solved too many cases. And what happens is that his wife and daughter get killed in a motor vehicle accident. And McBride falls into a very understandable depression. For a while,

he's unable to work. He doesn't show up at work. The police department sort of turns its eye the other way and allows him to not be involved in cases. And what happens is they find out the police department that is they find out that he's been using cocaine to get over his depression and so well that'll get you over being depressed that's right and the police department didn't appreciate it either so they they made a deal with him the deal was that he could keep his job only if he solved three murder cases in the space of one year so that's where the title of the the book comes from, the Texas quarter. His quote is solved three. The wind up happening is nine months into this probationary period, he's only solved one case. And he's very nervous about losing

his job. What happens in the book is that two women are murdered and raped. And it turns out, according to the police department, that the bride is the person that murdered and raped them. He murdered a rape because his intention was to frame somebody for committing those murders, and that way he would get his quota. So that's kind of like the bird's eye view of the book. And like I said before, it's a murder mystery. You know, as you read through the book, you're not sure like who the murderer is. and his identity does not become apparent until the end of the book.

And I might add, that is all based on real cases. Those things that I described in the book really happened. Wow. That is wow. That is wow. Anyway, he's the main character, but Bride is the main character. The book is all about him. And the book is about the choices that he made in order to save his job.

Basically, he murdered two people, two young women, to save his job. Let's see here. So this McBride guy, what do you base his character on? Is he based on a template of any sort of, I don't know, you know, sometimes people, is McBride? You know, sometimes books in New York in different places have, you know, they're set up with the Irish or, you know, some sort of character themed based on himself. What sort of makeup is this man, I guess?

Are you asking me what I've based him on? No, maybe so, if that's a good question for you. But what type of character is he? I mean, his name is McBride. Right. Why did he choose that name? And what does it have to do with his character, I guess, is what I'm asking? The idea of the character came from a real case.

And there was a man in the Chicago Police Department who, did what McBride in the book is accused of doing. You know, he is, I don't know how well you know Chicago, but he is a Chicago in. He's from the south side of Chicago. He lives about a block from White Sox Park, which as aside, I live a block from White Sox Park. So he is a very talented detective. According to the book, he's the most talented detectives in the Chicago

police department. And like I said, he's based on a real human being. So let's take a look at a few of the other things that are here. Now, your books explore police, misconduct, and justice. And I think we've talked about why these themes are important. Can you an example from the book of how you've interweaved those? Of how I interweaved it? Yeah. Maybe the issues about justice and. Yeah, maybe like a plot point. from the book? Right. Here's what I tried to do. There are characters in each of these books that are faced with what you might call moral dilemmas. We didn't talk about him yet, but in the

detective's quota, there is a police captain whose name is Edward Smith, and he and the bride are both faced with moral dilemmas. Smith's moral dilemma is this. He figures out that McBride committed these murders and being a long-time police officer who kind of practiced the idea of not ratting on your fellow police officers, he was forced with this dilemma. He wanted to make sure that the streets were safe, but to do that, he had to go after one of his own officers. Okay, he had to convince the state attorney's office. So he broke the rule, if you know what I'm saying. the rule being at the police don't, like, go against the law. The justice part of the books is, like I said, all these characters are based with some kind of dilemma, a legal or moral one, and they make a choice.

And what I hope readers will see is something that they can debate about with those choices that the characters make. Yeah. And that should be good. That should be good. In the book, you've got reoccurring characters in this upcoming series. And when do the other books come out? And how many are there? There's four of them. And two of them, I hope to be out in April. And the other two by the end of the summer. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So, you know, a lot of it depends on sales. A lot of it depends. A lot of it depends. on, you know, getting good book reviews from book analysts. So there's all those factors that go into it. I'm working really hard with a publisher now, who I believe knows what she's talking about.

And she thinks that I've written is very sellable, is very interesting. It's very current in terms of like what it talks about. It talks about police misconduct, which is a form of governmental misconduct. Anyway, sometime this year, I hope to have the four others published. And then we'll see where we go from there. I've tried many cases as a state attorney, so I have lots of ideas about books. And I could probably write 10 of them in the next three years. I have that much material on my hands.

And, yeah, you could, I mean, most of the detectives we had on the show, previous police work or attorney work. Yeah, there's like an endless supply of stories they have because they've worked all these cases. Right. And just a note here, someone wanted me to ask you, all the new books and new genres you're working on, do you have an idea about writing about failed love? In one of the books I do, actually.

It's interesting that you should mention that. But one that I'm working on right now, okay, which is number five in the series, has got a detective in a love affair with a woman that he meets. And, you know, the reason I put that in the book was because I'm trying to make these books as best as I can based on things that actually happened. And this book is about a certain detective who falls in love with a woman. And it's about their relationship and how the relationship. and how the relationship gets formed

and also how she reacts to the detective's job. His job is to put people in jail and she has some issues about that. So it is a love affair sort of book, but it's still a murder mystery. Still a murder mystery. So what do you love about writing? When did you start writing?

I mean, probably you're, works at the attorney's office, you had to write a lot of reports and dockets and courts and stuff. When did you start writing like novelish and fiction? Was there a point? Did you always do it when you were young maybe? What was the point that you're like, hey, I really think this is a thing. I'm going to pursue it. Well, yeah. When I was in the state attorney's office, I tried a case involving a man named Stephen Lynn Scott. And the long and short of it is that he told the police he had to dream about a murder. And it was a very interesting case. And I started thinking about writing about it way back then in the 1980s.

And that's kind of what I sort of wanted to do. The problem why I didn't do this earlier is because there's rules and regulations against state attorneys publishing books based on their cases. No. So I had to wait. But I, you know, I really want. wanted to write back when I was a state attorney, but like I said, the rules kind of prohibited that. Yeah, yeah, the rules prohibit it. Yeah, I can see why they give kind of a time thing there. So as we as we round out the show, what do you hope people come away with when they read your works

and what they learn from them? I hope they understand what justice is. Justice is the right moral thing. And that may vary from situation to situation, but that's what I hope people come across with. And the other thing, too, you know, I said that the books are about police misconduct, and that's very true. But there are also honest police officers in all these books. So I wanted to portray that as well and let people see, you know, what honest police work is versus what's not so honest. And that's kind of like my aim to kind of portray the police. And by the way, to portray the prosecutors, you know, in a very real way. And that's what I hope people take it across from the book.

Ah. Well, it would be pretty interesting. So as we go out, give people your dot coms, websites, emails, social media, where we want people to find you on the interwebs? Amazon. Amazon and Google. Right. Well, thank you very much for coming the show. We really appreciate, David. Very insightful, and I'm just looking forward to your burgeoning career of writing these wonderful novels and the series that will come and follow.

Okay. Thank you very much. Have a nice day. Thank you, David. And thanks, Ron, for tuning in. Order up his book, where refined books are sold. It is entitled The Detective's Quota. February 25th, 2021.

It is out. And watch for his upcoming series coming out as well. Go to Goodreason.com, Forteouschast, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortresschast Chris Foss, YouTube.com, Forteousch, Chris Foss, and Facebook. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next. You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life. Warning.

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