George O'Brien and Douglas Cooper discuss The Super Cops: The True Story of the Cops Called Batman and Robin with author L. H. Whittemore.

Interviewers Doug Cooper and George O'Brien get inside this true story of two New York policemen who turned convention on its head and became the stuff of legend with their spectacular arrests of 660 felons. The Batman and Robin monikers came directly out of Dave Greenberg and Bob Hantz's "gymnastics"-- scaling buildings with grappling hooks and leaping onto escaping villains. They went after narcotics in crime-plagued Bedford-Stuyvesant, in the era when cop duos (French Connection) were newspaper lore.

Whittemore freely states that these guys were drop outs; they could have become criminals. But they saw their buddies go to jail, some die. But in the police academy, they fought the system too. Broke the rules and challenged the bureaucracy that got in their way. Their intuition and street smarts were the "coin of the realm”. Conformity, mediocrity, pay-offs and jealousies were the enemies of wiping out crime.

The book reads like an exercise in counter-intelligence: the two fought 26 civilian complaints, wired cop investigators, and assassination attempts.

Yet Greenberg and Hantz's exploits became an MGM movie. The two received every conceivable citation and commendation, achieved a 97% conviction rate, and both were promoted--to Detective. Instinct and intuition were their tickets to becoming New York's crime-stopping duo.

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The Douglas P. Cooper Distinguished Contemporaries Collection (1967-1974) contains rare interviews with influential writers, statesmen, artists, songwriters, journalists and others who have left their mark on our culture.

The Origins of The Cooper Collection

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