Forget It, Jake, It’s Schenectady

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.