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The Crime CafeAuthor: Debbi Mack
Interviews and entertainment for crime fiction, suspense and thriller fans. Language: en Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Interview with Patrick H. Moore – S. 11, Ep. 10
Saturday, 25 October, 2025
My guest interview this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is with former investigator and crime writer Patrick H. Moore. Check out our discussion of Patrick's work in sentencing mitigation work. It's a lesser-known unique type of investigative work. You can download a copy of the transcript here. Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest today is a retired Los Angeles based investigator and sentencing mitigation specialist. Since 2003, he worked on more than 500 drug trafficking, sex crime, violent crime, and white collar fraud cases. My, what a mix. He also studied English literature and creative writing at San Francisco State University. As a student, he published several short stories and novel excerpts. In 2014, he published his first thriller novel Cicero's Dead. Today he has a three-book series, the first of which is a political thriller called 27 Days, which was along with Cicero's Dead, a finalist in various awards contests. As I said, it is the first of the three books in the Nick Crane thriller series. My guest was also co-founder of a blog called All Things Crime that apparently reached its zenith of popularity somewhere in the mid-2010s, which was what, 20 or 30 years ago? No, no, it was only last decade. It only feels like 50 years. Alrighty. It's my pleasure to introduce my guest, Patrick H. Moore. Hi. So how are you doing? Patrick (02:26): Oh, I'm doing great, Debbi. Hi. Thank you very much for having me on. Debbi (02:30): It's my pleasure. Believe me. And I was very intrigued to see that you used to be an investigator. Was that like a private investigator? Patrick (02:39): Well, I worked for a private investigator. The person I worked for, he held the private investigator's license, so I did investigations for him and also I did what's called sentencing mitigation work. We worked for lawyers primarily in the greater Los Angeles area, but also all around the country. And we would do a lot of their legwork. We would do a lot of their interviewing, and so we do their legwork, their interviewing, and also we would do a lot of the ghostwriting for the lawyers. So my specialty was actually writing federal sentencing memorandums, which are highly precise documents written in a very formal style that follow certain ground rules. (03:36): And so I wrote hundreds of these federal sentencing memorandums, and I also edited hundreds for my boss, but I also did investigations. But in doing sentencing mitigation work, it really is, it is like an investigation of a slightly different sort, that is you're not going out and knocking on doors or searching for things on the internet in one of the databases, but rather you're actually talking to your clients or our clients, my boss's company, John Brown and Associates. And so I would interview the clients at great length. I would interview their family members. I would collect character reference letters. So I was basically investigating the client his past, what he had or had not done, whether or not he had come from a disadvantaged background, all of those things. And so it was a kind of investigative work, but a kind of investigative work that very few people know about because the vast majority of the population has no idea that there are sentencing mitigation specialists in existence. And there actually are very few. I think Los Angeles really created this phenomenon, and I don't think it's really caught on in other parts of the country, which is why lawyers from other parts of the country would use my boss's firm too. Debbi (05:07): That's very interesting. Patrick (05:09): Because sharp lawyers quickly realized that to get those sentences a fair deal, they needed to have lots of ammunition, they needed to have lots of arrows in their quiver, and a full complete workup on the client they discovered was hugely helpful. We also did state cases, but those were fairly simple compared to the federal cases. My specialty was federal cases, drugs and fraud cases,
