Hall High School alum Tony Monheim details 30-year career in law enforcement

Tony Monheim knew from his first ride-along with a state trooper he was going to become a police officer.

“I was born to be a cop,” he said. “I just knew that. ... I never looked back.”

After his first ride-along, Monheim switched his major from accounting to law enforcement at Illinois Valley Community College the following day, completing his degree at Western Illinois University.

“He always had a concern for people,” said Jim Coutts, Monheim’s lifelong friend. “He just wanted to help people. ... I think that was his mission in life. He just wanted to be helpful and make sure people were safe and protected.”

Today, the Hall High School alum is an author and business owner, traveling the country training others in criminal investigations with a focus on homicide and crime scene investigations. His books outline two notorious cases; the satanic murder of Argelio Gonzalez in 2000 and a gang war that overtook Miami for most of the 1990s between the Boobie Boys and Vonda’s Gang.

Monheim has spent the majority of his 30-year career working as a detective for the Miami-Dade Police Department: 16 years in the robbery bureau and the past 12 years a squad supervisor in the homicide bureau.

“At the time, it was really easy to move up to detective,” he said. “Miami was exploding in population growth in the ‘70s ... I was so lucky at that at point in my career that I could move up so quickly.”

When Monheim retired, he knew he wanted to “keep [his] hand” in law enforcement. He began teaching criminal investigation courses in 1990, and began his own business in 2006 by starting HomicideTraining.com.

“Almost the day I retired, I put together a class,” he said. “I had taught a couple of glasses even before I retired. I knew that I liked it and wanted to teach other cops ... I wanted to give back and teach some of the younger guys the tricks that I learned and trade.”

His classes started where he did in robbery investigations. He then added homicide investigations and officer-involved shootings. When it became too much for him to teach all three, he enlisted the help of retired Miami-Dade detective Jeff Lewis. They traveled the country teaching until the COVID-19 pandemic.

“COVID literally destroyed my business,” he said. “No call came in, I got no classes. Everybody wanted to do online, everything was Zoom.”

Like most of the world, Monheim found himself at home – with nothing but time on his hands. He looked back on his career and thought he would try writing a book about one of the most “interesting” cases he’s worked on, entitling it “I have a Devil Inside Me: The True Story of Satanic Murder in Miami.”

Lazaro Galindo, who was convicted second degree murder of Argelio Gonzalez, believed he was possessed by an “evil entity,” called Candelo that previously possessed his uncle, who had been killed right next to him.

According to a September 2007 Associated Press article, as a teenager, he kept a black cauldron filled with hatchets and knives, all tools he used to sacrifice animals for his religion. He once told a detective he had an insatiable desire to eat human flesh. He described the grisly murder in a nearly 40-page confession, which was detailed at his just completed murder trial.

Monheim said it’s easy to follow the wrong lead in any case, but a case where there are so many variables discovering the right lead and following it until the end is key.

“You can get sidetracked on any investigation really easily,” he said. “Identifying good leads and following them and identifying bad ones is the heart of police work. That’s the heart of being a good detective.”

Monheim believed the story needed to be told and although he struggled to write at first, eventually he put pen to paper and “got into a groove” until he felt comfortable publishing.

“It was such a great case,” Monheim said. “Everybody I had ever told the story to thought there was a book in there ... I actually had several authors that called me over the years, I’ve had people from Sony Productions that wanted to do a movie … I gave them my reports, but nothing ever ever happened.”

After the success of his first novel he sat down to write the book he originally intended, “Boobie Boys: Murder and Mayhem in Miami.” It details one of the most prolific gang wars in Miami’s history, over the course of the 90s between the Boobie Boys and the Vonda’s Gang.

Monheim said the two gangs were fighting over drug turf, together both organizations were responsible for more than 40 murders and 100 non-fatal shootings over the course of a decade.

It took Monheim two years to go through all of the documentation, including police and court records.

“I was just overwhelmed,” he said. “It was just so massive, I just couldn’t wrap my head around trying to write the whole story ... My intention was always to write the Boobie Boys book. That was the best case I’ve ever worked in my entire 30 years”

After assembling a task force, police arrested more than 60 people in connection with the gangs. The leader Kenneth “Boobie” Williams, and his right-hand man, Efrain Cosado were found guilty of an umbrella racketeering count rounding up trafficking and violence.

“Drug murders are the hardest murders to solve,” he said. “We decided the best course of action was to just put these people in jail and stop the killing in any way.”

For now, Monheim said he is taking a break. His last book was published in August. He is toying with the idea of writing another book outlining a new case in every chapter.

“In homicide, I was responsible for over 300 murders,” he said. “I still have notes in my garage. If I go through. I’m sure there’s going to be 8 to 10 good cases that I could come up with and write a chapter on each one.”