Photo: Nigel Parry for New York Magazine Photo: Nigel Parry for New York Magazine
When Jim and Tim Clemente were growing up in Queens, their mother, a nurse, hoped they would go into medicine. Her sons had other ideas. It was the late 1960s, and gruff, heroic cops were always on TV, sprinting down alleys and tackling suspects. The brothers were temperamentally distinct Jim was the thoughtful outsider, inclined to think his way through problems, while Tim was the adrenaline junkie with an uncanny ability to withstand pain. But they both agreed that catching bad guys seemed like a fun thing to do for a living. “Jim wanted to be a detective,” Tim told me. “I wanted to be a cop.” The brothers eventually got their way, and by the 1990s, both were working as FBI agents. Although their career paths were similar, their differences persisted. “I like to get into offenders’ minds, to figure out how they tick,” Jim told me, whereas Tim “says he like