The Minnesota Connection is a true story written from police records, interviews with ex-prostitutes and pimps, and the personal experiences of Al Palmquist and numerous other officers of the Minneapolis Police Department.
             The primary purpose of this book is to expose serious problems that need to be solved.
             Prostitution has always been a problem in Minneapolis, as in all large cities. The Mayor's office and the police department sought to control, if not end, the vicious game that destroyed women mentally and physically. But arresting and convicting the whores without rehabilitation accomplished little and salvaged few lives.
             She arrived with multiple scalp lacerations bleeding into her hair so badly you could not tell she was blonde, a smashed nose, chest and back furrowed with bleeding welts, abdomen a mass of gray pits with angry red rims caused by cigarette burns. She was struggling in the arms of a Minneapolis police officer. She had been found lying next to a dead girl, as beaten as she, and holding a gun. But her hands had been broken. She had been arrested for murder, or was she also a victim?
             On the street they called her Candy, she was 14yrs old. A prostitute in the city of Minneapolis. In the Hennepin County Hospital she refused to answer to any name, refused to see an attorney, or talk to the juvenile authorities. Three days after her surgery, she tried to sneak out of the hospital. Bandaged and half naked, she was discovered under soiled sheets in the laundry room. When she threatened suicide, Candy was transferred to the psychiatric wing.
             A nurse, knowing about Al Palmquist being a special kind of cop, a caring one who was also a minister, called him for help.
             August, 1977 Al Palmquist, met Candy. Candy's case was more than prostitution, assault and murder. She was an example of the growing trend to recruit 'chili-dog hookers' (so called because they were very young, often see walking ...