The Criminal Minds Of Jim And Tim

The Clemente brothers left the FBI to become Hollywood’s go-to murder consultants. Now they’re rebooting the biggest franchise in truecrime TV: America’s Most Wanted.

- By Rachel Monroe

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 likes to get into an offender’s mind with a .308-caliber sniper bullet.”

Thirteen years ago, the Clementes pivoted from the FBI to Hollywood, where they founded a production company, XG, that has become a force in the true-crime industrial complex at a time when viewers can’t seem to get enough of murder. This week marks the launch of their highest-profile project to date, a reboot of Fox’s fugitive-hunting juggernaut America’s Most Wanted.