KNOX — James Keough was the first New York State Trooper to have a police dog.

After 35 years of service, Keough has written a book, “The First K-9 Trooper in the New York State Police,” detailing his experience.

Keough said he had been working as a Trooper for five years, and was part of the bomb section, when one of his superiors asked him, in 1975, if he would like to have a dog and train with it to sniff out explosives.

At the time, he said, there were “hundreds and hundreds” of German shepherds that had been bred by the United States Army to be used during the Vietnam War, but the war was over, and the dogs had no other purpose.

In Baltimore, Maryland, there was a program, to which the Army donated dogs, to be trained to sniff out explosives.

Keough went to Baltimore, where he met his dog, named Baretta, after an Italian pistol.

The dog, he said, had never been exposed to anything except for the inside of a crate on an Army base, and the first night it spent in Keough’s motel room, it chewed the front end off of a couch and ate a shoe.

“He adjusted quickly, though,” said Keough. “I just kind of took it in stride.”

He spent six weeks training with the dog, going from basic obedience, to tracking, and setting up obstacles with explosives.

“Baretta was well-mannered and very disciplined,” said Keough.

In his first year with the dog, Keough said, he recalls two memorable cases. The first involved four suspects in a burglary, whose car was stopped just as it was about to go over a bridge into Amsterdam. There was liquid spilled in the backseat of the car and Keough and Baretta were called in to see if the liquid were an explosive.

Keough walked Baretta by the car and he “alerted,” meaning there was an explosive inside. He did the same on his second pass.

The liquid was nitroglycerin.

The second case, he said, was a bank robbery, in which the suspects blew up a safety deposit box. There was another device wired to a telephone pole outside of the bank and people were afraid it was something called a “gotcha bomb,” a term used for a second explosive device placed outside of crime scenes meant to detonate when police arrived.

The device on the pole, said Keough, was not explosive; it was something meant to scramble the bank’s security system so that the alarm wouldn’t go off. However, as he and Baretta walked through the bank, the dog alerted him that there was an explosive on the counter.

Inside a cough-syrup bottle was nitroglycerin that had been left behind by the robbers.

Keough said he quickly realized that, after five years of working for the bomb section, Baretta was going to make his job much easier.

Baretta became a part of his family, he said. He had four children, and the dog calmly let them jump on him and drag him around, but fiercely protected them from perceived harm.

Baretta went to work with Keough every day, and came home with him every night.

The two worked together until Baretta’s sudden death due to a cardiac abnormality when he was seven.

“I always felt I had gotten the best dog they had to offer,” said Keough.

The K-9 unit program expanded rapidly, he said, and today, there are more than 90 dogs working with the New York State Troopers.

Keough said he had always wanted to write a book so he decided to go for it. He self-published it through Amazon.

In addition to his experiences with Baretta, Keough’s book highlights other cases throughout his career.

He said he has already sold 100 copies.