Gregg Owen has lived two completely different lives.

As a teenager he was already playing in touring rock bands. By the late 1960s he was on keyboards with The American Breed, whose hit “Bend Me, Shape Me” sold over a million copies, and he performed across the Midwest, opening shows for bands like The Doors. He also played keyboards with the band Jerico. He kept performing all through law school, alternating semesters between touring with the band and studying law in Chicago.

In early 1976 he spotted a small notice on his law school’s bulletin board: the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office would be interviewing interns the next day. He cut his long hair, bought his first suit, and applied. That decision changed the course of his life.

As an Assistant State’s Attorney at the Criminal Courts Building at 26th and California, Gregg tried 64 jury trials, 61 of them murder cases, and finished with a record of 62 and 2. In 1981, State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley appointed him the first Chief of Gang Prosecutions in Illinois history, taking on some of Chicago’s most violent criminal organizations. His work put him in the middle of the courthouse corruption that would later lead to the FBI’s historic Operation Greylord investigation.

After leaving prosecution, he built several businesses. He co-founded a group of national automotive magazines and later created a text-messaging platform used by car dealerships across the country, which sold in 2019.

Today he writes true crime drawn from the cases he personally prosecuted. His book Convergence, written with Jonathan Dixon and published in September 2025 by 26th Street Books, tells the story of the Apartment 131 murders: a brutal Chicago double murder that was solved in days but took four years to reach trial.