“Jesus fucking Christ, Simon. Listen to you. You’re like one of these fuckin’ defense lawyers who get you on the stand and start asking if it’s true, Detective Waltemeyer, that you fucked some broad in 1929. Who gives a fuck? McLarney was on a scene and he didn’t give a fuck about your fuckin’ deadlines. So just go fuck yourself and tell your newspaper to go fuck itself and stop bein’ a fuckin’ lawyer with us.”looked over to see McLarney giggling, hiding his face in his sport-coat.
“A whole year up here,” Waltemeyer concluded, “and you’re still nothing but a prissy bitch.”, normalcy.it might’ve stayed that way had not Barry Levinson bought the book and metastasized the thing into an NBC drama, turning our small, self-contained world upside down. Suddenly, Edgerton was some proud, fully intellectualized peacock of a detective named Pembleton. And McLarney was bald with a funny mustache, and obsessed with the Lincoln assassination. And Worden was that actor-whatshisname-the one that got fucked in the ass in Deliverance. And Garvey? Damned if they didn’t give Rich Garvey red hair and tits. He was a woman, for Chrissake.me, Homicide: Life on the Street was a strange stepchild at first. I admired the drama and the craft of it-and to the detectives themselves, I actually defended the show’s willingness to fictionalize their world as a necessary license for long-form storytelling. I was certainly happy to have the book rediscovered; well before the NBC show ended its run, a quarter of a million copies were sold. But, in truth, I was ambivalent.reading the first three scripts, I wrote a long memo to Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana in which I explicated the intricacies of various investigative techniques and legal requirements. No, you cannot search a suspect’s domicile for a weapon because a detective dreamed that the gun was there. Probable cause is a required element for any affiant to obtain a search-and-seizure warrant signed by a circuit court, and so forth and so on and furthermore, et cetera, et cetera…boy, Fontana called me after that, and not with any particular fondness.went to the set a couple times during filming, standing around like any other tourist. The detectives themselves would occasionally show up, usually with wives or girlfriends who wanted to meet Danny Baldwin or Kyle Secor. A few took the gig of technical advisor, sitting by the video monitors and offering advice when asked, and sometimes, to the chagrin of the film company, when not.special moment in this regard belongs to Harry Edgerton, who, upon witnessing Frank Pembleton-his television alter ego-order a Scotch and a milk at a bar, shouted, “Cut.”Levinson turned to look at his technical advisor as if to examine a new species. Assistant directors and junior producers scurried to immediately right the wrong.
“But there’s no way I would drink something like that,” Edgerton said to me later. “Scotch and milk? Seriously, Dave, people I know are gonna see that and what are they gonna think?”, Gary D’Addario-a man of demonstrated tact and discretion-became the solitary advisor and, in time, played the role of a tactical commander in the cast. And, as the novelty of filming wore thin, the other detectives drifted away. So did I, feeling, as all authors probably do on a film set, entirely beside the point.be fair, one of the producers, Gail Mutrux, had asked if I wanted to try my hand at writing the pilot for the show. Ridiculously ignorant of the money involved, I had declined, telling Gail-who first read Homicide and brought it to Levinson’s attention as possible television fare-that she should get someone who knew what he was doing, if only to give the project a fighting chance. I would, if they wanted, take a later script, writing only when a template for the show was established.and Levinson obliged. And that later script, which I cowrote with David Mills, a friend from college newspaper days, proved so relentlessly dark and unsparing that NBC executives declined to allow it to be shot during that first season of the drama. It was only a year later, during the truncated, four-episode run of season two, that it was filmed, and then only because Robin Williams had agreed to star in the guest role.still have my first draft of that script-replete with Tom Fontana’s notes in thick red ink. Our scenes were long and the speeches longer, and the descriptive sections were marred with the kind of camera direction that denotes an amateur effort. Once Tom and Jim Yoshimura got done adding additional scenes for the guest star-and cutting dialogue for other characters-maybe half of the script could be credited to Mills and me.thought this a personal failure-even after the episode won the Writer’s Guild of America writing award-and I took the opportunity to remind myself where it was I actually belonged. Back at the Sun, working my beat, I began planning that second book, a year in the life of a West Baltimore drug corner. Mills, however, left his gig at the Washington Post for Hollywood, and after hiring on at NYPD Blue called back to assure me that any freelancer who, on a first script, manages to get half his words into an episode, is doing fine.after a second Homicide script-this one filmed with few changes-I jumped. It helped that my newspaper-once a good, gray lady of venerable, if somewhat hidebound traditions-had become the playground of a couple carpetbaggers from Philadelphia, two tone-deaf hacks for whom the apogee of all journalism was a five-part series that declared “The Baltimore Sun has learned” in the second paragraph, then offered a couple overreported pages of simplistic outrages and even more simplistic solutions.was a Pulitzer fever to the place, and a carefully crafted mythology in which no one knew how to do their job until the present regime brought tablets down from Sinai. I returned from my research on The Corner to a depressed and depressing newsroom, moreso after a series of buyouts began driving talented veterans to other newspapers. Eventually, cost-cutting and out-of-town ownership would all but destroy the place, but even by the mid-nineties, there was enough intellectual fraud and prize lust at the Sun for me to realize that whatever I had loved about the Sun was disappearing, and that, in the end, the artifice of television drama was, in comparison to the artifice of a crafted Pulitzer campaign, no longer a notable sin.hired on with the stepchild, and Tom Fontana and his crew taught me how to write television to a point where I was proud to work for the man. And when The Corner was published, I was ready, with Mills, to tell that story on HBO.for the detectives, most accepted The Corner as a legitimate story, fairly told. Following a shooting one day at Monroe and Fayette, Frank Barlow actually came across the yellow crime-scene tape to chat with me about old times and ask how the new project was going-an act of fraternization for which I had to explain myself for days afterward to touts and dealers and dope fiends. But other detectives regarded the second book as something of a betrayal-a narrative written not from the point of view of stalwart Baltimore police but in the voice of those they were chasing.the early nineties, that chase had turned brutal and unforgiving. Five years after I reported Homicide, the cocaine epidemic had overheated Baltimore’s drug economy and transformed the inner city. Where once there were a couple dozen drug markets, now there more than a hundred corners. And where once the city’s homicide unit had to work 240 slayings a year, suddenly they were contending with more than 300. The clearance rate slipped a bit, the bosses got nervous and, eventually, they panicked.the reign of Donald Pomerleau, the homegrown management of the Baltimore department had devolved to mediocrity, but it was only amid the cocaine wars that the cost of such was revealed. It was one thing to have a half-senile commissioner caretaking a viable department in 1981, when crackhouses and speedballs were just a rumor in Baltimore. A decade later, actual leadership was a fundamental need and, for the first time since 1966, the city hired a commissioner from the outside, giving him a mandate to clean house.did. But in the worst way, because Thomas Frazier, arriving with an air of supreme confidence from San Jose, almost singlehandedly managed to destroy the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit in the process.one thing, Frazier proved indifferent to the fact that inside every police agency in America there are two hierarchies. The first is the chain of command, where rank itself is the chief determinant; sergeants learn to supplicate before lieutenants, who prostrate themselves before majors, who genuflect before colonels, who kiss the haunches of deputy commissioners. That hierarchy is necessary to the form and it can never be wholly disregarded.the alternate hierarchy-equally essential-is one of expertise, and it exists for the department’s technicians, those whose skill at a specific job requires due deference.defines a homicide detective.incredibly, Frazier came to Baltimore and immediately declared that the rotation of police officers from one assignment to the next would constitute his plan for revitalizing the city department. No officer, he declared, should remain in the same assignment for more than three years.mind that it takes a homicide detective-not to mention other departmental investigators and technicians-at least that long to fully learn his craft and become effective. And never mind that rotation threatened the professional standing of every man in the homicide unit. Frazier cited his own career as a justification, declaring that he had, after three years in any assignment, become bored and desirous of new challenges.chased some of the best men from the city, as they departed to investigative jobs with the federal government and the surrounding counties. When, for example, Gary Childs and Kevin Davis decided to leave before submitting to the policy, I interviewed Frazier and asked him how he felt about such losses.
“These are guys who can carry a squad,” I said.
“Why does anyone need to be carried? Why can’t every man in homicide be the best?”hyperbole, it sounds great. But the truth about the Baltimore homicide unit-even when it was at its best in the 1970s and 1980s, when clearance rates were well above the national averages-is that some detectives were brilliant, some were competent and some were notably ineffective.in every squad there seemed to be a Worden, a Childs, a Davis or a Garvey to center the half dozen men and keep watch over weaker colleagues. With thirty detectives and six sergeants, it was possible for squad supervisors to monitor the struggling detectives, to pair them with proven veterans, to ensure that cases didn’t so easily slip between the cracks.’s other strategy-apart from simply chasing talent from the department-was to assign more detectives to the sixth floor. More squads. More new detectives. Eventually, the violent crimes task force was co-mingled with homicide on the sixth floor and another thirty bodies wandered to and fro amid the casework.detectives, less responsibility. And now, when a detective took a phone call on a murder, more likely than not he didn’t know which squad was working the case or what the capabilities of a new detective actually were. There had always been rookies-one or two a squad-and the veterans would look out for them, nurture them, making sure they weren’t given whodunits until they had gone out on a dozen calls as secondaries, or maybe even handled a dunker or two on their own. Now, whole squads were comprised of first-year men, and with the continuing departure of veterans the clearance rate fell dramatically.few years later, it was well below 50 percent, with the actual conviction rate hovering at about half that. And as in any institutional enterprise, once the expertise goes, it does not come back.
“They ruined us,” Garvey told me before putting in his papers. “This was a great unit and it was like they had a plan to ruin it.”my part, I had come to feel much the same in my own world, having seen some of the best reporters at my newspaper depart for the New York Times, the Washington Post and other papers-chased by an institutional arrogance that was every bit equal to that of the police department., Wooten, Alvarez, Zorzi, Littwin, Thompson, Lippman, Hyman-some of the best reporters the Baltimore Sun had were marginalized, then bought out, shipped out and replaced with twenty-four-year-old acolytes, who, if they did nothing else, would never make the mistake of having an honest argument with newsroom management. In a time of growth, when the chance to truly enhance the institution was at hand, the new regime at the Sun hired about as much talent as they dispatched. And in the end, when the carpetbaggers finally departed, their mythology of heroic renewal intact, they had managed to achieve three Pulitzers in about a dozen years. During the previous dozen, the newspaper’s morning and evening editions achieved exactly the same number.to Garvey over drinks that day, I came to realize that there was something emblematic here: that in postmodern America, whatever institution you serve or are served by-a police department or a newspaper, a political party or a church, Enron or Worldcom-you will eventually be betrayed.seemed very Greek the more I thought about it. The stuff of Aeschylus and Sophocles, except the gods were not Olympian but corporate and institutional. In every sense, ours seems a world in which individual human beings-be they trained detectives or knowledgeable reporters, hardened corner boys or third-generation longshoremen or smuggled eastern European sex workers-are destined to matter less and less.watching what was done to my newspaper, and to the Baltimore homicide unit, I began to write the pilot for a new HBO drama. The Wire, for better or for worse, has occupied my time since.after reading the manuscript for Homicide, Terry McLarney mailed me a single sheet of white bond paper. Atop that solitary page:
“The Book. Volume II.”then the sentence, “My God. They’ve all been transferred. I think I see now what it is they were trying to tell me.”was the only shot fired across my bow before publication, the only warning-however lighthearted-that the book might prove problematic for those it characterized.in the wake of Frazier’s rotation policy, as well as other departures of veteran detectives unrelated to that policy, McLarney’s dry, comic lament might certainly seem prophetic.there is a corresponding truth, and one that also bears noting: In 1998, looking back a decade to the year when I followed these men with pen and notepad akimbo, it was accurate to say that more than three-quarters of them were no longer in the Baltimore city homicide unit. But, looking back ten years from my moment as a police intern, it is also true that three-quarters of the detectives who had manned the unit in 1978 were also gone. And they departed, of course, without any book having been written about them.itself is a means of attrition., in time, Baltimore became comfortable with its depiction in both Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and the television drama that followed. The mayor appeared on the show; Maryland’s governor as well. The actors themselves came to be regarded as resident Baltimoreans, or Baltimorons as some of us like to call ourselves. Over the last decade and a half, I’ve signed copies of the book for the city’s politicians, for its civic leaders, for its lawyers, its cops, its criminals.some quarters, though, my welcome has worn thin, perhaps because both The Corner and The Wire offer a much darker vision of the problems that confront the city. There is consternation about the net effect of all this murderous narrative on Baltimore’s image and its viability as a tourist destination, to be sure. Conversely, there is also a peculiar pride at being part of a city that endures despite such an appalling and persistent rate of violence.know that sounds ridiculous-a hoary citing of lemons and lemonade-but there is something to it. From the first, Homicide was, I think, a blunt and clear-eyed response to the national neglect of urban problems, demonstrating if not our civic ability to solve those problems, then at least our honesty and wit in confronting them.Natty Boh beer ads used to declare Maryland to be “The Land of Pleasant Living,” just as a standard credo of local pride claims of Baltimore that “If you can’t live here, you can’t live anywhere.”sentiments might seem grandly mocked by the contents of Homicide or The Corner or certainly, given its angry, political tone, The Wire. But no such sarcasm is intended, and among residents of this city I don’t sense that many feel particularly abused. If you live here, you know the good, and you still sense the civic ideal that has somehow managed to survive so much poverty, violence and waste, so much mismanagement and indifference., the city paid a half million dollars to a consultant seeking a new slogan for itself:
“Baltimore-Get In On It”like it. An implied secret. As if you need to walk these streets for a while before you’re entitled to know for certain what is at stake in this city’s survival and why so many people still care.I confess that my favorite slogan came from a short contest sponsored on the daily newspaper’s website, where readers offered their own free suggestions to the highly paid image consultants, and one local resident, tongue in cheek, wrote:
“It’s Baltimore, hon… duck!”detectives would have recognized the humor, and, more than that, the temperment that gives rise to such humor. Hell, if they could buy the bumper sticker, they’d probably have it on the back of every unmarked unit.men lived and worked without illusion, and late at night, when I was rewriting sections of the book for the third and fourth time, I realized that I was trying to achieve a voice, a statement even, that they would recognize as true.mind the demographics of bookbuyers, or the sensibilities of other journalists, or, God forbid, whoever might be judging some book award somewhere. Fifteen years ago, when I was trapped at my computer, the only judgments that mattered to me were those of the detectives. If they read the book and pronounced it honest, I would not feel the shame that comes from snatching pieces of human lives and putting them on display for all to see.is not to say that everything I wrote was complimentary or ennobling. There are pages of the book on which these men appear to be racist or racially insensitive, sexist or homophobic, where their humor derives from the poverty and tragedy of others. And yet with a body on the ground-black, brown, or, on rare occasion, white-they did their job regardless. In this graceless age of ours, any sense of duty is remarkable enough to excuse any number of lesser sins. And so readers learned to forgive, just as the writer learned to forgive, and six hundred pages later the very candor of the detectives was a quality, rather than an embarrassment.the preface to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee asked absolution for his journalistic trespass, declaring that “these I will write of are human beings, living in this world, innocent of such twistings as these which are taking place over their heads; and that they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on, revered and loved by other quite monstrous human beings, in the employment of others still more alien; and that they are now being looked into by still others, who have picked up their living as casually as if it were a book.”are many journalists who believe that their craft must burden itself with a nodding, analytic tone, that they must report and write with feigned, practiced objectivity and the presumption of omniscient expertise. Many are consumed by the pursuit of scandal and human flaw, and believe it insufficient to look at human beings with a skeptical yet affectionate eye. Their work is, of course, accurate and justifiable-and no closer to the actual truth of things than any other form of storytelling.ago, I read an interview with Richard Ben Cramer in which he was accused by a fellow journalist of engaging in a love that dares not speak its name-at least not in newsrooms. Regarding the candidates he followed for What It Takes, his masterful narrative of presidential politics, Cramer was asked if he actually liked the men he was covering.
“Like them?” he replied. “I love them.”could he write a nine-hundred-page tome in their voices if he didn’t love every last one of them, warts and all? And what kind of journalist follows human beings for years on end, recording their best moments and their worst, without acquiring some basic regard for their individuality, their dignity, their value?admit it. I love these guys.this writing, Richard Fahlteich-a detective in Landsman’s squad in 1988-is a major and the commander of the homicide unit, though he is planning to retire after more than thirty years service within the month.Terrence Patrick McLarney, who commanded a squad on D’Addario’s shift fifteen years ago, is a shift commander, having fought his way back to the unit after years of exile in the Western and Central Districts, where he was banished after his shift commander politely declined an invitation to fisticuffs in the headquarters garage.reason McLarney felt the need to extend such an invitation was simply that his shift commander was no longer Gary D’Addario, who had been promoted first to captain, and, later, to major and command of the Northeastern District. The man who replaced D’Addario did not understand the homicide unit, in the opinion of many. He certainly didn’t understand McLarney, who, despite his protestations, his calculated appearance and his general demeanor, happens to be one of the smartest, funniest and most honest souls I ever had the privilege to know.his part, D’Addario thrived not only as a district commander but as the technical advisor to Homicide and ensuing productions. His portrayal of Lieutenant Jasper, the tactical commander on the drama, brought, if not widespread acclaim, then an opportunity for many subordinate commanders to advise him on the value of his day job.was forced to resign abruptly three years ago by a police commissioner who never offered a reason, simply summoning D’Addario to his office and issuing the demand.this came a couple days after D’Addario first appeared in a brief scene of The Wire, playing the part of a grand jury prosecutor, may be relevant. The current city administration is known to dislike the HBO drama, and though D’Addario wasn’t the only department veteran to appear in episodes, he was the only ranking commander to do so at the time. I wrote a letter to the mayor, noting that the part was a neutral one and that D’Addario’s dialogue brought no discredit on the department. I suggested that if displeasure with the major stemmed from his appearance on the show, then the decision should be reconsidered, and, further, that the administration should inform us one way or another if it had concerns about officers appearing on the drama.response was forthcoming.1995, Donald Worden retired on his own terms after more than three decades service. Kevin Davis-the Worden of Stanton’s shift-called it quits the same day. I made it a point to go out with the two veterans on their last shift, when they picked up a suspect from the city jail and tried unsuccessfully to get him to roll on an old murder. That story of their last day on the job was my last staff byline for the Sun-a personal metaphor of sorts, not that anyone was going to notice.a year, as the murder toll jumped and clearance rates fell, the department hired Worden back as a civilian contractor to help clear cold homicide cases. He is clearing them still, along with his cold case supervisor, Sergeant Roger Nolan, putting blue names on The Board even though he carries neither badge nor gun.I see Worden on occasion, usually for a pint or two at that Irish dive on O’Donnell Street, I always offer him a quarter. He politely declines, though he can’t help but point out that it would now be forty-five cents.with Fahlteich and McLarney, Worden and Nolan are the only remaining members of D’Addario’s shift still on duty. Much of the remainder of that shift is scattered throughout mid-Atlantic law enforcement, most having put in their retirement papers to take better-paying investigative positions in other agencies.’s partner, Rick James, went to work for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. Rich Garvey and Bob McAllister took positions as investigators with the federal public defenders office, with Garvey working out of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, branch and McAllister employed in Baltimore.Childs became an investigator for the Carroll County State’s Attorney’s Office, and later a homicide detective in Baltimore County. He was joined in Baltimore County by Jay Landsman, who was, in turn, joined by his son. And with two generations of Landsmans working the same precinct, some hilarity naturally ensued., on a surveillance, Jay got on the radio to ask if his son, who ranks him, had the eyeball on a car they were following.
“Got him, Dad,” came the laconic radio response, followed by delighted laughter from the rest of the surveillance detail.Roger Nolan to protect him, Harry Edgerton soon ran afoul of a department with little tolerance for iconoclasts.1990, his longtime partner, Ed Burns, had returned from the successful joint FBI-Baltimore city prosecution of Warren Boardley’s drug organization and immediately wrote a proposal for a specialized unit that could conduct long-term proactive investigations of violent drug crews. When that proposal disappeared on the eighth floor without so much as a response, Burns chose to cash in his chips, retiring in 1992 to begin a teaching career in the Baltimore city schools-a career that I shortstopped by a year or two, convincing Ed to go with me to West Baltimore to report and write The Corner. That partnership continues-Ed is currently a writer and producer on The Wire.his own, Edgerton left the shelter of Nolan’s squad-where his sergeant always had his back, and where the complaints of co-workers were always received with some salt. He transferred from homicide to a fledgling investigative squad-the violent crimes task force-which Edgerton believed could become the major case squad that he and Burns had long imagined.VCU, however, proved to be nothing of the sort, and, as it began concentrating on meaningless street rips and corner raids, Edgerton began a singular rebellion, going his own way, ignoring the orders of supervisors and alienating fellow detectives as only Harry Edgerton can.deputy commissioner then assigned him the quixotic, existential task of recovering the gun of a patrol officer who had been wounded in East Baltimore. Within weeks Edgerton was in negotiations with an east-side dealer to do precisely that. His bargaining chip was a series of homemade porn videos, all packed in a leather case seized during a drug raid. Acknowledging to the dealer that the tapes were of a personal nature, Edgerton was offering to exchange them for the officer’s gun. But in the interim, as negotiations progressed, a supervisor charged him with failing to inventory both the tapes and the leather case with evidence control, and, pending a trial board, Edgerton was suspended with pay. Then, before that case could be heard, he was found in West Baltimore, armed with his service revolver though suspended, meeting with a man Edgerton described as an informant.Worden, a sage among murder police, is fond of pointing to the massive binder that is the Baltimore City Police Department’s Code of Conduct and declaring: “If they want you, they got you.”department wanted Edgerton, having tired of his indifference to chain of command and his willful disregard of anything other than casework. He was convinced, before any trial board could convene, to wait out his twenty-year anniversary and then retire with his pension intact. He now does security work with several companies.’s partner in the Latonya Wallace case, Tom Pellegrini, continued to pick at the dead girl’s case for years afterward, but to little avail. He finally visited the Fish Man one last time and encouraged his best suspect to write down on a slip of paper whether he was guilty or innocent, then hide the document.
“That way, if you ever die,” Pellegrini explained, “I’ll find the paper and at least I’ll know.”the Fish Man did indeed depart this vale, several years ago, no such document was recovered from his effects. Sometimes the magic works, sometimes not.retiring from the Baltimore department, Pellegrini did a tour of duty with the United Nations in Kosovo, teaching death investigation to fledgling detectives there. He currently operates a private investigation firm in Maryland.others, Gary Dunnigan is now an insurance investigator. Downtown Eddie Brown went to work security for the Baltimore Ravens, as did Bertina Silver of Stanton’s shift. Rick “The Bunk” Requer left to man the department’s retirement services bureau, though his homicide incarnation lives on in Wendell Pierce’s portrayal of the legendary Bunk Moreland on The Wire, right down to the ubiquitous cigar. The remaining detectives of D’Addario’s shift-Donald Kincaid, Bob Bowman and David John Brown-have retired as well, though Dave Brown went out in a frustrating way, having sustaining a severe leg injury during the search of a vacant house.Shea died of cancer in 1991. I didn’t follow him on many cases, as he was a veteran of Stanton’s shift, but I have the distinct memory of standing with him at the most natural of deaths, in a Charles Village apartment where an elderly piano teacher expired in bed with her radio playing softly.’s “Pavanne for a Dead Princess” was broadcast at that moment, and Shea, being a man of deep and varied knowledge, knew this as I did not.
“A quiet, perfect death,” he said, nodding at the cadaver and granting me a moment I always remember when thinking about Danny Shea.Waltemeyer, too, died of cancer last year, having retired from Baltimore city to become an investigator with the Aberdeen Police Department in northeast Maryland.McLarney and the other members of his old squad got together with Aberdeen veterans at the wake, they quickly realized that Digger Waltemeyer had managed to infuriate and endear himself to both departments in exactly the same manner. At the funeral, men in different dress uniforms assured each other that they were privileged to know and work with both a consummate investigator and a renowned pain in the ass., the police intern from that long-ago year is still at large, his whereabouts subject to rumor and the crude conjecture of certain unit veterans. He is seen occasionally on Baltimore film sets and glimpsed in cluttered production offices and writing rooms. Sometimes, he attends the Baltimore homicide reunions out in Parkville, where retired detectives never fail to talk the same shit and ask, with a wink and nod, when NBC is gonna get those bigass checks in the mail.comment to that. But the intern and his credit card stand ready, knowing that for many reasons, if not for his entire career, he owes these guys-every last one of them-more than a few rounds.SIMON2006Closedthe decade and a half since David Simon finished writing this book he has transformed himself from a T-shirt wearing, wet-behind-his diamondstudded-ear, notebook-toting journalist of questionable prowess into an award-winning author, acclaimed screenwriter and accomplished television producer. During that same fifteen years, I have advanced exactly one rank.years passed by and I had not seen much of Dave, save for a couple homicide reunions and the retirement parties of Gary D’Addario and Eugene Cassidy. Then one day my son called from North Carolina, “Dad, there is a show on HBO all about your police department.” I replied that I was familiar with The Wire and asked Brian whether he actually watched the show. His response seemed almost reverential, “Dad, everyone in the Marine Corps watches The Wire.”had done it again.in 1988, when a confused command staff allowed Dave to spend a year with us, my cronies and I smirked and played with him like infants who had found a new toy in their cribs. To our delight, Dave, a youthful teetotaler, would get noticeably intoxicated after only a few measly beers. He would join us after work, perhaps hoping to glimpse homicide’s Holy Grail, but eventually he realized that we merely wanted to marvel at the spectacle of someone getting drunk on three little cans of liquid.took the good-natured ribbing and soon was operating unnoticed in our midst. He became the proverbial roach on the wall, soaking it all in while we were too busy fending off murders to calculate our behavior in his presence. At first we were wary of what transpired in front of Dave. We would check ourselves, our language, even our methodology. But, after a time, we were too busy to care; the busier we got, the more he scribbled. Though we allowed him to be present during routine interviews, legal concerns sometimes precluded his being physically in the room for certain interrogations. Back then we didn’t have the viewing portals and microphones now common in every police department’s interview rooms. We learned to open the door slowly, to avoid smashing Dave in the face. He would listen through cracks in the door frame, and he had excellent hearing, judging by how accurately he would later chronicle entire interrogations. When Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets came out, we were gratified by how clearly Dave had captured the controlled chaos that permeates every urban homicide unit: the roller-coaster tempo of some investigations, the frustrations, the triumphs, the steady stream of unfathomable violence.now-sobered command staff reacted to the groundbreaking work by inquiring of the department’s legal adviser whether we could be charged with conduct unbecoming an officer. Cooler heads prevailed and no charges were brought, though many of us watched our performance evaluations drop like lead weights in a polluted pond. But then came the NBC series based on the book and Dave’s time with us was seen in a more positive, Hollywood-enhanced light.police are obsessed with describing our fellow man: Hispanic male, black male, white male, everyone categorically defined. We sit on the witness stand and say, “The black male entered through the front door, then the black male exited through the rear door,” as if the black male would suddenly morph into a white or purple male if we didn’t keep a close eye on things. With that acknowledged limitation, here is how I remember David Simon, as he was fifteen years ago.was a white guy. When he first showed up you knew, from just one glance, that no one would ever, ever, ask to substitute his urine for theirs. Though he claimed to have been a newspaper reporter before his internship with us, I couldn’t verify that. I didn’t remember seeing him around before, though he might have been around, and I might have looked directly at him but not remembered. He was easy not to notice. Of average height, his physique was not remarkable. Actually, it was not really a physique. There was a body there, to be sure, but it was devoid of things one normally associates with a body, like muscles. Those that did exist were cleverly hidden between bones and flesh. I never understood how a guy could carry a notepad in one hand and a pen in the other, all day long, and not have thicker arms. He had hair then, though of the wispy, not-long-for-this-world variety. It has since departed, revealing a gleaming dome, the closest hair now being eyebrows. Beneath those brows are eyes of an undetermined color, maybe green or brown. It all comes down to this:
“White male, six foot, 170, bald, poorly dressed, puzzled expression, reeking of beer, tattered notebook in possession, last seen…”me, one of the more poignant passages from Homicide was Donald Waltemeyer straightening the clothing of an overdosed junkie to make her more presentable just before her husband arrived to identify her remains. Dave called it a “small act of charity” and it was vintage Waltemeyer. I was Donald’s sergeant for a long time and never fully understood him, but I respected him immensely.and I traveled twice to a rural corner of Indiana. An arsonist had set a fire there, killing his girlfriend and her two young children. He then made his way to Baltimore, set another fire, got caught, and felt compelled to confess his earlier crime to his transvestite cell mate, who immediately called us. We flew out for the preliminary hearing, but when the actual trial came around, Donald, a noted claustrophobic, argued for a road trip. The pink Cadillac he rented was wine colored, he claimed.morning, as we ate in a diner, several locals stopped to ask whether we were the detectives from Baltimore and to thank us. We were happy to be appreciated and Donald, beaming, related his surprise that people knew who we were. As the Cadillac loomed just beyond the plateglass window I reminded Donald that we were in a tiny, conservative town, hanging out with a transvestite and cruising around in a pink Cadillac. He chewed thoughtfully and replied, “I told you, it’s wine colored.”’s passing saddened us all.job has changed some over the past fifteen years. The so-called CSI effect has raised juror expectations to unreasonable levels and become the bane of prosecutors everywhere. There is more witness intimidation, and, not surprisingly, a corresponding reduction in citizen cooperation. Gangs have discovered Baltimore. The drug problem has not abated. There are fewer dunkers and more whodunits. On the positive side, there are epithelial cells. (I love to say that word.) They exploded onto the scene just a few years back, like some wonder drug, spurred by advances in collection methods and the general march of DNA analysis. You can mask your face, wash your hands and throw your gun in the harbor, but you can’t keep your skin from shedding DNA. Yet, in the overall scheme of things, those changes are minor and the job remains much as it was when captured by David Simon. It is all about crime scenes, interviews, and interrogations, played out against a backdrop of flawed humanity.always will be.MCLARNEY, Homicide2006SimonSimon’s Homicide won an Edgar Award and became the basis for the NBC award-winning drama. Simon’s second book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, co-authored with Edward Burns, was made into an HBO mini-series. Simon is currently the executive producer and writer for HBO’s Peabody Award-winning series The Wire. He lives in Baltimore.
Дата добавления: 2015-11-04; просмотров: 23 | Нарушение авторских прав
| <== предыдущая лекция | | | следующая лекция ==> |