by David Simon
The Latonya Wallace murder stayed open. I was mortified by this—and not because a killer roamed free and the destruction of a child was unavenged. No, I was too overawed by the manuscript I would soon have to write to waste a moment thinking in moral terms. Instead, I worried that the book would have no climax, that its conclusion would be open and empty and flawed.
I drank some more, though by summer the detectives, feeling sorry for me perhaps, were buying as many rounds as they put to my credit card. To avoid the heart of the matter—actually writing—I wasted a week or two interviewing the detectives at length with a tape recorder, producing the kind of interviews in which people who have for months been candid and open suddenly talk into a microphone with the certain knowledge that posterity is at stake.
Edgerton caught a second child-murder and solved it, and, without knowing it, I met in the mother of the dead girl one of the central characters of my next book, The Corner. Ella Thompson began for me at the door of her Fayette Street rowhouse, a mother’s face contorted in grief. Four years later, I would wander into the recreation center on Vincent Street and encounter her again—by accident—as I began reporting a different narrative, one that even the best detectives can only glimpse.
During that year in the homicide unit, I never actually felt I’d gone native. Not in any way that seemed to matter. Not in my own mind, anyway. I dressed the part, and at crime scenes and in courtrooms I did what the supervisors and investigators told me to do. Ultimately, I enjoyed myself and the company of the detectives immensely. For four years I had written city murders in a cramped, two-dimensional way—filling the back columns of the metro section with the kind of journalism that reduces all human tragedy, especially those with black or brown victims, to bland, bite-sized morsels:
A 22-year-old West Baltimore man was gunned down yesterday at an intersection near his home in an apparent drug-related incident. De tectives have no motive or suspects in the case, police said.
Antwon Thompson, of the 1400 block of Stricker Street, was found by patrol officers called to the scene of …
Suddenly, I had been granted access to a world hidden, if not willfully ignored, by all of that dispassionate journalism. These weren’t murders as benchmarks of a day’s events. Nor were they the stuff of pristine, perfectly rendered morality plays. By summer, with the body count rising in the Baltimore heat, I came to realize that I was standing on the factory floor. This was death investigation as an assembly-line process, a growth industry for a rust-belt America that had long ceased to mass manufacture much of anything, save for heartbreak itself. Perhaps, I told myself, it was the ordinariness of it all that made it, well, extraordinary.
They went after the Fish Man for the last time in December. He didn’t break. Latonya Wallace would not be avenged. But by then I had seen enough to know that the empty, ambiguous ending was the correct one. I called John Sterling, my editor in New York, and told him it was better this way.
“It’s real,” I said. “It’s how the world works, or doesn’t.”
He agreed. In fact, he’d seen it before I did. He told me to start writing, and after staring at the computer screen for a couple weeks, wondering how you type the first fucking sentence of a fucking book, I found myself back at the Market Bar with McLarney, who swayed to the rhythm of a ninth Miller Lite and eyed me, much amused at my predicament.
“Isn’t this what you actually do for a living?”
Sort of. Except not something so big as a book.
“I know what you’re gonna write.”
Do tell.
“It’s not about the cases. The murders. I mean, you’ll write about the murders so you have stuff to write about. But that’s all just the bullshit.”
I listened. Carefully.
“You’re gonna write about us. About the guys. About how we act and the shit we say to each other, about how pissed off we get and how funny we are sometimes and the shit that goes on in that office.”
I nodded. As if I’d known it all along.
“I’ve seen you taking notes when we were just bullshitting, when we’re just sitting around with nothing to do but jerk each other around. We piss and moan and there you are writing. We tell a dirty joke and you’re writing. We say anything or do anything and you’re there with your pen and your notepad and a weird look on your face. And fuck if we didn’t let you do it.”
And then he laughed. At me, or with me—I’ve never quite been sure.
The book sold some copies. Not enough to make any bestseller lists, but enough that Sterling was willing to pay me if I could manage another idea for another tome. Roger Nolan confiscated my police intern ID and I went back to the Sun. The detectives went back to having their world unexamined. And save for an immediate, panicked reaction by the department brass in which there were threats to charge the entire unit with conduct unbecoming an officer—the raw wit and rampant profanity of their underlings left colonels and deputy commissioners shocked, shocked, I tell you—the general response to Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets seemed to be no less muted than that which greets most narrative nonfiction.
Certainly, it didn’t help that the tale came from Baltimore. The editor of the New York Times Book Review declined initially to review the work, declaring it to be a regional book. A few police reporters at other newspapers said nice things. One evening, when I was working rewrite, plugging out-of-town temperatures into the weather chart, William Friedkin called from Los Angeles to say how much he enjoyed the book.
“William who?”
“Friedkin. I directed the French Connection? To Live and Die in L.A.?
“Alvarez, stop fucking with me. I’m late with the goddam weather table.”
A few more deep breaths like that one and the hardbacks copies were off the display shelves and consigned to the true-crime section. I nestled back into the Sun, took up my old beat and began encountering the detectives from the other side of the crime-scene tape. Once, at a triple murder in North Baltimore, I lost my temper at Terry McLarney when he wouldn’t come out of an indoor crime scene to debrief me even as the home-final deadline passed. In the squadroom the next day, as I was ranting with probably a bit too much indignation, Donald Waltemeyer suddenly exploded out of his chair like a.45 round.
“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.”
I 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.”
Ah, normalcy.
And 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.
For 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.
After 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. N
o, 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 …
Nonfiction boy, Fontana called me after that, and not with any particular fondness.
I 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.
A 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.”
Barry 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?”
Eventually, 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.
To 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.
Fontana 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.
I 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.
I 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.
So 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.
There 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.
I 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.
As 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.
By 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.
Since 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.
He 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.
For 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.
But 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.
This defines a homicide detective.
Yet 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.
Never 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.
Rotation 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?”
As 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.
Yet 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.
Frazier’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.
More 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.
A 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.”
