by David Simon
For 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.
Struck, 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.
Listening 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.
It 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.
After 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.
Just 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.”
And then the sentence, “My God. They’ve all been transferred. I think I see now what it is they were trying to tell me.”
That 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.
And 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.
But 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.
Time itself is a means of attrition.
And, 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.
In 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.
I 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.
The 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.”
Such 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.
Recently, the city paid a half million dollars to a consultant seeking a new slogan for itself:
“Baltimore—Get In On It”
I 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.
But 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!”
The 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.
These 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.
Never 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.
This 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.
In 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.”
There 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.
Years ago, I read an interview with Richard Ben Cramer in which he was accused by a fellow journalist of engaging in a lo
ve 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.”
How 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?
I admit it. I love these guys.
At 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.
Lieutenant 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.
The 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.
For 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.
He 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.
That 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.
No response was forthcoming.
In 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.
Within 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.
When 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.
Along 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.
Worden’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.
Gary 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.
Recently, 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.
Without Roger Nolan to protect him, Harry Edgerton soon ran afoul of a department with little tolerance for iconoclasts.
In 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.
On 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.
The 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.
A 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.
Donald 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.”
The 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.
Edgerton’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.”
When 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.
After 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.
Among 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.
Danny 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.
Ravel’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.
Donald Waltemeyer, too, died of cancer last year, having retired from Baltimore city to become an investigator with the Aberdeen Police Department in northeast Maryland.
When 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.
