by Kyle Swenson
There were few practical blueprints available for cleaning up a police department. Washington, D.C., didn’t help. During the Johnson years, as commissions and task forces put microscopes on the riots, there was an almost uniform official blind eye to police misconduct during the uprisings. These government brainstorm sessions—which would set the national policy—were also staffed by law enforcement, so progressive ideas like civilian oversight were never seriously floated. And finally, both the Johnson and Nixon administrations pressed local and federal law enforcement to adapt to stricter crime reporting requirements. The influx of data, it’s been argued, created the first detailed picture of American streets—while also suggesting that crime rates had spiked when really crime was just being more thoroughly reported.
In October 1972, a few months after his meeting with Attorney General Mitchell, Mayor Perk sent a testy confidential memo to both the city’s chief of police and safety director. “Events,” the mayor wrote, “have taken place in recent months which reflect upon the operation of your Department and Division respectively.” Park continued: “These events have included the actual indictment of Cleveland policemen for offenses such as armed robbery, rape, and manslaughter, the damaging of a bar by members of the Cleveland Police Department, and continuous citizen complaints of poor or no response to calls for assistance and help.”
Perk’s first order was that no officer on duty should henceforth be “seen or found in a bar or cocktail lounge unless he is there on a specific complaint or request for assistance.” The mayor also reminded his subordinates that police officers could only carry city-issued weapons; all other firearm requests were to be reviewed. Most dramatically, he ordered the entire top layer of the command staff, from captains on up, in both districts and detective bureaus, to swap positions every few months. The juggling would hopefully eliminate comfortable cronyism.
But the chronic problems rotting out the department like a bad tooth were immune to hard words from city hall or command staff musical chairs. That was the lesson of Carl Stokes’s administration. The extent of the division’s discord would become painfully, embarrassingly clear to all of Cleveland within eighteen months of Perk’s memo.
March 1974 was a strange season for both the country and the city. Americans coast-to-coast reached for morning newspapers splashed with headlines on President Nixon’s slow-motion implosion, triggered by Watergate. Confidence in the basic American institutions was in a tailspin. Downtown at Cleveland city hall, the basic municipal decision-making was on pause; Perk, a famously hands-on mayor, was in the hospital recovering from viral pneumonia.
Into this patch of dead static, the Plain Dealer began dropping a series of above-the-fold blockbuster reports on police corruption. The first salvo tied a handful of police officers to an East Side burglary ring responsible for a string of jobs, including knocking over a bank branch for more than seventy-one thousand dollars, stealing twenty-three thousand dollars’ worth of goods from a jeweler, and lifting twenty thousand dollars’ worth of suits and topcoats from a men’s store. The next day the paper ran a piece on four high-ranking officers who were allegedly receiving payoffs to keep an illegal gambling house open. When a lower-ranking patrolman attempted to close down the East Side spot, the paper reported, someone dropped a concrete block on his car as he was driving home after a shift. Follow-up reports from the Plain Dealer showed how officers—despite Perk’s prohibition—were still spending their shifts bellied up to bars and carrying military firepower. A later piece recounted how fifty-to-one-hundred-dollar weekly payments from pimps were keeping officers from arresting working girls, and pointed out the city’s busiest prostitute stroll was only two blocks from the vice unit’s headquarters.21
As the series continued through March, anonymous cops approached the paper to unload their own horror stories of working with bad partners. One officer told the paper it was common for police to fill their own pockets at crime scenes—even murder sites. “The police at the scene ransacked the house looking for any money that had been hidden. They would even go so far as to look into the mouth of the corpse for gold teeth,” the patrolman told the paper. “As funny as that may sound, I’ve seen it happen.”22
“I would fear being shot at,” another patrolman said when explaining why good cops didn’t turn in the bad ones. “Or set up as being involved in a crime which would ruin my career.”
So much ugly press just confirmed Attorney General Mitchell’s assessment of the department. Hot panic flashed through the ranks of local government. Thanks to Watergate, public opinion was also particularly sensitive to public corruption. A solution to the police problem—something, anything—was imperative. Or at least the appearance of a solution. Both inside the administration and on the city council, eyes turned to New York City and Mayor John V. Lindsay. In April 1970, a New York Times article revealed extensive corruption within the NYPD. Police whistle-blowers—including Frank Serpico—related tales of bribery, payoffs, shakedowns, and worse. Mayor Lindsay met the problem head-on, using a mayoral executive order to create an independent commission to investigate the claims. Known as the Knapp Commission (after its chairman, former assistant New York district attorney Whitman Knapp), the commission spent two years investigating the department’s practices and policies, eventually indicting fifty officers and rewiring the NYPD. The Knapp Commission was the gold standard for police reform. Even as Cleveland’s politicos were wrestling with their options in spring 1974, Chicago was staffing up its own thirty-person civilian unit to address law enforcement corruption. Perk’s law director and members of the council urged the mayor to similarly adopt the Knapp blueprint.
Instead, Cleveland’s mayor bricked the play. Rather than hire experts to tackle the problem, Perk announced he would ask four local clergymen and a rabbi to sit on a commission tasked with investigating police corruption. Rather than open the city’s bank vault to pay for the committee, Perk decided to apply for federal funding, essentially tying the abilities of what came to be known as the God Squad to the LEAA’s willingness to foot the cost.
Other city leaders were unhappy. “I think the committee idea is utterly ridiculous and basically insane,” George Forbes, the city council president and inheritor of Carl Stokes’s black political machine, told the paper. “Perk is either losing his mind or is still under sedation … the clergy have the ability to save souls, but right now we’re trying to save a city.”23
Obviously the God Squad was bound to fail. The federal funding never came through. And when the committee issued its first of what was expected to be many reports in June 1974, the clergymen made it clear they weren’t advocating for an NYPD-like overhaul. “The Cleveland Crime Commission,” the recommendations began, “preliminarily concludes that a long-term investigation of corruption in the Cleveland Division of Police, such as conducted by the Knapp Commission over a period of a year and a half, will only delay the inevitable departmental reforms which can have the greatest impact in eliminating corruption and misconduct.” The God Squad also punted the responsibility for a serious investigation back to the existing power structure. “We believe that such a criminal investigation of these practices primarily rests in,” the same early report noted, “and should continue to be a function of the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office and the Cuyahoga County Grand Jury.”
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor John T. Corrigan hustled together a grand jury in April. Four officers were indicted on charges related to the burglary ring. But a second grand jury tasked with sorting through evidence of widespread payoffs and bribes tied to gambling and prostitution proved as ineffective as the God Squad. In late May the panel announced there was insufficient evidence for charges against any officers. Instead, the grand jury released its own report blasting the department’s “atmosphere of toleration, condoning, and indifference, if not an atmosphere of favoritism” toward some illegal gambling operations. “It did not surprise us that such qualities as discipline, respect, competency were rep
laced by disrespect, incompetency, indifference and something less than quality police work,” the report fumed.24 But again, instead of criminal indictments, the grand jury served up organizational and policy recommendations.
With outside committees deferring to grand juries, and grand juries opting for recommendations rather than criminal indictments, concrete solutions to the 1974 police scandal seemed a long shot. Exacerbating the situation throughout the spring and summer was a crime wave that political leaders couldn’t ignore—and begged the question, corruption or not, of whether the department was actually doing its damn job.
Cleveland notched its record number of reported crimes in 1969. A year later the city watched those numbers slip. But as 1974 pushed on, and while the police were being roasted in the newspaper, reported crime citywide jumped 22 percent.25 The most eye-popping aspect of the new figures was that they had skipped across the Cuyahoga River. Between 1970 and 1974 on the West Side—the fortressed hub of the white ethnic constituency—there was a 17 percent increase in overall crime, including a 117 percent climb in break-ins, 138 percent in rapes, and 80 percent in robberies. “Things are changing,” a white West Side reverend told the Plain Dealer. “A fair number of older women here have simply refused to go out at night. They will not even come to a meeting here [in the church] at night, and they only live down the street.”26
Citywide patience was running low. Forbes publicly took aim at the department, going after their paycheck and civil service protection. Throughout the year, the outspoken council president threatened that if crime rates didn’t drop, he’d hack a sweetheart provision out of the city charter forcing Cleveland to pay its police officers the highest salaries in the state. In news reports, a peevish frustration flashed in the tone of commentators and reporters when writing about the department—culminating in a Plain Dealer series a year later titled “Do Police Give Money’s Worth?”
The political finger pointing in newsprint and council chambers did little to fix the situation on the streets.
Crowding into the news cycle on the same May afternoon as reports of the grand jury’s failure to bring indictments was news of another gun battle on the East Side.
Three black men who identified as devout Sunni Muslims—Craig Fowler, Larry Johnson, and Charles Jordan—abducted Schoolboy Jackson, a local drug pusher who sold to teens out of an East Side shoe store. The message: stop selling, or else. But Jackson slipped away from his kidnappers. Alerted to the possibility of armed black militants in the area, police were already piling into the neighborhood, more than seventy-five officers. Adrenaline spiked. Here was Glenville, round two. The cops arrived with guns blazing. “Cleveland police ran up the street shouting, ‘We’ll get those bastards,’” a witness told reporters. “It appeared that nobody was in charge. The cops ran up the hill shooting—pumping shotgun shells like mad.”
The three would-be kidnappers barged into a house on Union Avenue for cover. Inside were a mother and her eight grown children. With gunfire already raging in the street, the three barricaded themselves inside, using the family as hostages.
Police and the hostage takers traded gunfire for eighty minutes before negotiating the family’s release. The two oldest hostages walked out the front door with their hands up—and into a wall of bullets fired by confused Cleveland patrolmen. Reporters later confronted Police Chief Gerald Radenmaker about his officers’ trigger fingers while the two hostages struggled on feeding tubes in the hospital. “We got the people out, didn’t we?” he snapped.27
Fowler, Johnson, and Jordan’s trouble was just starting.
After they were roughly piled into separate patrol cars and taken to the East Cleveland police station, after they were arraigned on thirty-three felony counts and put through an exhausting trial and found guilty on six counts and each sentenced to fifteen to one hundred years in prison, after nine years inside and appeals and hearings and rejections and a last legal shot, Fowler, Johnson, and Jordan were finally allowed to tell their stories in a federal court in September 1983.
All three men described beatings and torture by Cleveland and East Cleveland police on the night of the shooting. The men were dragged down hallways lined with officers swinging flashlights, clubs, and fists. Charles Jordan recalled being clubbed so badly with a shotgun that the stock broke. Fowler detailed his interrogation. He wasn’t Mirandized. He was told he had to make a statement. He was told his friends were already cooperating.
“I told them that I knew my rights and I would like to have a lawyer,” Fowler testified in 1983. “They said, ‘Nigger, you have no rights. Give us a statement.’”
The man across the table from Fowler, he told the court in 1983, was a Cleveland Police detective named James Farmer.
“Detective Farmer was beating me with a blackjack on the head down the hallway. They told me that if I would not make a statement, ‘Nigger, we are going to finish what we started downstairs,’” Fowler told the court. “‘You’re going to make a damn statement or we are going to beat you half to death.’”
* * *
A year later, Rickey was sitting at a small table in a murky room, in nearly the same situation. He wasn’t Mirandized. He was told he had to make a statement. He was told his friends were already cooperating.
“The brothers have already told us everything,” the detective named Terpay told Rickey. Detective James Farmer nodded.
The teen had sat through enough hours of television to know the good-cop-bad-cop routine. He didn’t even bother reading the piece of paper the detectives were waving at him to sign in the windowless interrogation room. Terpay was sliding him lines about how this was all to help him.
“What could they possibly tell you?” Rickey snapped.
“They said you were the triggerman. You planned it. You had the gun.” The detective pushed the paper across the desk. “Just sign right here.”
“If I know anything about these two, I know that they aren’t going to do something that stupid,” Rickey answered.
“The guy’s trying to do you a solid,” Farmer chimed in. “You can still have a life after prison.”
Bullshit, Rickey thought. Bullshit. Terpay then switched into bad-cop mode. The table jumped under his slammed fist. “Goddamn, you are wasting my fucking time!”
They had been swatting around this volley for hours. Rickey knew Wiley and Ronnie weren’t anywhere in the police station talking because there was nothing to talk about. Fairhill was just a street to them, Mrs. Robinson a friendly face behind a counter, Harry J. Franks a shape under a sheet. Nothing beyond that. But the detectives only seemed interested in getting his signature on the paper. Exhausted with the banter, Terpay finally called for an officer to take Rickey back to his cell. But before he could leave, Terpay ordered the uniform out again.
“Stand up,” the detective said.
Terpay cuffed Rickey’s hands behind his back.
“A good man was killed, you fucking nigger,” the detective said tersely, now picking up a hefty phone book from a nearby shelf. Nigger, Rickey thought, feeling like the word had kicked down an unseen door, letting something new and serious into the room. Terpay opened the thick, flimsy book, settling it carefully over Rickey’s shaking chest like a carpenter lining up a board. Farmer held the pages in place while Terpay slammed his knuckles against Rickey, shocking the air out of his lungs and freeing a rush of tears from his eyes. He kept his lids shut, cinched tight, glued, while fists continued rolling into him like beats of a drum.
“You ain’t shit without a gun.”
4
X-RAY EYES
Cleveland, August 1975
The boy’s words were so quiet they didn’t carry across the courtroom, dropping out midflight like flimsy paper airplanes. Tall windows threw down rectangles of August light that stretched and yawned onto the wood floor while Ed Vernon tried to speak. Small already, he seemed now to be collapsing in on himself, hunched over, head angled away from the rest of the room. Despite prompts fr
om Judge John C. Bacon to raise his volume, Ed’s voice continued to falter. The courtroom leaned in to hear—the law students scribbling notes in the gallery, the jurors in the box, the lawyers at the two conference tables, and the defendant, Wiley Bridgeman, on trial for murder.1
“What did you see them doing?” Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Charles Mathay prompted.
“I seen them throw a pop in the man’s face after he came out of the store and then they hit him with a stick,” the boy said. “Then one of them—both of them rather, pulled a gun and tried to pull a briefcase away from him and then he wouldn’t let go of it so he shot him twice.”
“Who shot the man?”
“Rickey.” Ed then explained that he saw Ronnie Bridgeman throw liquid in the man’s face before hitting him with a pipe.
“When you saw this happening, what did you do?”
“I went back to the bus stop and peeked out,” the boy said. “I seen them take the briefcase and run down the street.” The words were marching out of him like he’d been programmed, Wiley thought.
“Where did they run?”
“To the car,” he mumbled. “I seen Buddy standing out and then when they shot—”
“I can’t hear,” Bacon moaned.
“When they started running down here, he got in the car and started the car.”
“Who did this?”
“Buddy.”
“This man here?”
“Yes.”
