In retrospect, it’s good that the year ended when it did, before one of the detectives provoked me to intervene in some truly harmful way. Once, in December, I found myself crossing that line- “going native,” as journalists say. I was in the back seat of an unmarked car cruising Pennsylvania Avenue, accompanying Terry McLarney and Dave Brown in their search for a witness. At one point, the detectives suddenly pulled over to the curb to confront a woman who matched the description. She was walking with two young men. McLarney jumped from the car and grabbed one man, but Brown’s trenchcoat belt became caught in the car’s shoulder harness and he fell back into the driver’s seat. “Go,” he yelled at me, still struggling with the harness. “Help Terry.”
Armed with my ball-point pen, I followed McLarney, who was struggling to get one man up against a parked car while the second eyed him angrily.
“DO HIM!” McLarney yelled at me, gesturing toward the second man.
And so, in a moment of weakness, a newspaper reporter shoved a citizen of his city against a parked car and performed one of the most pathetic and incompetent body searches on record. When I got down to the guy’s ankles, I looked up over my shoulder at McLarney.
He was, of course, laughing hard.
David Simon
Baltimore
March 1991
POST MORTEM
To properly credit the idea for this book, we journey back twenty years to a Christmas Eve I spent with Roger Nolan, Russ Carney, Donald Kincaid and Bill Lansey, observing some routine mayhem and preparing to write a brief feature article on the holiday observances of those charged with working murders. I, for one, enjoy the perversity of a silent, holy night punctuated by a double-cutting in Pimlico, and I thought there might be a few readers of the Baltimore Sun who might also be willing to appreciate the small wit of the thing.
So I brought a bottle up to headquarters, slipped past the security desk, and joined the homicide squad working overnight as they handled a street shooting, a drug overdose and the aforementioned knife fight. Later, with much of the work done and an early morning choral concert of holiday music playing on the office television, I sat with the detectives as Carney poured cheer.
The elevator doors rang and Kincaid appeared, back from the last shooting of the shift-a desultory affair that landed the victim in an emergency room bed with a gunshot wound to an upper leg. He would live to see New Year’s.
“Most people are getting up right now, going under the tree and finding some kinda gift. A tie, or a new wallet or something,” mused Kincaid. “This poor bastard gets a bullet for Christmas.”
We laughed. And then-I will never forget the moment-Bill Lansey said:
“The shit that goes on up here. If someone just wrote down what happens in this place for one year, they’d have a goddamn book.”
Two years later, Bill Lansey, bless him, was dead of a heart attack and I wasn’t feeling all that good about things myself. Despite record profits, my newspaper was challenging its labor union with a contract of givebacks in medical coverage and provoking a strike-an economic stance that was to become thematic in journalism over the next couple decades. I hated my bosses just then, and being one to nurse a grudge I sensed it might be good to conjure a leave of absence, something that would hold my job at a daily newspaper but avoid the newsroom for a time.
Remembering Lansey’s remark, I wrote to the Baltimore police commissioner, Edward J. Tilghman. Would it be possible, I asked with feigned innocence, to observe his detectives for a year?
Yes, he replied, it would.
To this day, I have no direct explanation for his decision. The captain in charge of the homicide unit was opposed to the idea, as was the deputy commissioner for operations, the number two in the department. And a straw poll of detectives in the unit quickly revealed most thought it a terrible notion to allow a reporter into the unit. My good fortune was that a police department is a paramilitary organization with a rigid chain of command. It is not, in any sense, a democracy.
I never managed to ask Tilghman about his decision. He died before the book was published-indeed, before I’d finished my research. “You need to ask why he let you in?” Rich Garvey later offered. “The man had a brain tumor. What other explanation do you need?”
Maybe so. But years later the CID commander, Dick Lanham, told me there was something more subtle in play. In response to questions about my status, Tilghman said his own years as a homicide detective were the most enjoyable and gratifying of his career. I suppose I’d like to believe his motivation for letting me inside was as pure as that, though Garvey was probably onto something as well.
In any event, I entered the unit in January 1988 with the improbable rank of police intern, working New Year’s Day with the men-and all nineteen detectives and supervisors were male-of Lieutenant Gary D’Addario’s shift.
The rules were fairly straightforward. I could not communicate what I witnessed to my newspaper and I had to obey the orders of the supervisors and investigators I followed. I could not quote anyone by name unless they agreed to be so quoted. And when my manuscript was complete, it would be reviewed by the department’s legal affairs division-not to censor my work for general content but to assure that I did not reveal key pieces of evidence in cases still pending. As it turned out, no changes resulted from this review.
Shift after shift, with detectives looking on warily, I filled notepads with what seems to me now a frantic stream of quotes, case details, biographical data and general impressions. I read through all the detectives’ case files from the previous year, as well as the H-files on some of the biggest cases I had chased as a police reporter: the Warren House shootings, the Bronstein murders, the Barksdale warfare in the Murphy Homes back in ’82, the Harlem Park jacket slaying from ’83. I couldn’t believe I could just walk to the admin office and pull entire case files, then sit at a desk and read them at leisure. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t thrown off crime scenes, or out of interrogation rooms. I couldn’t believe the department brass wasn’t going to change its collective mind, confiscate my ID card and toss me onto Frederick Street.
But days became weeks and the detectives-even those cautious souls who would change their very tone when I walked up on their conversations-soon lost the will to perform, to pretend to be someone other than who they were.
I learned to drink. I dropped my Amex card now and then, whereupon the detectives more than matched me round for round, showing me I still had a lot to learn. Staggering from the Market Bar at closing one night, Donald Worden-who had allowed me to follow him on calls and through cases, but always with a certain veiled contempt-glared at me as if for the first time and drawled, “All right, Simon. What the hell do you wanna see? What the fuck do you think we’re gonna show you?”
I had no answer. Notepads were stacked on my desk, a dog-eared tower of random detail that confused and intimidated me. I tried to work six days a week, but my marriage was ending and sometimes I worked seven. If the detectives went drinking after work, I was often in tow.
On night shifts, I would work doubles, coming in at four and staying through the midnight shift until early morning. Sometimes, coming off midnight, we drank at dawn, and I would stagger home to sleep until night. I learned to my amazement that if you forced yourself to drink the morning after a bad drunk, it somehow felt better.
On one February morning, I was hungover and late for morning roll call when Worden phoned to wake me with the news that a dead girl had been found in a Reservoir Hill alley. I was at the crime scene ten minutes later, staring at the eviscerated body of Latonya Wallace and the beginning of an investigation that would become the spine of the book.