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Letter to the editor

A crooked path

Once Maryland's top crimefighter, Ed Norris fell - hard. This son and grandson of police officers, now living in Tampa, wonders what to make of himself.

By KELLEY BENHAM
Published May 1, 2005

[Times photo: Keri Wiginton]

Ed Norris, 45, tries to write a book proposal detailing his rise and fall. The former Baltimore police chief is on house arrest in his 1,050-square-foot Tampa home. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” he said.

	[AP: 2003]
	On March 14, 2003, Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich, right, swears in Ed Norris in as the state police superintendent. A couple of months later, federal prosecutors started their investigation.
	[AP: 2004]
	Ed Norris leaves U.S. District Court with wife Kathryn after being sentenced to six months in prison, six months of house arrest and community service. Said Norris’ attorney David Irwin, at right: “Today people still come up to me and say ‘How’s Ed? He was the greatest chief we ever had.‘ The other half say, ‘I hope they kill him in prison.’ ”
	[Times photo: Keri Wiginton]
	The former police commissioner keeps in touch with Baltimore, doing a radio show by phone every weekday from his home in Tampa.

TAMPA - He doesn't want to talk. He is absolutely certain. Not one word. He is sick of the press, and he promised his wife. No, he doesn't want to think about it. Why did he open the door? He thought it was someone else. Like when you're expecting a cool drink of water and you get vodka by mistake.

"You write about me and I'm going to be f---," he says. "I'm going to get divorced."

His name is Edward T. Norris, and you wouldn't have heard of him. That's how he wants to keep it. He's new here. In Baltimore, his face has been on TV a thousand times, but not like this.

Here, in his doorway, he's just a guy interrupted on his way to the shower. Bare chest. Bare feet. Puppy face. Utterly vulnerable. This is not how he looked in his official Maryland State Police superintendent portrait, or even in the newspaper, striding away from U.S. District Court after pleading guilty to spending police money on steak dinners, shopping trips and extramarital affairs.

In those photos, he wore a dark suit and a stern face. He looked like a different man. Now he's a felon on house arrest. He works at the mall.

"In Baltimore, I was the greatest thing since Cal Ripken," he says, talking while not talking. "Here, nobody knows who I am."

Pretty soon he starts to cry, and it's not an easy thing to watch. So we're going to go now. The door closes.

He calls later. He's been thinking. Maybe he does have something to say.

"Can we start over?" he says.

Start over? Sure. We can start over.

Can he?

To see Ed Norris when he was Ed Norris, you have to go back about three years.

He was police commissioner of Baltimore, where the murder rate was seven times the national average. Even people who don't like him say he was the best chief the city ever had. When he arrived, he declared that he would bring the annual murder count below 300 for the first time in more than a decade. He did.

He was all over television with his shaved head and too-white smile, his dark sunglasses and black leather jacket. Advisers warned he was "too Tony Soprano" and suggested he get some khakis. He declined. He had a driver and bodyguards. When he walked into a room, officers snapped to attention and saluted. Someone laid out his uniform each morning and pinned on his medals. His suits said "Made for Edward T. Norris" inside.

"He was the top cop, and he let everybody know it," said his attorney, David Irwin. "He was in-your-face, aggressive. He was bigger than life." In bars, people posed for pictures with him. Rumors swirled about the women who wanted to be near him. He attended political dinners with his beautiful wife. He schmoozed politicians and recruits in fancy restaurants in New York and New Orleans. He liked Manhattans and filet mignon, rare.

He saved lives. Baltimore's murder count fell to 261, then 253. His stock rose and rose.

But it wouldn't be much of a story if it ended there.

"In any good story, there's conflict and tragedy," Irwin said. "Ed Norris was a fabulous police chief. Maybe he was a small-time criminal, too.

"But I think it's finally dawning on him that he's not Ed Norris anymore."

Now he puts on long pants in the morning to cover his electronic ankle bracelet. It's light and plastic, like a cheap diving watch. He can almost forget it's there.

He lives in Tampa because he and his wife wanted a new life where people didn't recognize them from television. Where they could pick up the newspaper and not see his face. They had friends here, so she bought the bungalow near the water for $282,500 and he followed a couple of months ago, when he got out of prison.

Every weekday afternoon, he talks to people back in Baltimore on a lunchtime radio show. He's still part of the daily swirl of city media and politics. By telephone, he comments on everything going on there, including his own story, which is still a story.

But on his end of the line, life is quiet.

Most days he makes breakfast for his son, Jack, who is 5. He packs his Ninja Turtles lunch box - a cream cheese sandwich or peanut butter and jelly. They watch cartoons. Jack leaves for school at 7:45 a.m. His father does not drive him or even walk him to the car.

If he steps too far from the monitoring device in the bedroom, a phone rings on the dresser.

He can leave the house to go to work, to look for work, or for church on Sundays. He hasn't made it to church in a few weeks now. When he goes, he makes sure not to ask God for any favors.

He applied for jobs at gyms, at the mall. If the application asked, he checked the box that said he'd been convicted of a felony.

Under the innocuous heading of Employment History, he confronted his old self. City of Baltimore, 2000-2002. Title: Police Commissioner. Supervisor: Mayor Martin O'Malley. Salary: $140,000. Responsible for all aspects of a 4,000-member police department.

He filled in the forms a dozen different ways, trying to wiggle around the inevitable interrogation, the excruciating self-examination. How can he explain his life to a mall store manager if he can't explain it to himself? Is a job application the place to define, or redefine, a man's life?

Using a minimalist strategy - Police officer. Retired. - he found a part-time job at International Plaza, selling shaving cream and perfume at Caswell-Massey for $8 an hour. That application did not ask about any criminal history, so he did not volunteer it. The store manager told him he seemed too sweet to be a cop. He thought: "Wait till she finds out I served federal time."

He rehearses ways to explain all this. "I can't straighten things out in my head," he says. "I can't wrap my brain around it. I'm sitting in the smoldering wreck that is my life."

He lost his $140,000 salary. Cashed out his 401(k) to pay lawyers. Sold his car, some furniture, some clothes. Took out a second mortgage to pay his $10,000 fine. His wife, Kathryn, an artist, is starting over, too, trying to sell real estate. She has stuck by him, but she'd like to not have to read about him anymore.

He's 45. Decades of uncertainty lie ahead of him.

"My life is one big I-don't-know."

Now he sits in the living room with the blinds closed. Kathryn and Jack are out. He listens to the same mix CD over and over, his prison soundtrack. Unchained Melody. Folsom Prison Blues. Hurt.

He daydreams about disappearing to some island and becoming a bartender. There's one reason he can't.

Jack comes home in the afternoons. He looks just like his dad did as a kid: curly blond hair, wide smile. Norris can hold him out in front of his body, perched on his big forearms. They rub noses.

Jack knows only that his dad used to wear a blue police uniform, then he wore a brown police uniform, then he quit wearing a uniform and went away for a long time on business. He knows Daddy's not the police anymore. He does not know about jail. He does not know that Daddy can't leave the house. He is full of questions.

"Can we go outside and play ball?"

Maybe later, or it's kind of dark or I'm tired.

"You used to be the police?"

The boss of the police.

The hardest question came the night before Norris reported to prison. They were watching SpiderMan 2, and in the movie, Peter Parker got arrested.

"Do good guys go to jail, Daddy?"

He was a cop for 24 years.

"The cop," he says.

His dad was a cop. NYPD. His grandfather, too. Both of his uncles.

Growing up in Brooklyn, he used to sit with his dad at the kitchen table and help him polish the brass buttons from his uniform shirt. He loved the tailored dark blue wool of the jacket. He used to wear his father's hat and play with his father's badge.

He knew the streets were full of bad guys. He knew two girls who had been raped. His dad was a good guy. He worked in his time off to catch the rapists.

He never played with trucks or trains. He was always a superhero. He was Captain America.

He was 20 when he started patrolling 42nd Street in Times Square, where thugs prowled for tourists. All the rookies at NYPD had bright, shiny badges, but his was tarnished and worn. No. 7560. His dad's.

Maybe he should have felt powerful that first night, but mostly what he felt was afraid. All he could think was, "What if something happens? What do I do?"

He ran up and down the streets, up and down the subway stairs, from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. Fights in progress, people with knives, people with guns, all night. He loved it.

He worked the streets for four years. He tore off part of his finger whacking a suspect with the butt of his gun.

He remembers seeing a guy slap a girl in the face, right in front of him. Then the guy looked at him and said, "What are you going to do about it, Captain America?"

He pounded the guy. He started to feel like he really was Captain America. One of the good guys. Girls wanted to walk down the street on his arm.

"You're doing the right thing. You're wearing the white hat," he said. "People see you and they're not afraid anymore."

He blitzed through the ranks at 1 Police Plaza, through narcotics and the detective bureau. He became a star in the late 1990s after hard-charging Commissioner William Bratton came in and the department starting holding commanders accountable for preventing crime.

Norris revamped the fugitive division, doubling the number captured from 6,000 to 12,000 in a year; he started a cold case squad that solved 27 murders in its first six weeks. He rose to deputy commissioner for operations at 36.

He still felt the same mixture of invincibility and vulnerability that he'd felt the first night on patrol. In a magazine interview, he said he felt like a kid who'd sneaked into the box seats at Yankee Stadium and was waiting for the usher to tap him on the shoulder and send him back where he belonged.

In 1999, he got a call from the mayor of Baltimore.

Baltimore had a murder rate five times New York's. In 1999, 305 people died there.

The city had a new mayor, a young, charismatic Democrat named Martin O'Malley. He sang in a rock band and campaigned on a promise to cut the killing. O'Malley brought in Norris from New York to make good on the promise. The press called them Batman and Robin.

Norris took over 3,200 officers, a $275-million budget, and one little off-the-books expense account that nobody worried much about.

He shook things up almost immediately. He made 9-to-5 cops work nights, because that's when criminals are out. He created a fugitive task force that caught almost all of the city's 250 wanted murder suspects. He fired people, including high-ranking African-Americans, and took the heat for it. He fought the City Council. He showed up on the scenes of police shootings. If he thought the shooting was justified, he'd say to the officer: Good job.

Soon after his arrival, he bolted from a rolling police car, chased down a heroin dealer and personally cuffed him. From time to time, officers would hear on the radio "Unit One in pursuit," and that part of Baltimore would explode like a beehive hit with a stick. Cops swarmed to back up the chief, bewildered thugs scattered. It made an impression on the deputy commissioner, who had worked for every chief since 1965 and rarely saw one actually make an arrest. "He just latched on to them and locked them up," said Bert Shirey, now retired. "It made him lovable."

He had a bit part on HBO's The Wire, a police drama set in Baltimore. He played a street-level detective named Ed Norris. In one episode, his character says, "Drink up and die right," then vomits all over the street. In another, he takes a shot at the police commissioner, saying, "Show me the guy who can straighten out this department and I'll give you half my overtime." A little inside joke for Baltimore.

In real life, crime dropped 29 percent by the end of 2002 and the commissioner lived almost as hard as his TV character.

"I never slept. It was like a circus act," he said. "The drinking, the partying. I did that. Absolutely."

He swatted at rumors. He said the press officer each week would present the latest: "Did you get arrested this week?" "Was a councilwoman escorted out of your apartment?"

No, but that summer, a Baltimore Sun reporter got a tip that Norris had an off-the-books expense account.

There would be plenty to write about.

Telling those stories, he can almost forget how it turned out. Most of the time, he keeps his old life sealed tight in plastic containers in the garage. He drags them inside to his office at the back of the house, where his police badges are still framed on the wall. Since he got out of prison, he hasn't wanted to see all this: the old press clippings and plaques and photographs.

"I can't look at it yet," he says.

He can't get away from it, either. The reminders are all over the house. His coffee mug still says "Commissioner."

At first it just looked like sloppy accounting. The city paid for an Ernst & Young audit, which recommended that Norris pay back $61.85 for a Nordstrom purchase he could not remember. He then met with the city finance director and agreed to pay back $6,000: a trip to New York to attend a funeral, Orioles tickets and souvenirs for his inner circle, $2,000 of undocumented advances.

His bosses backed him up. That December, he left the city to head the Maryland State Police. Judging by news accounts, everyone was shocked and sad to see him go.

A couple of months later, federal prosecutors opened their own investigation. Everything crumbled quickly, like that scene in All the President's Men when the Teletype machine spits out more and more damning news about Nixon.

His former deputy, Bert Shirey, had retired by then. The story unfolded night after night on the news. The phone would ring and someone would say, "Turn on Channel 11," and there would be his old boss, crying.

"I couldn't watch that," Shirey said. "I can't remember him that way."

Everybody agrees that the account had no written rules. It was not public money; it had started as a charity fund during the Depression and had grown over time. It was not subject to audit like the other accounts. No previous chief's spending had been investigated.

Norris spent $178,000 in three years, about the same rate as his predecessor. Most of it was indisputably legitimate: consultants, training, charitable donations.

After that, things got murkier.

Prosecutors released a 14-page list of evidence detailing trips, dinners and gifts. They lined up a number of witnesses: Female #1 through Female #8. A little whiff of sex, Norris calls it.

He was on the hook for about $20,000 in questionable purchases (Norris says it was less), including the $6,000 he'd already paid back. That's a small amount for a public corruption case, attorney Irwin said.

"But it was extremely detailed and unusual in its drippings and sensationalism," he said. "The government was brutally efficient in the presenting of this case, in setting out all the gory details in the indictment. They were enjoying the thought of parading out these eight women before a jury."

Norris was said to have taken "naps" with three or four women a day, sometimes while on duty.

"My lawyer tells me I'm sleeping with three and four women a day," he says now. "I came home and told my wife, "Jeez, I hope they leak that.' "

Put that long document in front of him and he lunges for his yellow highlighter, ready to justify every purchase. Those shoes were combat boots. That knife was for police work.

He gets irritated when it comes to the most publicized purchase: No. 9. Gifts for three women bought at Victoria's Secret the day before Valentine's Day 2001.

Norris, highlighter in hand, is sick of hearing about Females 1 through 8. Go ahead, ask him one more time.

"If you think I slept with somebody, I did. Everybody I ever talked to in Baltimore I had sex with," he says. "Let's move on to the criminal stuff. Because I didn't steal a f--- dime."

He swore he'd fight. Said he looked forward to his day in court.

Irwin told him he didn't have a chance.

"It wasn't the law of the case that mattered. It was the lore of the case," Irwin said.

"It's hard to argue that Victoria's Secret was police equipment."

Norris walked into court on March 8, 2003, and pleaded guilty to conspiring to misuse the account and to not reporting the illegal extra income on his tax returns.

His father, behind him in court, lost his breath and had to leave the room.

Norris was sentenced to six months in prison, six months of house arrest and community service. He paid $12,000 restitution and a $10,000 fine.

He bought 26 toys and put them in 26 envelopes. Every week he was gone, his wife put one in the mail to their son.

He went to a minimum security prison in Fort Walton Beach, inmate No. 41115-037. He ended up in Atlanta, where at his lowest point he spent a night sleeping on the floor holding a rolled-up newspaper to the door with his feet to keep out rats.

He remembers thinking, "I am in the Atlanta pen. I've got mismatched sneakers on. I've got orange pants on. Two guys just taught me to bend bars with sheets." He started to laugh out loud. "Last year I was superintendent of the Maryland State Police."

He grew a long beard. Everyone assumed he was a meth dealer, so he let them think it. He worked in the kitchen and learned to cook. "My bean pie," he says, "was off the chain."

The day of his release, the prison was ringed with television cameras. Prisoners on the inside got suspicious.

"Who the f-- are you?" they asked.

His son just stared at him when he got home, like, "Who are you?"

Now they spend more time together than ever. Jack doesn't bother with trucks or trains. He plays with superheroes.

One of them will play Obi-Wan and the other Anakin Skywalker. Is Anakin Skywalker a good guy or a bad guy? He was a good guy, until he became Darth Vader.

Norris tries to put ideas into his son's head, for later.

"Why did Peter Parker go to jail, Jack?"

The bad guys framed him, Daddy.

He has a file of things for Jack to read later. A graduate school in Virginia teaches a class on his leadership skills. He has been written about in a number of books. The U.S. attorney who prosecuted him was later reprimanded for being too predatory with public officials. He has since resigned.

Sometimes Norris clings to reminders of his old life. He watches cop dramas on TV. He watches local TV news. Watches the police search for missing kids and child molesters. Did they track down all the parolees? Did the credit cards turn up?

He hopes he can one day find work investigating old cases or advising small police departments. He knows there are shelves of evidence in paper bags no one has time for. He has time.

Other times, he just wants to be a guy no one knows, with an ordinary job. He liked working at the mall. He likes everything about the mall. When he gets this thing off his ankle, the mall will be one of his first stops.

He won't be working there, though. He was fired, he said, after somebody sent an e-mail to the corporate office saying who he was.

He went through bouts of guilt about how to provide for his son. He wished he'd never gone to Baltimore. At least, he wished he'd gone straight home after work.

"Even if I did everything they say I did, don't I deserve to make $8 an hour?"

The day after he was fired, he started looking for another job. He let his probation officer know where he was going and set out on his used Harley-Davidson motorcycle. He wore the dark sunglasses and black leather but still looked less Tony Soprano than he used to.

He went to a store on Dale Mabry where he likes to shop. Most of the people already know his name, but they don't know much else. He asked if they were hiring.

He got an application and shook some hands. The application was six pages. The critical question was near the bottom of Page 2. Question 6. "Have you ever been convicted of a crime?"

He didn't fill it out right away. He wanted to take it home and think about it.

How long can he tell people he's just an HBO actor? He has three more months of house arrest, then community service in Baltimore, then he has to face the rest of his life.

No more fudging with the job titles, he decided. No more incomplete answers. The application gave him exactly one line where he could tell the whole story.

He thought about it for a few days, put it off.

Then, one morning last week, while his wife and son were at Busch Gardens without him, he sat down at the computer. One line wasn't going to be enough to tell people who he was. He'd need a whole page. He looked at the keyboard, because he's a cop, not a writer. Okay, he's neither. His typing was slow and clumsy. Everything about this was hard.

But you have to start somewhere.

To Whom It May Concern.

- Kelley Benham can be reached at 727 893-8848 or benham@sptimes.com

[Last modified April 28, 2005, 09:14:03]