The Art of Crisis Leadership. Kevin Cowherd
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in my office sometimes. I had to catch my breath. I couldn’t function some days. I’d walk out of a meeting and I’d smile and shake hands. Then I’d go into my office and almost fall down. My knees would buckle.
“Keep in mind, as I’m doing this, I’m trying to run a police department, trying to keep my family intact. And every media member in Baltimore who has my number…is calling and saying: ‘I hear there’s a sealed indictment coming on Friday.’”
Norris would lose it during those conversations.
“DO YOU THINK I KNOW?!” he’d yell at reporters. “DO YOU REALLY FUCKING THINK THEY’D TELL ME FIRST?”
He learned that the feds had gone through his bank records and visited his parents’ house in Brooklyn. Norris had borrowed $9,000 from his father when he’d bought his house in Baltimore. His father had signed the money off as a gift.
But prosecutors had found a check in Norris’ records that indicated he’d paid his dad back. So now the gift was being considered a loan.
“’That’s the headshot,’” Norris says a high-powered attorney told him. “’They’re going to pepper the indictment with things you didn’t do. They’re going to indict you for bank fraud and mortgage fraud, and they’re going to force a plea because they have you on that.’”
In a moment of despair, Norris asked Ehrlich: “Why are they doing this to me?”
Norris says the answer was succinct.
“You’re the 8-point buck in the state,” the governor replied. “Who else are they gonna do this to?”
The indictment was announced in December of 2003. In addition to charges of misusing some $20,000 and lying on a mortgage loan application, it contained lurid details of extra-marital encounters.
There was other stuff he could explain away, like more than $5,000 used to entertain deserving officers and colleagues at Orioles games. He was charged with buying boots for personal use—he said they were combat boots for work. Same thing with a knife that was listed. Interestingly, the final restitution request for gifts in Norris’ case was a whopping $100!
Norris resigned as state police superintendent the day the indictment was announced. His instinct, he told everyone, was to fight the charges. But on a chilly March morning in 2004, he showed up at U.S. District Court in Baltimore. Standing grim-faced before a judge, he pleaded guilty to conspiring to misuse money from the supplemental account and lying on tax returns.
“He made the decision,” his lawyer explained outside the courthouse, “that a long, drawn-out trial would bring too much pain to his family, his friends and the city of Baltimore.”
By this point, of course, his loved ones were already in plenty of pain.
The day after the indictments were handed down, Norris’s wife, Kathryn Norris, was stopped at an intersection in her car. Suddenly someone lunged at her, holding up the front page of The Sun that showed a photo of her husband and the headline: “Chief Lies, Cheats, Steals.”
Those were the comments Maryland U.S. Attorney Thomas DiBiagio had made to reporters one day earlier—the same day that Norris’ father, the proud former New York cop, had listened to the charges being read in court and became so distraught he had to leave.
Norris was sentenced to six months in prison, followed by six months of house arrest and community service.
In the weeks that followed, he was overwhelmed with feelings of fear, anger and shame. The thought of going to prison terrified him—everyone knew that doing time as an ex-cop could be its own form of hell.
He thought about suicide.
“I sat in Robert E. Lee Park with my gun,” he said, tearing up at the memory.
What kept him from pulling the trigger? The thought of his son, Jack, then 5, living without a dad.
From then on, he did everything he could to keep his mind off what lay ahead.
“I went into husband-father mode,” he said. “I kept myself extremely busy doing things to at least keep the family intact. I also bought toys for every week I’d be away. I put them in envelopes with a card. And my wife gave one to my kid every week, which she said I had mailed.”
Soon after the indictments, he moved his family to Tampa. Baltimore was too hot, in the figurative sense. Too uncomfortable. Too many bad memories. He was done with the city. So was his wife.
“We’ve got to get the fuck out of here,” Kathryn Norris kept saying.
In some ways, the last few days of freedom were the hardest. One night, he sat with Jack watching a Spiderman/Daredevil animated series on TV.
“Why is Spiderman in jail?” the boy asked suddenly, pointing at the screen.
Norris’ thoughts were a million miles away. He tried to re-focus. What?! Spiderman’s in the slammer? How do you answer that one?
“Well, Jack,” Norris said finally, “sometimes good people get put away by bad people.”
The day before he was due to report to the federal prison camp at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, a minimum-security facility, two old friends, former New York City detectives, flew down to Tampa.
“I wouldn’t let my wife or my dad drive me to prison,” Norris explained.
Instead, he and his buddies took off in a rented car. They drove through the Panhandle intent on raising hell one last time.
“Remember the Jack Nicholson movie ‘The Last Detail?’” Norris said, referring to the 1973 film about two Navy men ordered to bring a young sailor to prison, but who decide to show the kid a good time first. “We went to a strip club, we had steak, we got drunk.”
The next morning at 10, brutally hung over, Norris was banging on his buddies’ motel-room doors shouting: “Get up! The faster I’m in prison, the faster I get out! So let’s get this done!”
At the prison gates, Norris had one last request.
“Just fucking leave,” he said. “Don’t look at me. Just drive away. I’ll see you when I get out.”
His buddies left and didn’t utter a word to one another for more than an hour on the car ride back. They, too, were emotionally spent and couldn’t believe they had just dropped one of the best cops they knew at a prison gate.
Prison life was harsh, but not as bad as he had feared.
After processing, which included a strip search, the issuing of prison clothes, a physical and a session with a psychiatrist, Norris was assigned to a cell with six bunks. Scared of introducing himself as a former cop, he says he made up a “stupid story” about who he was and why he’d been incarcerated.
An inmate took him aside and said: “Look, we know who you are. We get newspapers in here. And people talk. Don’t worry. You’re fine.”
The inmate turned out to be Martin Grass, the disgraced former CEO of Rite Aid. Grass was doing an eight-year sentence for directing an accounting fraud. He and Norris would become friends. Three other inmates in the cell were drug dealers. The fourth was a former judge from New Orleans.
Norris let everyone else think he was a meth dealer. He soon settled into the mind-numbing, soul-crushing routine that is life behind bars.
He got a job in the kitchen. He was relieved to find that rape happened infrequently, since there was plenty of sex to go around if an inmate wanted it. He learned the various rituals you needed to learn to get by. One involved knocking on the table before rising after a meal, a signal that you weren’t getting up to stick a knife in someone’s back.
“I worked out, lost 40 pounds, read 70 books,” he said. “…I wrote letters every day, got a ton of mail and that keeps you going. I set goals every day. Mine were to get fit, breathe and prepare for what’s coming next.”
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