Homicide. David Simon
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applications to the Baltimore Police Department. He had once worked for a brief time at a private security firm, and though the job offered nothing even remotely resembling police work, it left him with the vague feeling that he might enjoy being a cop. In the late 1970s, however, the prospects for a law enforcement career were uncertain; most every city department was dealing with budgetary retrenchment and hiring freezes. Still, Pellegrini was intrigued enough to attend the interview for the Baltimore department. But rather than wait for a reply, he pushed on to Atlanta, where he had been led to believe that the Sun Belt’s economic boom was a better guarantee of employment. He stayed overnight in Atlanta, reading the classifieds at a depressing diner in a ragged section of the city, then returning to the motel to hear from his aunt, who called to say he had been accepted by the Baltimore academy.
What the hell, he told himself. He didn’t know much about Baltimore, but what he’d seen of Atlanta couldn’t exactly be described as paradise. What the hell.
After graduation, he was assigned to Sector 4 of the Southern, a white enclave almost evenly divided between affluent urban homesteaders and an ethnic working class. It was hardly the most crime-ridden section of the city, and Pellegrini understood that if he stayed there ten years, he would never learn what he needed to know to rise in the department. If he was going to be any good at this, he told himself, he had to get to one of the rough-and-tumble districts like the Western or, better still, to a citywide unit. After less than two years in a radio car, his ticket out of the hinterlands came in the form of an approved transfer to the Quick Response Team, the heavily armed tactical unit responsible for handling hostage situations and barricades. Working out of headquarters, QRT was considered something of an elite unit, and the officers were divided into four-man teams that trained constantly. Day after day, Pellegrini and the rest of his squad would practice kicking in doors, fanning out across unfamiliar rooms and then mock-firing at cardboard cutouts of gunmen. There were cardboard cutouts of hostages as well, and after enough practice, a team could get to the point where, under optimal conditions, if every man did his job, they might hit a hostage no more than every fourth or fifth time.
The work was precise and demanding, but Pellegrini felt no more at ease in QRT than he had anywhere else in his life. For one thing, his relationship with the other members of his team was difficult, primarily because the unit was short one sergeant and Pellegrini was selected by the other supervisors to serve as the officer-in-charge. An OIC is accorded a little extra pay, Pellegrini learned, but little extra respect from the men under him. After all, it was one thing for the rest of his team to take orders from a sergeant with real stripes on his sleeve, it was another to have those orders coming from a temporary supervisor with no more rank than the men under him. But more important to Pellegrini than the office politics was his memory of one particular encounter in the spring of 1985, an incident that gave him his first look at the kind of police work that truly appealed to him.
For almost a week that year, the QRT took its orders directly from the CID homicide unit, hitting several dozen locations in East Baltimore in a search for a wanted man. Those raids came in the wake of a police shooting in which Vince Adolfo, an Eastern District patrolman, was murdered while trying to stop a stolen car. An east side boy was quickly identified as the shooter, but in the hours after the slaying the suspect managed to stay on the wing. As quickly as the homicide detectives identified an address as a possible hideout, the QRT was there with a maul and shield, taking down the front door. It was the first time that Pellegrini got a chance to watch the homicide unit up close, and when the Adolfo detail ended, one thing was certain in his mind: He wanted to be one of the people who live by finding the right door. Some other cop could have the job of kicking it down.
He acted on that thought by doing something extraordinary—at least by the standards of the average police department. Armed with a carefully prepared résumé and letter of introduction, he took the elevator to the sixth floor of headquarters and walked into the administrative offices next to the homicide unit, where the commander of the Crimes Against Persons section makes his home.
“Tom Pellegrini,” he said, extending a hand to the captain in charge. “I’d like to be a homicide detective.”
The captain, of course, looked upon Pellegrini as if he were the citizen of some other planet, and with good cause. In theory, an officer could apply for posted openings in any section; in practice, the appointment process for CID detectives was both subtle and politicized—even more so in the years since the department had abandoned standardized testing for detectives.
For older hands like Donald Worden and Eddie Brown, and even Terry McLarney, who arrived as late as 1980, there was an entrance examination for CID—a test that managed to weed out those applicants incapable of writing a respectable warrant, but also to promote a good many people who were simply good at taking tests. Moreover, the test results—though they implied a quantitative approach—had always been subject to politics: an applicant’s score on his oral exam was usually only as good as his departmental connections. Then, in the early 1980s, testing was discontinued and appointment to detective became purely political. In theory, police officers were supposed to make homicide by distinguishing themselves elsewhere in the department, preferably in some other investigative unit on the sixth floor. Although most of the applicants did indeed manage that prerequisite, the final decision usually had more to do with other factors. In a decade of affirmative action, it helped to be black; it also helped to have a lieutenant colonel or deputy commissioner as a mentor.
Pellegrini and the captain had a brief and inconclusive conversation. He was a good cop with a respectable performance sheet, but he was neither black nor the disciple of any particular boss. But Jay Landsman heard about this brief meeting and was impressed with Pellegrini’s approach. To walk into a commander’s office with nothing more than some typewritten pages and a handshake required stones. Landsman told Pellegrini that if he made it to homicide, he’d be welcome as a member of his squad.
In the end, Pellegrini had only one card to play: a well-connected lawyer for whom he had once done a favor during his time in the Southern. If there’s ever anything I can do, the guy had said. That was a few years earlier, but Pellegrini called in the marker. The lawyer agreed to do what he could, then called him back two days later. There were no openings in Crimes Against Persons, but through a connection with one of the deputy commissioners, he could get Pellegrini into William Donald Schaefer’s security detail. It wasn’t homicide, the lawyer said, but if you can last a year or two in the service of Mayor Annoyed, you can pretty much name your poison.
Reluctantly, Pellegrini took the transfer and thereafter spent nearly two years following Hizzoner from community meetings to fund-raisers to Preakness Parades. Schaefer was a tough man to work for, a machine-bred politician who prized loyalty and a willingness to eat shit above all other human attributes. There were several days when Pellegrini left work with mayoral insults ringing in his ears, and several more when he went home suppressing an almost overwhelming desire to cuff the city’s highest elected official to a radio car bumper.
Once, at a March of Dimes event where Schaefer was serving as master of ceremonies, Pellegrini made the mistake of intervening in the mayor’s performance. As Schaefer waxed prolific on everything from birth defects to Baltimore’s new aquarium, an event organizer pointed out that the March of Dimes poster child, a little girl confined to her wheelchair, was not being included. Sensing disaster, Pellegrini reluctantly wheeled the child closer to the mayor, speaking in a soft stage whisper.
“Uh, Mr. Mayor.”
Schaefer ignored him.
“Mr. Mayor, sir.”
Schaefer waved him away.
“Mr. Mayor …”
When the mayor finished his speech, he wasted no time wheeling around on the plainclothes detective.
“Get the fuck away from me,” said Schaefer.
Still, Pellegrini played the good soldier, knowing that in Baltimore a machine politician’s word is gold. Sure enough, when Schaefer was elected Maryland’s governor in 1986, the people in his entourage got their pick of the lot. Within days of each other, there were two appointments to CID homicide: Fred Ceruti, a black plainclothesman from the Eastern, and Tom