from his cruiser to personally slap the handcuffs on drug dealers abounded. So did stories of his epic carousing at upscale bars and restaurants.
He shook up the department, changing beats and firing senior officers. He made cops used to day shifts work nights, because that was when the criminals worked. He made going after dangerous fugitives a priority. He was a cop’s cop.
He seemed to show up after every police shooting. If the shooting was justified, he’d huddle with the shaken cop and say, “Good job,” letting him know the new commish had his back.
When the media arrived, Ed Norris would step in front of the TV cameras and say: “This officer did what he was sworn to do. We should all be proud of him.”
His fellow cops loved him. How could they not? Criminals feared him. He fought with the City Council and ticked off some in the community with his tough tactics, but also developed a reputation with others as a New York hothead and showboat.
But for many in Baltimore—the city O’Malley called the most violent and addicted in the country—Ed Norris was a genuine civic hero.
Crime fell dramatically. So did the homicide count. The papers took to calling the young mayor and his top cop “Batman and Robin.” For the first time in years, there was a sense the city was a better, safer place for its citizens.
“I was the greatest thing since Cal Ripken, Jr.,” he laughed.
A couple of years later, it all began to unravel.
It started with seemingly innocuous questions about an off-the-books expense account.
The Baltimore Sun reported that Norris used the little-known supplemental fund for expensive dinners at steak houses, weekends at the opulent W Hotel in Manhattan, Orioles tickets and assorted souvenirs.
“They started beating my brains in with this,” Norris recalled. “They tried to misrepresent this as taxpayer money. It wasn’t. It was a fund that originated in pre-Depression Baltimore that was put together by police for widows and orphans.
“It was the commissioners’ discretionary fund. They could use it any way they wanted, with no oversight.”
Police commissioners had used the fund for generations. Norris insisted to everyone that he did nothing wrong.
The pricey steak dinners? Not so pricey when you consider he brought along four staff members, he said. One New York trip was to attend a funeral. He paid for the O’s tickets himself. The souvenirs were inexpensive trinkets he’d give to out-of-town visitors as a good-will gesture. Most of the money that was spent—some $179,000—was determined to have gone toward legitimate departmental expenses. But some $20,000 was red-flagged. Norris agreed to pay back the money he’d spent on alleged “personal items.”
Still, the allegations and intense scrutiny were wearing on him. So was the job itself. At a meeting with Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich to see how the state police could help the city, Norris says Ehrlich popped the question: “How would you like to be the state police superintendent?”
Norris was immediately intrigued.
“A lot of stuff was going down in Baltimore,” he told me. “Racial politics, everything else…I was under tremendous stress there. Because we took such an aggressive crime stance, I buried seven cops in three years. That takes a toll on you personally.
“It was very hard for me. I never slept. I tried to appear like I was everywhere. I’d go home at 8 at night and be back out at 2 in the morning. I was exhausted. This was a chance to not be exhausted.”
In December of 2002, Norris agreed to head the Maryland State Police. O’Malley was upset, Norris says, but sent him a beautiful framed photo of Ulysses S. Grant as a going-away gift.
This was an inside joke. When crime in Baltimore was down, the mayor would refer to Norris as General Grant, the Civil War hero for the Union. When crime spiked, Norris became Gen. George B. McClellan, whom President Abraham Lincoln replaced for being ineffective.
Critics immediately accused Norris of abandoning the city. Things soon got worse for the swashbuckling new state police boss. Weeks later, federal prosecutors began their own investigation of his tenure in Baltimore.
The U.S. Attorney’s office seized files from police headquarters as evidence. Now the feeling around Ed Norris was that of a gathering storm, one that could sweep in and batter him at any moment. Was this a politically-motivated investigation for leaving Baltimore after only a few years? Some said so.
“It was tremendous pressure,” he said. “I would collapse 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
