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.”
In prison, he learned that his nemesis, DiBiagio, the U.S. Attorney who had brought charges against him, had “resigned” amid allegations that he had ordered subordinates to produce other “front-page” indictments. Still, the news did little to cheer Ed Norris at the time. Prison is a place where your emotions shut down. Joy is hard to come by.
After hurricanes hit the Panhandle, he was transferred to a prison in Yazoo City, Miss., then to the federal camp in Atlanta. The inmates he’d become friendly with promised Norris they wouldn’t divulge his identity.
But on the day of his release, news trucks descended on the prison, waiting for him to come out of the gates.
Other prisoners watched the TV cameras setting up, stared at him and asked: “Who the fuck are you?”
Good question. Even Ed Norris didn’t know anymore.
He was 45, a convicted felon. What would he do now? He needed a job. He was on home detention with an ankle bracelet, able to leave home only for work, church and the gym. But who would hire him?
Nevertheless, he started looking. Every day. But every job application asked: “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” Finally, he filled-out one that didn’t and got a job at a high-end perfumery at a Tampa mall.
He made $8 an hour and liked the job just fine. He says he was a valued employee.
“Then I got a call one day from the manager,” he said. “Someone recognized me and called the company. So the manager said ‘So sorry’ and fired me. I said ‘You want me to bring the key back?’ She said no, they already changed the locks.
“So I got fired! From a minimum wage job! At the mall! I’d been out for three months. You wonder why people go back to their criminal behavior? They have to get money somehow.”
A Tampa newspaper reporter got wind of Norris’ story and stopped by his house to see if he’d talk about his situation.
It was a bad day to drop by.
“I
