Читать книгу The Art of Crisis Leadership - Kevin Cowherd - Страница 12

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When You’re the 8-Point Buck

Ed Norris’ fall from grace was as swift and stunning as any in recent memory.

The worst moment, he told me, came in the middle of his six-month sentence in federal prison, as he lay on the floor of a sweltering cell in Atlanta he shared with two other inmates.

“I’m wearing pants that are too small, a shirt that’s five sizes too big, I had two different colored sneakers on and I’m holding a newspaper rolled up in tape against the door with my feet to keep the rats out,” he recalled.

“Two guys in the bunk are smoking meth or whatever. I started to laugh uncontrollably. I’m thinking: I can’t believe a year ago I was the Colonel of the Maryland State Police! How the fuck did they ever get away with this?”

Ed was hardly the first public servant to be unceremoniously drummed from office. But the story of how Maryland’s top crime fighter landed behind bars made international headlines, pegged as yet another cautionary tale of a powerful figure brought down by greed and a lavish taste for the good life.

Over drinks and dinner at a Baltimore chop house one evening, he told me his story:

Built along the lines of a chimney, with a prizefighter’s mug and an inherent love for chasing bad guys, Ed Norris seemed born to be a cop.

He was the son of a New York City patrolman and a rising star in the NYPD when then-Mayor Martin O’Malley lured him to Baltimore in 2000 to be deputy police commissioner.

Within months, he had ascended to commissioner, eager to help the young mayor fulfill his campaign pledge to get crime under control. Norris vowed to bring Baltimore’s infamous murder count under 300 for the first time in more than 10 years, improve the sagging morale of the 3,200-member police force, and root out corrupt cops.

He quickly backed up the brash talk.

Emerging as a larger-than-life figure, he swaggered around town in his crisp uniform, black leather jacket and shades, head shaved smooth as a cue-ball. Tales of the new commissioner leaping 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 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.”

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 can’t wrap my brain around it,” he told her. “I’m sitting in the smoldering wreck that is my life.”

But little by little, the clouds began to lift.

In August of 2005, he got a call from a radio station in Baltimore. How would he like to do an hourly talk show every day from his Tampa home?

He was still immensely popular in Charm City. The station had taken a poll of listeners, asking: “Would you want Ed Norris back as police commissioner?” Ninety percent of the callers said yes. Evidently, they felt Ed Norris had made Baltimore safer. He had delivered on his promise to reduce crime.

So he accepted the radio gig. When a judge decreed that Norris had to perform his community service in Baltimore, he flew north, slept in a friend’s basement and continued to do the show, returning home on weekends to see his family.

With his service requirements fulfilled a year later, he asked the station for a long-term contract. Otherwise, he told them, I’m moving back to Florida with my family. The station gave him what he wanted and he moved his family to the Baltimore metropolitan area.

Pretty soon, Ed Norris was getting great ratings, making six figures and reclaiming his old celebrity status, this time via the airwaves. He was even asked by David Simon to play a detective known as Edward Norris on the hit HBO series, “The Wire.”

More than ten years later, he still works in radio as the co-host of the top-rated sports-talk “Norris and Davis Show” on 105.7 The Fan.

But as dessert and after-dinner drinks are served at the chophouse, Ed Norris frowns when I ask him how life is going these days.

“Am I content? No,” he says. “I still didn’t do anything wrong. It’s nice that I make more money than I did as police commissioner. I have an easy job. I have a nicer car…People are always telling me ‘You’re doing great!’ (But) I’m not a crook. And I have to live with this. And I’m out of a profession that I was the best at.”

“I tell people: ‘That’s what I was meant to do.’ I was really good at that. If your mother was the victim of a crime, you’d want me to have the case.’”

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1 Keep your family intact. Crisis causes tremendous amounts of short- and long-term strain and there are many instances when people in crisis have a difficult time managing themselves, much less others around them. However, when it comes down to it, your family is really all you have—they are the people that love you unconditionally. Most have heard that you “hurt the ones you love the most.” Flip the paradigm and do everything in your power to maintain your family structure. Families are generally the unintended victims and everything must be done to protect them from the people or circumstances that threaten your physical and emotional well-being.

2 Preserve your own life. In virtually every high-profile crisis case I’ve been a part of, clients have said that the thought of suicide entered their mind, particularly when there is intense media scrutiny. The rationale? Clients felt as if there was simply no way out. They were disgraced, humiliated, embarrassed and beaten down—they had no fight and lost their will to live. These were generally good-hearted people who reached a breaking point—they felt they had more value dead than alive. Their self-esteem was destroyed and they wanted the pain to simply go away. There are so many resources to help one get through life’s most difficult times. And, to a person, everyone I’ve interacted with who thought of suicide is glad they didn’t do it. Sadly, when someone takes his or her own life, the pain is passed on to those who love them. If you can make it through the rough patch by leaning forward, life will get better.

3 Know your numbers, above and below the line. We’ve all heard the saying that money is the root of all evil. Based on my experience, money that is mismanaged wittingly or unwittingly triggers long-term crisis. As a newly-appointed chief executive, never completely trust what others are telling you, particularly when it comes to the financial side of the shop. While it was very easy to rely on the fiscal advice Norris was given about the discretionary fund, he admits he should have been more diligent and less accepting of embracing the “that’s the way we’ve always done it” mindset. Thoroughly scrub each budget you are accountable for, particularly as a new executive. Trust but verify!

4 Lead from the front. Norris talks frequently about leading from the front and not asking anyone who works for you to do anything you wouldn’t do yourself. Whether Norris was chasing an armed suspect down a dark alley or testifying before combative community members or legislators, the men and women in blue knew he had their back and was acting in their best interest. Be the example and those that are loyal and motivated will operate within that shadow. Real results are driven by leaders who operate in the trenches.