“What am I going to do?” asks Edward T. Norris. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Nobody wants to hire me.”
He has applied at five or six health clubs, he says, and a handful of retail stores. Each time, he checks the box that says he has been convicted of a crime. All he has landed is a part-time gig at a store, the name of which he won’t disclose. While he waits, he will launch today his potential new career as a talk-show host, appearing free of charge for two weeks as a guest on a Baltimore radio station.
So it goes these days for the man some believe is the best police commissioner in the history of Baltimore, a third-generation New York officer. This is the man who did what his predecessors couldn’t – and his successors haven’t. He reduced the killing.
He was 39 when he came to Baltimore; 42 when a strained relationship with City Hall prompted him to bolt to the Maryland State Police; and 43 when he pleaded guilty to using a city police account to finance extramarital affairs, meals and shopping trips.
Now he’s a 44-year-old convicted felon on house arrest. He is a month removed from a six-month stint in federal prison, and his new cell is the 1,050-square-foot Tampa home he and his wife bought while he was incarcerated. He is allowed out only to work, look for work and go to church on Sundays. Even though it’s 76 degrees outside, he wears pants and socks to cover his electronic monitoring anklet.
A reporter from The Sun came to Tampa on Friday to meet with Norris. But the man who loves the news media would have none of it.
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Less than two miles from his interviewer, he agreed to talk by phone. He disclosed where he planned to look for work that day – a mall near the airport where he says there are “help-wanted signs everywhere” – but the job hunt was aborted when Norris said he no longer had a car to go job hunting. His wife had taken their used Nissan Xterra to work.
Norris declined to be interviewed in person at his garage-less bungalow in South Tampa.
He says he is terrified to go back to federal prison for violating his house arrest, which forbids visitors.
Yet via phone, former inmate No. 41115-037 is willing to talk about, well, everything. Friday’s 90-minute conversation occurred between his probation officer’s unannounced first visit and the scheduled appointment of a phone specialist to install the line that will allow him to enter the world of Baltimore talk radio – joining “Out to Lunch” from noon to 1 p.m. on 105.7 FM.
The man who hired Norris noted his experience as a guest star on HBO’s The Wire. The former commissioner said he hopes this might help launch a new career, much like a man who went to prison after Watergate.
“Hopefully it works out, and I’ll have some kind of future in radio – a G. Gordon Liddy kind of thing,” Norris says. “Even if you’re a felon you can have some kind of career.”
Talk radio is known for wildly bouncing from topic to topic, and Norris seems more than comfortable with that type of format. He talked with The Sun about prison workouts, watching cartoons and who was a better boss, Mayor Martin O’Malley or Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.
It doesn’t take much to get him talking about his disbelief that he was indicted and pleaded guilty to corruption and tax offenses. “This country is so focused on sex and sensationalism,” he says. “There were so many misrepresentations. People never want to look at the facts.”
Asked if there is any truth to any of the charges, he says: “I swore under oath that I did everything, so I have to live with that now.”
Yet he acknowledges that he is frustrated that the felony conviction limits his career options. He can’t become a private investigator because he is prevented from securing any kind of work license in most states.
He says neither public nor private companies will hire him because of the publicity and what they can read about him on the Internet. “All they know is that I had custom shirts made out of a widows and orphans fund,” he says. “It’s a bunch of crap. … The worst part of this is not the criminal sanctions, it’s the Google hit.”
And he wonders if he will ever move beyond that reputation. “This is going to be my legacy forever?” he asks. “After all the lives I saved, after all the good things I did in that state, after all that good work, this is my legacy forever? It’s so unbelievable.”
Norris says he hasn’t told his 5-year-old son, Jack, that he was in prison. “I didn’t lie to him, but I told him that my work took me away,” Norris says.
On his last day before prison, Norris and his son watched a Spider-Man cartoon in which Spider-Man went to jail. Jack asked: “Do good people go to jail?” Norris responded: “Sometimes, Jack, it happens.”
The former commissioner entered a minimum-security prison last summer near Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. He was evacuated to Mississippi during hurricane season and finished his time in Atlanta, where he was released Jan. 19. He grew a long beard and kept his head shaved. Many in Atlanta came to believe he was a biker and crystal meth dealer. “I just let them think that,” he says.
What can’t be seen on the radio or through a phone interview is that Norris lost 40 pounds. His black T-shirt clings to his biceps. In prison, he did curls by attaching vegetable oil cans to a broomstick, forming a barbell. He also used bags of rice as weights.
After his indictment, Norris told his wife they could live anywhere. He always liked Florida, and the couple had friends here. After a visit, she decided she liked South Tampa, a collection of upscale neighborhoods near downtown and the water. They bought for $282,500.
He says he wants to remain anonymous here. “I just tell people I’m an HBO actor who’s a former cop,” he says.
These days, he says, he gets up early. Not like in prison when he rose at 5 a.m., but still before 7. He makes coffee, then packs a sandwich inside Jack’s Ninja Turtles lunchbox – usually cream cheese and peanut butter, or peanut butter and jelly. He watches cartoons with Jack (often Maggie and the Ferocious Beast) and sends the boy to school at 7:45 a.m. Norris can’t give him a ride because of the house arrest.
Days are spent talking on the phone or searching for jobs. At night, he cooks dinner for the family; a friend in prison taught him. One recent night’s menu included linguini with pesto and sauteed shrimp. “We try to keep it healthy – chicken and shrimp,” he says.
Norris and his family live off his $50,000-a-year pension from New York City, just enough to cover the bills. He says he drained his retirement accounts to pay for his legal defense and make ends meet. His wife recently started work in real estate but has yet to sell a house.
“I’ve got to figure out,” Norris says, “what I’m going to do for the next 30 years of my life.”
After he completes his house arrest this summer, he will return to Baltimore for his required 500 hours of community service; a federal judge recently denied his request to have the work moved to Tampa.
“If I’ve got to clean alleys, I’ll clean alleys, but I’d like to put my skills to use,” he says.
Norris still pays attention to Baltimore and Maryland; he is willing to offer free advice to acting Police Commissioner Leonard D. Hamm.
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“I wouldn’t discard all the New York City strategies. … It works. Don’t get mired in the politics. Take advantage of the fact that he won’t have to deal with the racial politics that a white chief would have to,” he says.
Yet Norris – the highest-ranking employee to work for both the governor and the mayor – won’t say whom he would favor in the 2006 gubernatorial election, assuming the two square off.
He says the biggest difference between the two is that O’Malley’s advisers were more likely to “push back” at nay-sayers, whereas Ehrlich supports “staying above the fray.”
“I kind of like both of them,” Norris says. “Without naming names, I really like the people Ehrlich has immediately around him better. … I think they’re both good leaders. I’m not going to say bad things.”
But, he adds, he’s not going to say nothing at all.
<!– ART CREDITPHELAN EBENHACK : SPECIAL TO THE SUN
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTFormer police chief Edward T. Norris says nobody wants to hire him.
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