Rounding Third and Headed for Home

Source: Cincinnati Reds

Monday was a busy day, like any other. One might point out, as my manager did, that it was my work anniversary. I generally don't take notice. But I also always take my birthday off so they don't decorate my cube. (I hate that.) Had to help my car-impaired stepson and his wife get around while they wait for a water pump install. And my television's backend platform went down so I couldn't even watch broadcast or a DVD. I entertained my wife for two hours with my vast vocabulary of swear words and shaming Vizio on two social media platforms, both with GIFs of someone smashing a television.

Oh, and to cap it off, Pete Rose died at the age of 83.

To say my reveling in my technological misfortunes and hanging out with family ground to a screeching halt is an understatement. A big piece of my childhood just disappeared without warning. We had already lost Dame Maggie Smith and Kris Kristofferson over the weekend, along with a pair of lesser-known but well-regarded actors. But Pete Rose. Charlie Hustle.

Wow.

Pete is one of those guys who is complicated. And yet he's not. His gambling scandal in the late eighties came as a shock to those of us who grew up following the Big Red Machine. Even growing up in Cleveland's sphere of influence, we worshiped the mighty Reds. They had an all-star line-up: Rose, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Joe Morgan, Dave Concepcion, Ken Griffey Sr. I had Rose, Bench, and Concepcion's Topps cards from 1976. Of course, my mom threw them away before I realized how valuable they were. But when you're forced to watch a foundering Cleveland Indians, who would go on to a decade under the ownership of a dead man, you latched on to the next nearest thing. And no Clevelander in their right mind would become a Pirates fan. Oh, we had Steelers fans. There's a reason the original Steelers-Browns rivalry worked so well. But the Pirates? Ew! The Reds, however, were from Ohio. And unlike cities like New York, Chicago, or LA, with two teams in the same city or very near each other, we knew the Reds were NL to our struggling AL team.

And Pete Rose was the face of that team.

As an adolescent, I sat at the edge of my seat as Rose chased Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak record. (He came up short, alas, but boy, was that great baseball.) As a young man, I was shocked when Pete beat Ty Cobb's hit record. I still lived on the fringes of the Cleveland exurbs back then, blasting Led Zeppelin from my Camaro while the wind blew through my mullet. I thought, "Wait. He's how old? And he's still breaking records?" He would retire from playing a year later and settle in as the Reds manager. That's when it happened.

It was discovered Pete bet on baseball. Eventually, he would admit to it, and he would even admit betting on the Reds, a big no-no. I was shocked. Mind you, juice ball was not really a thing yet.

I moved to Cincy not long after, and as I spent more time here, I also ran into people who knew Pete, met Pete, even did business with Pete. And I was not surprised. Or even disappointed. Pete is a product of Cincinnati's West Side, and it doesn't get anymore Cincinnati than that. This is old neighborhood, where you're born, live, and die within the same city blocks. Gambling in bars is a part of the culture there. Skyline Chili, an institution in the rest of the city, is sacred there. You don't drink craft beer; you drink Hudey or Natural Lite or Bud Lite. (The woke thing did nothing to dent Bud Lite's sales. The trans model who triggered it was a UC athlete, so Kid Rock could go hang. He's not even real Detroit anyway, 32-mile to Eminem's Eight Mile.) Gambling is a big part of West Side culture. It's at every church festival, in every bar, at the Eagles Club. It's Fred and Barney hanging with Joe Rockhead. Blue collar culture.

And no one was more blue collar than Pete Rose.

Was what Pete did that bad? 

Well, he broke the rules. In fact, it's a rule the NFL doesn't think twice about coming down on and with less fanfare. I suppose if Tom Brady had been caught gambling on football or Joe Burrow or Patrick Mahomes, it'd be career-ending. At the same time, there was a sense the lifetime ban and the exile were only the beginning, that Commissioner Bart Giamatti intended to rehabilitate this most revered baseball player. Indeed, the Reds and the city of Cincinnati refused to acknowledge the ban. Owner Marge Schott received less support than Pete over the years. In fact, it seemed only Johnny Bench, the one player as talented and beloved as Rose, could be a critic. 

But Giamatti died before the healing could begin. And Rose spent decades in exile. Only in the 2000s, after Marge Schott was run out of the MLB on a rail, after juice ball, after the botched attempt at contracting the leagues, baseball tried to meet him halfway. Pete confessed to betting, and baseball let him participate in the opening of Great American Ballpark as long as he didn't wear a uniform. (He wore a Reds cap with a suit.) Soon, he was in the Reds Hall of Fame. He was doing commentary on one of the baseball recaps. One wonders if he might not have been a viable replacement for Joe Nuxhall, the Hall of Fame broadcaster who retired from Reds color commentary in the 2000s. Of course, Bud Selig, a saner commissioner than Faye Vincent, might not have suffered that line to be crossed, but Pete Rose was back in baseball. But he wasn't. And Cincinnati didn't care what MLB thought.

Pete Rose is a great noir character, one Shakespeare might have loved and Twain would have poked gentle fun at.  But Pete didn't need Will or Mark. He was already larger than life just showing up for work. Even when it all went sideways.

Paging David Simon and Ed Burns...

 We all loved The Wire, the gritty, realistic crime series based in a Baltimore whose underside is all too familiar to anyone living in a city with over 50,000 people. What made it so real was that many of the writing staff and some of the actors were the same cops, criminals, and bystanders who inspired the characters. The show featured not one (rotund Homicide sergeant Jay Landsman), not two (Sgt./Lt. Mello, played by the real-life Jay Landsman), but THREE Landsmans. (Richard Belzer appears in the finale as Baltimore/NYPD Detective Munch from Homicide/Law & Order, a fictionalized version of Landsman in David Simon's book Homicide.)

While the show devoted its third season to the corruption in politics in Baltimore, that thread started in Episode 1 and keeps rolling along in the final season-ending montage.

What if I told you just by watching Fox 19 and WCPO News here in Cincinnati, I've been watching a reboot of The Wire playing out for the past several years?

In a city that had its riots over police shootings in 2001, the most drama coming from that corner in more recent times stemmed from the ouster of Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell over mismanagement and poor morale among the officers. He was the second of two "outside" chiefs, chiefs hired from outside the police department after a referendum broke the local FOP's hold on promotions to the highest ranks. However, current chief Elliot Isaac is a longtime veteran of the CPD. His approach to last summers protests that followed George Floyd's murder was to announce the curfew at 9 PM, ask everyone to get to their cars by 9:30, and the force would see everyone the next day. That's not to say we don't have our own problems between police and the black community here, but we seem to handle it better than most.

Then we have Cinicnnati City Council. Four members of council have been indicted on corruption charges since 2019. Three of them - PG Sittenfeld, Jeff Pastor, and Tamaya Dennard - were all suspended by the Ohio Attorney General and booted from Council in 2020 and early 2021. A fourth, Wendell Young, found himself in hot water in the past month. Cincinnati City Council has nine members, which means now, nearly half of Council has been appointed by either their party or a judge.

I grew up in Cleveland back when La Cosa Nostra and the Irish mob were a thing there. Granted, Cleveland has a bigger, ward-based council, so what Cincinnati currently calls a crisis in leadership, my old city used to call Tuesday. And yet I'm reminded of the shenanigans that went on in Mayor Royce's office on The Wire, the backroom deals made to move one corrupt police commander after another into the commissioner's office, of Tommy Carcetti selling his soul piece by piece over three seasons until he bore more than a passing resemblance to Aiden GIllen's next major role, that of Littlefinger on Game of Thrones. No wonder Martin O'Malley hates that show. (Though I think O'Malley might have made a decent run for president if he'd learn to stop taking himself so seriously.)

But to have nearly half the people entrusted with running the city indicted on bribery charges? Three of these people had already declared  for this year's mayoral campaign. One is still running and insisting his innocence. Not very credible when you realize how tone-deaf that makes one seem. See Weiner, Anthony; Gaetz, Mark. 

Throw into the mix a local judge who was accused of mismanagement of her officer, a scandal complete with political intrigue, racial overtones, and a main figure every bit as colorful as the fictional Clay Davis, and Simon and Burns could easily squeeze at least two seasons out of the Queen City.

Is it life imitates art? Or the other way around? Growing up, I knew some older characters claim to be in the bar mobster Danny Green left before he was blown all over Cuyahoga County, a hit that would land anyone involved on Homeland Security's counter-terrorism radar today. I chatted with a former county commissioner at a coffee shop as he dished dirt on a few notables in Cleveland and other local governments. I played little league with a future local police chief who lost his job after a rape conviction. And I've known local politicians who just wanted to do the right thing, including a mayor who was my den mother in Cub Scouts and son is now mayor of the suburb where we grew up. Here in Cincinnati, the mayor of my current suburb used to be my bartender while a coworker sits on another town's council. While there's not much dirt to dish on those four, as characters, they could give a fly-on-wall view of what does go on behind closed doors. Not all of it is pretty, or Cincinnati would have more than five elected council members right now.

Is Cincinnati Reenacting The Wire?

Police and politics have been in the news here in Cincinnati in recent weeks. We've been spared the latest round of shootings followed by riots that seems to have overtaken other cities. (Twice in the case of Cleveland, just four hours north of here.) But other problems have arisen.

Our police chief is a man named Jeffery Blackwell, who came to the Queen City from Columbus. Blackwell was named near the end of the previous mayor's term. Three weeks ago, it became news that the Chief would resign after two years on the job, then changed his mind. Despite denials from Blackwell, Mayor John Cranley, and other officials, stories of discord between city hall and the police department are rampant. Then this week, in the wake of a rash of shootings in the Avondale neighborhood, the city demanded Blackwell come up with a 90-day plan to reduce violence. I've seen this before.

It was a recurring theme on The Wire.

To recap, David Simon's Baltimore had a police department hamstrung by senior officers jockeying for position to become the next commissioner. Division captains and lieutenants found themselves terrorized by promotion-minded assistant chiefs at "comstat" meetings, where they had to explain why the crime rate was so high and what they planned to do about it. Never mind that the criminals causing all the trouble had to cooperate. Many of the plans and the personnel moves were tied to politics. Watching the news, I can't help but notice that so are the real-life moves in Cincinnati.

For starters, the increased crime in Avondale, while horrifying, belies a crime rate lower than in past years. There have been increased shootings on the West Side as well, but they make the news as individual incidents, not as a sudden spike in gun crime in one part of the city. But Avondale is two neighborhoods away from downtown and Over-the-Rhine, far enough out to spare the business district and the gentrifying neighborhood to the north of it, but close enough to the stadium to spook city leaders. Why are they spooked?

The All Star Game is coming in a couple of weeks. And so, with the local stations harping on Avondale's rise in shootings, city leaders have turned to that time-tested means of looking like they're on the job: Tell the police to do something, dammit. So Chief Blackwell was given a week to solve a problem that has been building since last year.

Sound like The Wire?

Then we have the hostility between city hall and the CPD. Chief Blackwell replaced James Craig, who left to take over the police department in his native Detroit. However, Blackwell started shortly before the last mayoral election, which means Mayor Cranley did not have a hand in choosing the chief. The current city manager also did not have a hand in the decision. One has to wonder if the administration's need to put its stamp on the police department is outweighing the need for stable leadership in the CPD.

That is speculation, of course, but every time Chief Blackwell, Mayor Cranley, or some council member opens their mouth now, I can't help but think back to Mayors Royce and Carcetti ripping some hapless commissioner a new one on The Wire. Cincinnati does not have all of Baltimore 's problems. If anything, we manage our police-race relation issues better than cities that looked at us funny during the 2001 riots. But when politicians fall all over themselves on the eve of a major sporting event, I can't help but wonder if life is imitating art. It wouldn't surprise me. Some of the cops and criminals depicted on The Wire were also writers and actors on the show.

All This Has Happened Before

by Jim Winter

Last night, I watched about an hour of CNN to see what was going on in Baltimore. I did like how police officers and community activists comported themselves when interviewed. However, two of the reporters discussed, without irony, how the constant coverage of rioting and burning after recent incidents starting with Ferguson might be fanning the violence each time. I say without irony because, while everyone spoke, CNN kept running video of fires.

Yeah, I'm sure that's helping calm things down.

They did this when Ferguson erupted. And in 2001, even the local news had round-the-clock coverage of the riots here in Cincinnati. Yes, my adopted hometown has been through this. That should give you some hope. We got through this. I won't kid you and say everything's fine here, but it's been a lot less heated in Cincinnati for years now than it has been in Baltimore of late.

But I also remember how opportunistic the Cincinnati Enquirer was in the months that followed. The normally conservative paper openly turned the police into its personal punching bag. It had less to do with any shortcomings of the police and more to do with selling papers. It did no service to race relations in Cincinnati. The local (and national) media did nothing to resolve the situation, only milked it to sell Toyotas.

Eventually, things calmed down. The police made efforts to reach out to the community. It's not all Kumbaya, but there's not this sense of rage that was palpable in the months leading up to the riots.

The spark that lit the explosion was the shooting of a Timothy Thomas, a 19-year-old black man, by Officer Stephen Roach. The confrontation? It was over traffic citations. So an unarmed man ran because of traffic tickets. And the officer shot him as he ran away.

That was the match tossed into the powder keg.

I had a part-time job at a pizza place at the time. Many of my coworkers were high school students from Withrow High School, a predominantly black school. I occasionally gave some of them rides home. One guy, who had moved into assistant management when he graduated, told me he was worried because many of his classmates were getting harassed by cops. Being a pizza delivery guy, I also interacted with a lot of cops. And they were getting frustrated because they did not think they were getting much support from the city. Yeah, tempers were getting ready to blow. It would only take one incident to set off the whole works.

When the riots subsided, there was a boycott. There were police reforms. And eventually, peace returned to the city. If Cincinnati can get past it, so can other cities. I'm under no illusion that it can't happen here again. But things go in cycles. If you want the cycle to end, you have to work at it.

That's what Cincinnati did. There's no reason other cities can't. Might be nice if the media would help, but that might not sell enough Coca-Cola.

Criminal Savants

by Jim Winter

About a decade ago, several businesses on Cincinnati's east side suffered break-ins, almost always on a Sunday night. Police could not get a handle of the suspects. They would break in, lift the safe, and leave absolutely no evidence behind. By the time they had an arrest, they had found several safes in the nearby Little Miami River, and businesses had lost well over $100,000.

Surprisingly, two of the safe crackers worked for cigarettes. So how did the police find out?

Ring leader Jimmy Godfrey liked to walk into an East End bar and brag about his heists to his buddies.

Yes, the man smart enough to hit safes when they would hold the most money and insist on his fellow thieves wearing gloves while not allowing them to spit or use the bathroom was not smart enough to keep his mouth shut. The story of how the police busted this ring is straight out of a Tarantino film.

You would think Godfrey was a criminal mastermind. He forbade his fellow thieves from eating, drinking, smoking, or going to the bathroom to avoid leaving any traces behind for forensic technicians to find. See, Godfrey was a fan of CSI, and he actually learned something from the show. He even avoided wearing the same shoes twice on a job. Why? He didn't want anyone tracing the shoe prints.

Godfrey was also persuasive. He convinced his girlfriend and two relatives to work for cigarettes while Godfrey himself pocketed the cash. The problem was how Godfrey disposed of some of the swag he stole. One neighbor in East End, a rundown neighborhood along the Ohio River known at the time more for its Confederate flags and rusty cars than anything else, took a big-screen TV from a nearby shop and mounted it in his apartment. In 2004, big screens and LCD's were about as common as electric cars are today. Godfrey's girlfriend helped herself to a handful of expensive Christmas tree toppers.

Worse for Godfrey, some of his relatives were more than willing to sell him out to the police for very little. One woman received $35 in exchange for information about Godfrey's nocturnal activities. But they weren't the only ones. Godfrey's own worst enemy was Godfrey himself.

He paid very close attention to detail on his jobs: Taking care to leave no evidence, using rubber gloves, even timing his jobs for maximum take. However, he did two things wrong. His own cohorts sold him out since he would keep all the cash. But that was not his worst mistake. If you wanted to know who robbed Mt. Lookout Television, City Beverage, or the Sky Galley restaurant, just ask anyone living along Eastern Avenue, the main drag through East End. Godfrey would brag about his crimes to anyone who would listen.

To add insult to injury, Godfrey would have been done in by his own brother, who was sloppy by Jimmy Godfrey's standards. The younger Godfrey would frequently leave traces of himself behind, and once banged his head during a job. The injury bled which gave evidence technicians a nice DNA sample to use just in case Jimmy Godfrey clammed up.