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.

Thank God for the Man Who Put the White Lines on the Highway

 

Every city has its sound. That's part of what goes into the setting. There are jazz towns like New Orleans, Chicago, and San Francisco. Memphis is all about country and roots-based rock. Nashville owns country. I won't call Seattle grunge, but Seattle still burns the punk torch.

Living here in Cincinnati, I sometimes lament that I moved to a "wedding singer" town. The bands here all play cover tunes, although my former spouse is married to a guy who plays some tasty Southern Rock originals. (Link at the end of the article, with a few others you might like.) Some cities are like that, content to have bands that do nothing but cover tunes. Which is sad because I really think rock would benefit from hearing originals from the Rusty Griswolds, Naked Karate Girls, or the Menus, all highly regarded Cincinnati bands that sometimes sound better than the ones they cover.

But, if I haven't beaten you over the head with it recently enough, I grew up in the multi-county empire known as Cleveland. And Cleveland gave us not only the name "rock and roll," it gave us Kansas transplant Joe Walsh, Screamin' Jay Hawkins and the spell he put on you, half the members of The Cars, and Nine Inch Nails. (Yes, they started in Cleveland as an offshoot of another band Trent Reznor played in, the Exotic Birds.) Unfortunately, it also gave us Eric Carmen with the song that caused a million wrists to be slit, "All by Myself." (Thanks, Eric. The makers of prozac, Xanax, and Paxil thank you.)

It also gave us one Michael Stanley Gee.

Who?

Better known as Michael Stanley. Of the Michael Stanley Band. Those of us of a certain age will remember three of his songs. Those of us from the Midwest of that same certain age will remember quite a few more. (Working from home, his last regional hit, "Shut Up and Leave Me Alone" gets put on heavy rotation on Spotify whenever the sales team has a "crisis.") The first is that early eighties guilty pleasure, "He Can't Love You Like I Love You." Michael doesn't sing on this one, but he is memorable.

As you can see from the video, the city's blue-collar, manufacturing ethic is on full display here. "He Can't Love You..." was a fun song and a breakout hit for MSB (as we know them). Joe Walsh and Eric Carmen left town to make it big, as would Trent Reznor when NIN gained traction. MSB insisted on staying put. After all, you can travel to New York to record and tour anywhere. Why should they abandon their hometown? Over on the country side, Willie Nelson did not really gain success until he went home to Austin, Texas. That might have contributed to their difficulties breaking the charts.

The second song is Cleveland at heart, a jilted boyfriend making the long, lonely drive home during a snowstorm. "Lover" has a line that, if you're from that area, you hear over and over every winter. "Thank God for the man who put the white lines on the highway." Even before I knew what noir meant, I thought the song was noir as hell.

It's companion song, "In the Heartland," is pretty much their signature tune and explicitly mentions local spots, including the "boys on Mayfield" looking for a fight. Readers of Les Roberts's work will recognize that particular street as the turf of Cosa Nostra off-shoots, the Mayfield Road Mob, purveyors of fine illegal booze from 1920 through 1933.

Of course, I wax nostalgic about one of my graduating class's high school heroes as Michael Stanley pass away a couple weeks ago. After he called it a career, Stanley joined local classic rock station WNCX as an on-air personality and worked in television. He was a natural, an affable, down-to-Earth guy who refused to surrender his blue collar roots. We still love him for it.

So, perhaps it's fitting that I leave you with MSB's final hit, an ode to his hometown that should have been the state rock and roll song. (I still haven't forgiven Governor Celeste for picking "Hang on, Sloopy." Jerk.) Because like Michael Stanley, Cleveland is still very much "My Town."

For that tasty Southern rock I mentioned, check out the Russell Jinkins XL Band on Facebook.

 

And for more Northcoast rock, check out Northcoast Shakedown. No, I had nothing to do with the band. Except sharing DNA with the oh-so-talented lead guitarist, Chris Hottle. That, and I might have signed off on the name.

Fast Eddie

Once upon a time, a man named "Fast Eddie" Watkins could get in and out of banks quickly, relieving them of cash, and usually not harming anyone. He became one of Cleveland's most notorious criminals, and that says a lot in my hometown. Cleveland had the Torso Killer. Its suburbs produced Jeffrey Dahmer while the Tremont neighborhood spawned notorious kidnapper Ariel Castro. A branch of the Genovese crime family ran the underworld for years, and Irish mobster Danny Green met a fiery end when his car exploded leaving a union hall in the late 1970's. So, yeah. The Northcoast has hosted its share of thugs and monsters.
But we always had a soft spot for Fast Eddie. Sure, he robbed banks. But he was a gentleman thief. In and out, and he loved the publicity. The Plain Dealer, The Press (infamous for its shoddy reporting of the Sam Sheppard murder case), and the local TV stations faithfully recounted his exploits. In a city more famous for its burning river and its serial killers, Watkins developed a Robin Hood reputation.

The one time Fast Eddie's robbery didn't go so well, he took 9 hostages. After 21 hours, though, he let everyone go and surrendered. The feds sent him to prison in Atlanta. He escaped, and therein is where Fast Eddie crossed a very young Jim Winter's path.

South of the exurb where I grew up, there is, to this day, a stretch of potato fields called The Muck, a handful of rock quarries, and cornfields all sandwiched between the CSX and Norfolk Southern railroads. We used to ride our bikes out through there, headed for the tiny little freeway burg of Burbank. Only one day, the local police stopped us.

"Why can't we ride out to Burbank?" I asked the Lodi cop at the roadblock.

"We got a bank robber cornered out past the rock quarry."

I went home. At 6:00, WEWS led their news broadcast with the standoff between Fast Eddie Watkins and the Medina County Sheriff. By 7, Fast Eddie was in custody and headed back to prison.

Watkins never hid the fact that he was a bank robber. He said he enjoyed it. "I wanted to be a big shot," he confessed. His illegal withdrawals helped finance his lavish lifestyle. So where did he keep his money?

"I trust banks with my money. They're insured. It's the best place in the world to put your money."

But was it the money? Watkins wife once said no. Mrs. Watkins said that Fast Eddie ogled banks the way most men ogled girls.

But even in prison with his criminal career over, Watkins remained a character. The Cleveland papers occasionally reported that Fast Eddie had taken up painting while behind bars, favoring landscapes.

Fast Eddie died in 2002 at the age of 82 after a long battle with heart and lung disease. Unlike the bank robbers of an earlier era, going out in a blaze of glory wasn't for him.

Prophet and Loss

On Thursday, Eve Fisher set aside her usual article and wrote a heartfelt piece about opinion-mongers that judge the three young women who survived imprisonment by Ariel Castro. In a one-size-fits-all society, some people find it hard to understand different people react differently in differing situations. Patty Hearst paid for such judgment after her abduction because prosecutors and the public couldn't understand she'd been brainwashed and probably remains affected to this day.
A person can never tell how they'll react until events overtake them. My own reaction to armed robberies has been an out-of-body distancing: I felt like I was above it all looking down, not fearful or angry but sort of an unreasonable reasonableness. I patiently argued with them: No, I wasn't going to give up my watch and wallet. It wasn't the smartest response and there wasn't anything brave about it, but it was my reaction, one of an untrained man in a dangerous quandary who can't bear being pushed around. Perhaps that's part of the answer: in tense situations our innermost instincts emerge.

Subnormal or Supernatural?

As much as sick Cleveland abductor Ariel Castro disgusts me, another type of predator preys upon victims in the guise of 'helping' others. They call themselves…

Psychics.

Whenever a personal disaster strikes, slimy, slippery-tongued parasites crawl out of money-lined holes. They dispense advice and 'readings' to anyone who'll listen, hoping to make money from another's misery. Marc Klaas, father of a little girl who was raped and strangled, says "You become increasingly desperate and afraid. Every day the police don't find your child, you think they're not doing their job. So you go elsewhere, and psychics put themselves out there as a very viable solution." He goes on to say, "I call them the second wave of predators. First you lose your child and then these people descend. Every time."

Shock and Awww…

Contrary to public relations and opinion, study after study demonstrates predictions are almost always wrong. Nevertheless, psychics invariably find a way to reflect wrong predictions in their favor. In the Caylee Anthony case, close to ninety psychics descended upon Orlando to 'help direct' the search with spirit-guided 'blind driving'. A blathering Nancy Grace went on the air to beg the public to let the "professionals, the police and the psychics, do their job" to find the missing girl.

In fact the psychics, all 86 of them, got the location absolutely backwards, pointing the police in the wrong direction. Out of the first 2500 tips, all but two were from psychics, all of them wrong. And yet by the time of the trial, at least one medium managed to insinuate he'd been right although he hadn't managed to pinpoint the body even after Roy Kronk stumbled across the remains. Blind monkeys throwing darts at a map could have done better.

Nor is Caylee Anthony the only case occultists botched in Florida. The state boasts its own clairvoyant town– Cassadaga. You'd think with so many preternatural mediums gathered in one spot, crime should become a thing of the past, if not abolished at least rapidly solved. Sadly, that's not been the case.

Palmist Predators

In 1979, St. Cloud police relied upon Cassadaga fortune tellers rather than criminal science to assist in a then-rare homicide of a preacher's wife. They failed miserably. Years later, a new police chief and detective reopened the cold case in 2010 and, with proper investigation, came up with the killer.

But Cassadaga wasn't done embarrassing itself. In 2001, Lillian Martin and her grandson, Joshua Bryant, disappeared from nearby Deltona. Psychics tormented the family and variously predicted the grandmother had kidnapped the boy –or– the parents had killed them –or– they were abducted by a long-hauler at a truck stop. Psychics failed to predict they were apparently murdered by confessed killer Douglas McClymont and that the body of Joshua would be found three years later virtually on Cassadaga's doorstep.

But even Florida has its limits. After a dozen states complained, the Feds and the attorney general managed to take Miss Cleo, the actress with a fake Jamaican accent, off the air, but not before she'd conned a handsome living out of her bogus 'readings'.

Bacon Bits

The human mind has a way of convincing itself of things that aren't true. Therefore, I admit a few people may honestly believe they have prophetic dreams or psychic powers. They may be exceptionally good at reading people. I knew one of these for many years and she insisted she was never wrong, and indeed, she was right at least 49% of the time.

Her sister had an amazing talent too, that when she gambled, she never lost. Ever. And yet, when I was with her when she played slots or bought lottery tickets, I never saw her win once. Ever. And yet, she continued to insist, even to me, that she always won. Rob Lopresti quoted Francis Bacon who said the root of all superstition is the human tendency to remember hits and forget misses.

These sisters (two of five) were part of a family fractured by a radio psychic. Their mother's gold cross had gone missing. After months of anger and accusations, another sister phoned a 'world famous psychic' to ask about the missing cross, revealing suspicions about a nephew. The psychic agreed it was obvious the young son of yet another sister had stolen it. The old woman immediately disowned that daughter and her family. Years later, the case for the cross turned up– in the house of the sister who'd originally phoned the psychic.

The Magic of Mental Meddling

Multiple studies of paranormal predictions have discredited psychics and clearly proved several frauds. Subjects respond that scientific approaches and apparatus disrupt the metaphysical fabric of the other world and make it impossible for spirits to function on our side of the curtain. They claim the scientific community is out to get them. They claim the spirits won't speak in controlled environments.

But science professionals aren't the only fronts exposing fraud among spiritualists. A handful of magicians have taken on the task, most notably the Amazing Randi who offers a million dollars ($1,000,000) to any psychic who can prove their mettle. None has passed the test, including Uri Geller.

On Halloween night 2007, magician Criss Angel challenged Uri Geller's psychic ability, offering him a million dollars to prove he was the real thing. Geller could not. Criss Angel wasn't the first to discredit Geller and the list of his skeptics includes Johnny Carson. As far back as the 1970s, a French magician duplicated Geller's so-called feats of mentalism "even more convincingly than Geller." Eventually, Geller's stage manager, Yasha Katz, admitted Geller used simple stage tricks.

Geller blew his big crime chance when he was called in to investigate the disappearance of model Helga Farkas. Geller predicted she was alive and well, when in fact she'd been abducted and murdered.

And now, back to our story…

And so we return to the case of the Cleveland kidnapper. To the disgust of many and the surprise of few, in 2004 infamous psychic Sylvia Browne told Louwana Miller, mother of Amanda Berry, her daughter was dead. The mother died the following year of, according to friends, a broken heart.

And yet after Amanda Berry's release, her cousin Sherry Cole "reached out to Browne" on Wednesday to offer support. "Our family in no way blames Sylvia. … We still love her and believe in her."

Jon Ronson, columnist for The Guardian, believes people are too polite to challenge the celebrity psychic. He's made sort of a project out of Sylvia Browne. Over the years, he's documented one failed prediction after another.

• Browne claimed missing Texas 6-year-old Opal Jennings had been sold into slavery in "Kukouro, Japan," a place that doesn't exist. An autopsy revealed the little girl had been killed within hours of her abduction and buried in Fort Worth.
• She told the parents of missing 11-year-old Shawn Hornbeck their little son was dead. The father said, "Hearing that was one of the hardest things we ever had to hear." Four years later, the little boy was found alive and well. Browne's ex-husband, Gary Dufresne, said of his wife: "I try to get her out of my mind as much as possible, but the damage she does to unsuspecting people in crisis situations is atrocious."
• She claimed 19-year-old Ryan Katcher had been murdered and dumped in an iron mine shaft. Katcher was found in a pond, an apparent victim of accidental drowning.
• She told Lynda McClelland's daughters in a 'reading' their mother was alive and had been abducted to Orlando, Florida by a man with the initials "MJ". McClelland's body was found buried near her home in Pennsylvania, killed by David Repasky, her son-in-law, who'd shaken Sylvia Browne's hand at the reading.
  
• She changed her position three times within an hour in the rapidly unfolding events of the Sago Mine Disaster.
• She predicted Michael Jackson would be found guilty of child molestation, when in fact he was found innocent.
• She predicted Osama bin Laden had died in a cave in Iran when in fact he was subsequently killed in a compound in Pakistan.

The Big Lie

Extensive studies of Sylvia Browne proved false her claims she's more than 85% correct, concluding she erred in virtually every substantive prediction,  although in the majority of cases, Browne's 'help' was too vague and watery to be useful, e.g, "I see two boulders somewhere…"

• Skeptic Robert Lancaster, creator of the web site StopSylvia.com, details a plethora of missing child cases Browne got wrong, noting James Randi calls her a "callous fraud".
• Steven Brill is the founder of CourtTV, American Lawyer magazine, and the magazine Brill's Content, which examined fourteen cases of known outcomes. Law enforcement officials and victim family members evinced Browne was unable to provide any useful information.
• Ryan Shaffer and Agatha Jadwiszczok of the Skeptical Inquirer found in 25 cases of known result, Browne was completely wrong.

In other words, if you find yourself blest or beset with a Sylvia Browne prediction, you can pretty much bank on the opposite outcome. Again quoting her ex-husband, Gary Dufresne, after a tarot reading party: "I said to her as we were washing dishes and she was wiping, I said, 'Sylvia, how can you tell people this kind of stuff? You know it's not true, and some of these people actually are probably going to believe it?' And she said, 'Screw 'em. Anybody who believes this stuff ought to be taken.'"

The Big Question

It's bad enough Nancy Grace puts psychics on an equal footing with police investigators, but it's truly embarrassing when police listen to psychics and follow up their 'leads'… which are almost invariably wrong.

The Guardian's Jon Ronson asked CIA psychologist Dr Ray Hyman why the agency and police departments bother to employ psychics. "People are basically nutty, which means there are just as many nutty people within our government and our law enforcement agencies as there are outside them."

Ah, so that explains it. Special Agent Chris Whitcomb of the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children maintain that to their knowledge, psychic detectives have never solved a single missing-person case, not one, not ever.

Unfortunately, I predict desperate families and police departments will continue to hire clairvoyants. I must be psychic.