Author: Ben Popper

The recent arrest of two Memphis police officers is the latest in the department’s Operation Tarnished Blue investigation. MPD has been working in conjunction with the FBI for more than six months to catch what it terms “rogue” cops. These latest arrests, the 18th and 19th of the operation, were perhaps the most conspicuous yet. One of the officers, Terrance Harris, bought a Humvee, a Corvette, and a large home in Southaven and made more than $800,000 in deposits in a little over a year. The Flyer sat down with MPD director Larry Godwin to discuss the department’s struggle with dirty cops. — By Ben Popper

Flyer: How does Memphis compare with other cities in terms of police corruption?

Godwin: Let me put it this way: I don’t view it as police corruption. I view it as rogue cops, because to me, if there is corruption, it goes all the way to the top. And it’s not in this office, I can assure you. I’m the one who initiated this investigation. What we’re dealing with is less than 0.5 percent of the force who bring embarrassment to the other 99.5 percent of police officers who are doing their job.

So Internal Affairs is a necessary part of a healthy police department?

We have an internal squad that handles policy violations. Then we have a security squad, which handles criminal. We took seasoned investigators for the security squad: someone from homicide, burglary, economic crimes, etc. Let me tell you something else — they all volunteered.

Was the squad formed in response to bad press?

No. We used to have a security squad and a separate internal department. A few years back, due to shortage of manpower, they combined the security and the internal squads. Not that the internal side lets info out, but they are investigating a totally different problem.

The “Blue Wall” of silence, the notion that officers would never tell on each other, is often depicted on television and in films.

That’s movies. These two officers acted alone. One made a statement to the effect that you don’t want anyone else involved because they’ll get you caught. There is not an officer in this department who wouldn’t turn them in. I would not tolerate a code of silence, and the embarrassment the other officers [feel] when this happens tells me that [they aren’t covering for each other].

In your 33 years on the force, what experiences have you had with officers who bent the law?

I haven’t, because I never investigated them. I’ve had officers who worked for me who were caught up in it. I think you can work with somebody and look at their evaluation, see them coming to work every day, and think they’re a good cop. Then when they’re off, they are using the uniform in a different way. There are a lot of police officers who are married; they drive SUVs; and they are in debt to the hilt. So you don’t always know.

I’ve got a tallboy of Bud in my right hand, and my left is looped around the back of a bucking Honda 300 All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV). Up the embankment, less than 30 feet away, interstate traffic roars by. The ATV sends up the heady smell of burned gasoline, and with a whooping cry, I head out on my first “mudding” run.

“This is really a unique thing about Memphis,” says Cran Boyce, an ATV enthusiast and my guide for the day, “having a major off-road area hidden right in the middle of a city.”

We’re snaking through the middle of the 240-Loop, right off Covington Pike. Along the Wolf River’s muddy bottoms and outlying forests, generations of riders have carved out a vast network of trails on dirt bikes, ATVs, and the occasional mountain bike.

The recent death of a young rider on May 7th, identified by police as Timothy Medlin, 22, of Hernando, Mississippi, drew media attention to the activity along the bottoms, but riders like Boyce have been enjoying the trails for decades.

“My dad rode out here in the ’60s. He took me here when I was a kid, and, in high school, I would come out all the time with my friends,” he says.

Despite his history here, Boyce admits he still occasionally gets lost in the vast network of trails whose only rhyme and reason are the riders who have come before.

The dirt trail leads down from the interstate and loops back under an overpass, below which tents and shacks hide.

“There are some bad folks down here,” says Boyce. Car thieves will sometimes bring stolen vehicles, he explains, strip the car, and set the remains on fire. “When I got stuck one night last winter, I stayed out all night with my ride, because if I had left it, sure enough it would have been wrecked by morning.”

As quickly as the trail turns from dirt to woods to dunes, it changes again, and we ride into a swampy forest, startling large gray rabbits. Here the riding gets much rougher, and we sometimes sink to the top of our tires in the soft mud. I’m surprised at what a joy the ATV is to ride, even sitting shotgun with two tires choked in mud.

We tour for an hour and never travel the same trails twice. Boyce doesn’t use any safety equipment and seems dismissive of the idea, suggesting it might make sense for more extreme types of riding, as opposed to just running trails.

As we’re heading back, we emerge onto a flat hillock and Boyce stops.

“That right there is the 100-yard dash,” he says, pointing in front of us.

“Dude, that looks like a lake,” I say, eyeing a swampy pit of unknown depth.

Boyce just laughs. “If you make it through that,” he says, “you can probably ride a badder place than this.”

I ask him where that would be.

“Man,” he says, ” I have no idea.”

Three dozen pairs of feet restlessly tap a backbeat into the carpet, and the guy in front of me is wearing a T-shirt that reads, “It’s a drum thing — you wouldn’t understand.” Onstage, two drum kits sit empty, their cymbals bright under the lights.

The crowd is gathered at the Memphis Drum Shop in Cooper-Young for a clinic that is sort of a cross between a concert and a seminar.

The clinic takes place in an airy studio nestled deep inside the Drum Shop. Nearly 50 people are waiting for Gerry Brown and Sonny Emory, two drum legends whose work has served as inspiration and instruction for many in the crowd, to come onstage.

“They are big influences on me. I can remember listening to [Brown] play School Days,” says Myron McLean, a professional drummer who works locally on the casino circuit. “Listen to that album and you can hear how Gerry was really an innovator of the fusion style.”

Brown, who played first, certainly has the chops to wow the crowd. He has been the drummer for Stevie Wonder for 14 years, as well as playing for Roberta Flack, Lionel Ritchie, and Chick Corea. Yet Brown is equally interested in impressing upon the young drummers the value of versatility.

“You should listen to different kinds of music because if you wear many different hats,” he says, removing his own cap to wipe sweat from his brow, “you will always have a roof over your head.”

An audience member asks Brown to play the lick from Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” and Brown obliges. He plays a spare, dead-on rhythm, and when the applause settles down, he intones the value of not overplaying a song. “One thing that was key to me learning that song was to remember that this is a blind man’s groove. If I ever started to stray, Stevie would lean back and yell, ‘Hey, Gerry, do you know what job security is?'”

Even when there isn’t a clinic, the shop is still a place for young drummers to come and learn about the craft. “We have the vintage vault,” says owner Jim Pettit, “with antique drums going back to 1900.

“We try and have a mix between the purely educational clinics and something more like a live show,” says Pettit, adding that both events are usually followed by a question-and-answer session.

“You are really lucky to have this place,” says Brown after his set. “Not only do you have a great drum store but a museum, as well.”

Emory, the next drummer, has played at the Drum Shop before, and his performance leaves the audience rapturous. Emory was the drummer for Earth, Wind & Fire for more than a decade. With his left foot, he keeps the Latin clave rhythm going on a woodblock; with his right, a steady backbeat on the base drum. With his left hand, he works the cymbals, and with his right, he approximates a line of melody across his four finely tuned toms.

“For me, it’s all about learning to play beyond the drum,” Emory says. “My phrasing, my attempts at melody, come from listening to Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, and my own father, who was a saxophonist.”

An audience member asks Emory for advice on playing. “When I was young, it was Gerry’s playing that really fed and nurtured me, just listening and trying to learn. I’m the result of cats like him, and that’s why I’m taking the time to do stuff like this now.”

With the largest ballot Shelby County has ever seen arriving in voting booths this August, the Coalition for a Better Memphis wanted to help local citizens choose highly qualified candidates. The coalition devised a ranking system for candidates and released its first set of results — evaluating those running for County Commission seats — just a few weeks ago. The results have caused perhaps an expected stir among candidates: The winners think the system works; the losers see it as flawed. The Flyer recently spoke with Dean Deyo, one of the coalition’s organizers and the chairman of the Leadership Academy. — By Ben Popper

Flyer: How did you get the idea?

Deyo: We would have to give credit to the Regional Chamber [of Commerce] in Memphis. They do something called Best Practices, where they travel to other cities and try to exchange ideas and steal whatever they do best. They looked at what they were doing in Atlanta and said this would be fabulous for us.

How were the criteria for the rankings developed?

In order to expedite the process we hired the same consultant who was hired by Atlanta, a group called Civic Strategies. They came to Memphis, interviewed our community leaders, and read everything they could in the archives of The Commercial Appeal and the Memphis Flyer. They went and pulled copies of the Shelby County five-year plan. From that research, they developed a list of qualities a County Commission candidate should have and the issues they should know about.

We have also created a “transparent” system. You as a voter may appreciate what we’re doing but feel that at the end of the day the only issue that matters to you is ethics. That is why we posted the candidates’ individual scores on the Web site, as well as their written responses to each question.

Who is in the coalition?

We knew from the beginning that we needed a diverse coalition. If you look at the enrollment online you will see we have everything from AutoZone to neighborhood associations like the 35th Ward Civic Club to 100 Black Men, the Urban League, and Memphis Tomorrow. So we had over 110 people with nothing in common, white and black, young and old, Democrat and Republican.

Politicians have always been elected on rhetoric. What’s wrong with that?

One example I used at our first meeting that seemed to ring true to people is the District 29 election: Ophelia Ford and Terry Roland. Ford won by 13 votes. Because it came off-cycle, we didn’t know much about either of them. But perhaps a more important point is that there was a third candidate in that election: Robert Hodges, better known as Prince Mongo. He got 89 votes. Now there might have been some people who voted for him because his name appears on nearly every ballot, and they assumed he was a credible candidate. If information had been out there, maybe this election could have been different from the beginning.

Like the carousel it plans to sell, questions about the Mid-South Fair keep going round and round.

The Mid-South Fair plans to auction Libertyland’s Grand Carousel and Zippin Pippin as soon as July 1st, but questions still linger about its authority to do so and whether the rides actually belong to the fair or to the city of Memphis.

Travis Flee, marketing director for the Mid-South Fair, says that the rides are undoubtedly owned by the fair but hasn’t provided any evidence to support the claim. Flee could not say what entity owned the rides before they came into the fair’s possession or how much the fair paid for them.

“The previous owner is neither here nor there,” says Flee. “We are a private company and do not intend to release documentation. We are confident that we are the owners.”

But, according to a 1946 Commercial Appeal story, the Memphis Parks Commission bought the carousel from a Philadelphia company.

Earlier this week, city attorney Sara Hall told city council members that the rides do not belong to the fair.

“Both the carousel and the Zippin Pippin predate the 1974 agreement [with the fair],” says Hall. “We have asked the Mid-South Fair to provide any evidence that proves ownership.”

The city is also still trying to determine whether it owns the park’s other equipment and rides.

The Flyer obtained the original 1974 lease agreement between the city and Mid-South Fair for the operation of Libertyland. Under the agreement, the city and county agreed to finance 90 percent of the funds — or about $7 million — to create Libertyland. The money was borrowed with the understanding that the fair would repay it during the duration of its 20-year lease.

“This is where the issue becomes sticky,” says Steve Mulroy, a law professor with the University of Memphis and a member of Save Libertyland. The contract does not specify if the lease transfers ownership of the rides and equipment to the fair.

The question has troubled the city for some time. In 1992, the city and county forgave the fair’s remaining debt, $3.5 million. At the time, city finance director John Pontius addressed a memo to several officials, including then-Mayor Dick Hackett.

“As part of this settlement, it is important that we have a comprehensive understanding of our relationship,” Pontius wrote. “In particular, I am interested in their rights to fairground property.”

Even earlier members of the fair board thought the rides belonged to the city. In a Commercial Appeal article from November 20, 1987, former board president William Farris is quoted as saying, “The rides and buildings in the park belong to the city and county. It is their property. We simply manage it for them.”

The carousel alone is valued at $1 million if sold whole. If divided into pieces, it could fetch about $3 million. The Mid-South Fair wanted to defray expected moving expenses by selling the rides.

Cindy Childress, vice president of the fair board, was quoted recently in the CA as saying that the carousel “needs to be someplace where the citizens of Shelby County can enjoy it. But at the same time, where we can get the value of the asset to assist us in case we’re forced to relocate — or to help us with improvements to the fair if we’re not.”

“As I read this contract,” says Mulroy, “I am more convinced that the city has a strong case. The contract makes clear that the parties contemplated that the fair would have a 20-year ‘lease’ on the ‘premises and improvements’ without making a distinction between the two. The ‘improvements’ are the rides, equipment, and buildings making up Libertyland that were paid for with city and county bonds. No mention is made of the fair owning anything but rather leasing everything.”

If the fair continues with the auction as planned, Hall says the city will file an injunction to stop the sale. The city is continuing to investigate ownership of other Libertyland rides and equipment.