A SOON-TO-BE-PUBLISHED MINI-eBOOK ON AMAZON.COM
 
By Stephen Tabeling and Stephen Janis
 
Baltimore City, like most communities, has a split personality.

Within its borders, alleys and back-ways two parallel worlds exist side by side. Distinct civic selves, which become self- evident if you spend enough time immersed in both.

I know this because I was… and still am, a cop.

During my career as a Lieutenant in Baltimore City Homicide, I often worked at a crossroads where the two worlds met. At the point where healthy productive communities and the criminal element clashed.

And while I worked dozens of murder cases and headed a variety of investigations, there is one case that to this day stands out as emblematic of the split personality that characterizes this town.

This case defined just how destructive the burgeoning drug war in Baltimore was to become; and just how complicated and costly fighting it would be.

It was a case that pitted the city against itself, and revealed how scars of divisive racial mistrust would be slow to heal — if ever they would heal at all.

It was a case that has all but been forgotten, although it sowed the seeds of many of the problems that hamper the effectiveness of our justice system even today.

It was also a story of a social movement that threatened to engulf the city in civil war, a vigilante movement which still remains in part, a mystery.

I’m talking about the murder of Maryland State Delegate Turk Scott.

BETWEEN THE HEALTHY AND THE UNHEALTHY

For most of my career I was an investigator, a detective, a person whose beat was the juncture of the aforementioned divide between the healthy and the unhealthy.

And when it came time for me to do my job, I tried, for lack of a better analogy, to be precise, and dogged. I mean methodical, hard-nosed, but within the law. I didn’t fight violence by abandoning the law; indeed, I embraced it. I was “the law,” so I acted like it. But I also acted within it.

That’s been the mantra of my career — to follow, teach, and learn the law; it’s the only way to police effectively.

To insure that cops remain peacekeepers and community builders, simply demands they follow the law. Because when your job is to literally stand on the precipice of communal dysfunction, the law keeps the chaos at bay.

That’s why the law has evolved. That’s why it has to be followed.

And in the murder of James “Turk” Scott, it was all I had.

AN UNWIELDY CASE AT SUTTON PLACE

It’s a strange life, being at the nexus of all things violent. In the City of Baltimore, which numbered almost a million people when I was a homicide investigator, if someone found a body with a bullet hole in it they called us.

This is why a ringing telephone on the floor of the homicide division always had a sinister undertone. Like a perversion of Zuzu’s wing-earning angels, when the bell chimed in our office, it meant someone had just met a violent end.

And if that call was from a homicide detective who was already on the scene of a murder to tell me I needed to “see this,” I always knew there was something extraordinary attached to the body that lay prone and lifeless in some back alley or on a sidewalk in the city’s urban hinterlands.

But nothing really prepared me for the murder, and its aftermath, that began with an early a.m. Friday the 13th phone call from one of my detectives who was standing in the parking garage at the Sutton Place Apartments on that morning in July, 1973.

It was a grisly scene, yes.

VICTIM WAS WEARING BEIGE SUIT AND PAISLEY TIE

A middle-aged African-American male lay on the parking garage floor surrounded by at least a dozen shotgun casings and spent slugs. The victim was dressed in a beige suit and paisley tie; blood-spotted entry wounds were visible on both his chest and lower leg.

But what caught my eye that morning, and what would ultimately draw this case into a firestorm of controversy was something else. Something you rarely see at a crime scene. I guess you could call it a message of sorts… and it wasn’t subtle.

Strewn about the body like leftover litter from a raucous Irish wake were leaflets — dozens of them. All emblazoned with the name of a group that we had recently become aware of, but at that time had few clues to just how violent it would become.

Black October.

Allegedly named after an organized effort during the Vietnam War to aid heroin-addicted African-American soldiers, the group had come to our attention when another suspected city drug dealer was gunned down in broad daylight.

And now inscribed on the sheets of paper strewn across the parking garage was a short but succinct threat, a posthumous death sentence for Turk Scott and a warning of more trouble to come:

“These persons are known drug dealers,” the flyers proclaimed. “Selling drugs is an act of treason. The penalty for treason is ‘death’!!  [signed] Black October”
 

Stephen Tabeling, pictured here, is co-author of soon-to-be- published mini-eBook series on Baltimore homicide, co-writ- ten by Fox45-TV Investigative News Producer Stephen Janis.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
and the mini-eBooks:
 
He was the first detective to win a murder conviction without a body. A cop who investigated the attempted murder of former Mayor William Donald Schaefer. A detective who was on the scene when a sniper shot seven Baltimore police officers in the bloodiest day of violence in the history of the city force.