At first Langley obtained the footage as an objective bystander, but that ended when an officer invited him to suit up in tactical gear and follow the police as they moved in. For the first time, Langley understood the stress and danger (and the adrenaline rush) that police experience daily. And the footage he shot during the raid was some of the most compelling he’d ever seen. He thought it might be possible to build an entire show around it.
KEEPING IT REAL
As Langley developed the idea for a show he called Street Beat, he decided it should be presented in a minimalist, cinema verité style—the edited footage would be presented as-is, without a narrator, script, music, staged reenactments, much editing, or any other standard TV storytelling conventions to distract the viewing audience. He didn’t want a host or anyone else telling people what to think about what they were seeing.
Langley believed that such a show would be successful, but ABC, CBS, and NBC weren’t convinced and passed on the idea. Even Langley’s business partner, Malcolm Barbour, was skeptical. The concept was so unusual, and even if it was a good idea, it wasn’t clear that a beginner like Langley would be able to pull it off.
With no takers for Street Beat, Langley and Barbour’s production company spent the next few years producing a series of crime-themed syndicated TV specials (which included footage of police ride-alongs) hosted by Geraldo Rivera. The specials were very successful and helped to raise Langley’s profile in the TV business. But if he thought that would make it easier for him to find a buyer for the show he now called COPS, he was wrong: ABC, CBS, and NBC still said no.
Duane Chapman (Dog the Bounty Hunter) cannot own a gun. Reason: felony conviction.
THE ROOKIE
By 1987, however, there was a new player in network television: Fox. The upstart network had been on the air since October 1986, but few of its shows were successful. Fox was struggling not just to stay afloat but also to forge an identity distinct from the Big 3 networks—its survival strategy was to put unusual new shows on the air. And thanks to a looming TV writers’ strike that looked like it might drag on for months, Fox was particularly interested in shows that didn’t require writers or scripts.
Langley and Barbour put together a reel of the best police-raid footage from the Geraldo crime specials and made a sales pitch to three Fox executives: CEO Barry Diller; programming head Steve Chao; and a third, unidentified man who sat in the corner taking notes—Langley assumed he was an accountant. After they made their presentation, the man taking notes, who turned out to be Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch, told Diller, “Order four of ’em.” Langley and Barbour had a deal.
COP-SPAN
To film the pilot, Langley went to the same person he’d gone to when he needed police footage for his Geraldo specials: Sheriff Nick Navarro of Broward County, Florida. Navarro was bothered by the fact that the public’s understanding of law enforcement was informed by fictional and wildly inaccurate movies and TV shows such as Dirty Harry and Miami Vice. He saw COPS as an almost C-SPAN-like chance to depict law enforcement as accurately and honestly as possible, and he believed that such transparency was essential in a free society. He happily allowed Langley to film his officers at work.
If you watch the hour-long COPS pilot, you may be surprised at how different it is from the modern version of the show. The most glaring difference is the inclusion of scenes of the officers in their own homes—cooking dinner with their families, watching TV, and playing with their children. One officer and his wife even argue about their relationship in front of the COPS camera crew. Langley says Fox forced him to insert the cops-at-home footage into the pilot against his better judgement, theorizing that if the cinema verité footage didn’t hook the audience, the real-life soap opera storylines would. The COPS pilot aired on Saturday, March 11, 1989. Ever since then, the show has aired on Saturday night.
Average length of a criminal sentence in Colombia: 137 years.
ONE, TWO, THREE
Fox didn’t promote COPS very heavily, but the show still managed to find an audience, which grew quickly thanks to positive word of mouth. As it did, Langley set to work stripping out all the features the network had forced on him—background music, the “soap opera” subplots, and the scenes shot at police headquarters, which he believed were unnecessary and much less interesting than scenes of police in the field. In the process, he also developed the three-stories-per-episode format that continues to this day:
• The first segment is a dramatic “action” sequence of some kind, often involving a police chase of a vehicle, or of a suspect on foot.
• The second segment is slower and often contains emotional or humorous content (such as the scene where a suspect repeatedly denies that he uses drugs, not realizing that he has a marijuana cigarette tucked behind his ear until the officer plucks it out).
• The third segment aims to give the audience something to think about, such as the methods used to take an uncooperative suspect into custody, or the social costs associated with treating drug addiction as a criminal problem instead of a public health issue.
BAD BOYS, BAD BOYS
Twenty-three years and more than 800 episodes later, COPS remains the most successful reality series on network television. Its role in shaping the public’s perception of law enforcement has been profound, and it has produced an entire generation of officers who first developed an interest in police work while watching COPS when they were kids.
Perhaps the show’s most unusual claim to fame is how it turned its “Bad Boys” theme song into the most quotable, if not the most famous, reggae song in history. From the beginning, Langley wanted COPS to be the first-ever network show with a reggae theme song, and while filming the pilot in Florida he had his field producers scour local record stores in search of just the right song. Someone found “Bad Boys,” sung by the Jamaican band Inner Circle. “I said, ‘That’s it, that’s the song,’” Langley remembers. “I mean, it was just too good. You know, ‘...bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do, what you gonna do when they come for you?’ It was just too perfect.” The song was released as a single in 1993 and hit the Top 10.
J. Edgar Hoover once gave his mother a canary bred by the “Birdman of Alcatraz.”
MAKING THE SHOW
• In a typical week of production, as many as a dozen two-person COPS film crews are riding along with police officers all over the U.S. Most production takes place during warmer months, when crooks are more likely to be out and about. That explains why you hardly ever see a police chase in the snow...but you see plenty of suspects who are sweaty and shirtless.
• On average, it takes about 18 hours of unedited police footage to produce the 22 minutes of material that make up an episode.
• COPS has been filmed in Hong Kong, Great Britain, Russia... but never in Canada. Why not? “Canada has far less crime than we do in the States,” Langley told the Ottawa Citizen in 2008.
“I’M ON TV!”
• If you (like Uncle John) live in terror of COPS filming in your town on that one worst day of your life, when you’re drunk, half naked, and screaming in the middle of the street, fear not: COPS can’t show your face on TV without your consent. Every face shown on the program is the face of a person who has signed a release form.
• In the early years, getting suspects to sign the release forms wasn’t easy; many faces had to be digitally blurred as a result. But now that the show is famous, more than 90% of suspects sign them. “When they hear that we’re not a news camera, that we’re COPS, they generally exclaim, ‘Oh, that’s great! When will I be on?’” Langley says.
* * *
THE WORLD’S MOST STOLEN PAINTING
The Ghent Altarpiece is a Dutch panel painting known as Het Lam Gods (“The Lamb of God”) that was completed in 1432. It weighs two tons, measures 14 feet by 11 feet, and has been stolen 13 times, the most of any famous piece of artwork.
40% of TV viewers polled believe police shows are “fairly accurate.” Only
14% of cops agreed.
ETHICALLY DISABLED
There are few things more pathetic than people pretending to be disabled—and few things more satisfying than catching them.
FUTBOL FAKERS
Their dream was to watch their country’s soccer team play in a World Cup game in Germany in 2006, but the admission price was more than the three Argentinians wanted to pay. Determined to see the match, they found a loophole: Discounted seats were being offered to disabled people. So they somehow got themselves three wheelchairs and rolled into the match against Holland, claiming a handicapped viewing spot near the field.
The ruse probably would have worked, too, if one of them hadn’t gotten so excited after a play that he jumped out of his chair with his arms raised in the air. “A person near us thought there was a miracle happening,” one of the fakers told reporters outside the stadium—which is where the three fans spent the second half of the game after security escorted them out (on foot).
PARALYMPIC FAKERS
The 2000 International Paralympics were a resounding success for Spain: The country won 107 medals overall, highlighted by the gold medal awarded to its developmentally disabled basketball team. A few months later, one of the players, Carlos Ribagorda, made the shocking admission that “of the 200 Spanish Paralympic athletes, at least 15 had no physical or mental handicap.” Ribagorda, a journalist for the Spanish magazine Capital, had joined the intellectually disabled basketball team to expose the corruption. In the two years Ribagorda played for the team, no one ever tested his I.Q. Not only that, says Ribagorda, the team was told to slow down their game so they wouldn’t attract suspicion.
A subsequent international investigation concluded that only two members of the basketball team were intellectually disabled. In addition, as Ribagorda had discovered, some members of Spain’s Paralympic track, tennis, and swimming teams were found to be only...morally handicapped.
Until 1819 in the United Kingdom, felling a tree illegally was punishable by hanging.
LAWSUIT FAKER
In 2006 Las Vegas authorities suspected that wheelchair-bound Laura Lee Medley was taking them for a ride. After four separate lawsuits against four California cities over faulty handicapped access to public buildings, investigators smelled fraud. They tracked Medley to Las Vegas, where they arrested the 35-year-old woman, who was sitting in her wheelchair. Medley immediately began complaining of pain and begged for medical attention. Skeptical—but not wanting to doubt her if she really was in pain—police officers drove her to a nearby hospital. But moments after she was wheeled through the entrance, the “paralyzed” woman got up and started sprinting through the hospital corridors. She was quickly apprehended and cuffed. Medley was charged with four counts of fraud and resisting arrest.
BEAUTY PAGEANT FAKER
Dee Henderson was crowned Mrs. Minnesota International in a 1999 beauty pageant, thanks in part to the aerobic exercises she performed for the talent competition. Henderson owned and operated two businesses selling beauty pageant supplies, and was the director of three Midwest beauty pageants. Those are amazing accomplishments, especially considering the fact that at the same time, she was getting disability payments from the government. Henderson claimed she couldn’t work, couldn’t sit for more than 20 minutes at a time or lift anything heavier than her mail. She also had difficulty with “walking, kneeling, squatting, climbing, bending, reaching, and personal grooming.” The injuries, she said, stemmed from a 1995 car accident. From 1996 to 2003, Henderson received Social Security benefits totaling $190,000.
But her case unraveled when a video taken by a private investigator showed her doing activities such as snorkeling and carrying heavy luggage (not to mention the aerobics). More damning evidence: an email in which Henderson claimed she would “keep going and going and going and going” like the Energizer Bunny. She did keep going...to prison for 46 months.
* * *
If I die, I forgive you. If I recover, we shall see.
—Spanish proverb
McGruff the Crime Dog was named in a 1980 contest. Runner-up name: “Shurlocked Homes.”
HOLLYWOOD
SCANDAL, PART I
A woman is found dead...a well-known celebrity is charged with murder...the whole world follows the trial. O. J. Simpson? Nope—Fatty Arbuckle. In the early 1920s, the Arbuckle trial was as big as the Simpson trial. Here’s the story.
A KNOCK AT THE DOOR
On the morning of Saturday, September 10, 1921, two men from the San Francisco sheriff’s office paid a visit to Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, then Hollywood’s most famous comedian, at his home in Los Angeles. One of the men read from an official court summons: “You are hereby summoned to return immediately to San Francisco for questioning...you are charged with murder in the first degree.”
Arbuckle, thinking the men were pulling a practical joke, let out a laugh. “And who do you suppose I killed?”
“Virginia Rappé.”
Arbuckle instantly knew that this was no joke. He’d just returned from a trip to San Francisco, where he’d thrown a party over the Labor Day weekend to celebrate his new $3 million movie contract—then the largest in Hollywood history—with Paramount Pictures. A 26-year-old bit actress named Virginia Rappé had fallen ill at the party, presumably from drinking too much bootleg booze. Arbuckle had seen to it that the woman received medical attention before he returned to L.A., but now Rappé was dead—and Arbuckle had somehow been implicated in her death. Whatever doubts he may still have had about the summons vanished the following morning as he read the three-inch headlines in the Los Angeles Examiner:
ARBUCKLE HELD FOR MURDER!
The autopsy report showed that Rappé died from acute peritonitis, an inflammation of the abdominal lining brought on by a ruptured bladder. Why was Arbuckle a suspect in the death? Because Maude “Bambina” Delmont, another woman at the party, had filed a statement with San Francisco police claiming that she had seen Arbuckle drag Rappé into his bedroom against her will and assault her. As she later explained to newspaper reporters,
Average cost per inmate in a state prison: $22,650 per year, or $62.05 a day.
I could hear Virginia kicking and screaming violently and I had to kick and batter the door before Mr. Arbuckle would let me in. I looked at the bed. There was Virginia, helpless and ravaged. When Virginia kept screaming in agony at what Mr. Arbuckle had done, he turned to me and said, ‘Shut her up or I’ll throw her out a window.’ He then went back to his drunken party and danced while poor Virginia lay dying.
The 265-pound comedian had supposedly burst Rappés’ bladder with his weight during the assault. And because the injury had gone untreated, it developed into a massive abdominal infection, killing Rappé.
Pressing Charges
After Delmont’s statement was filed, San Francisco District Attorney Matthew Brady had ordered Arbuckle’s arrest and had issued a public statement to the press:
The evidence in my possession shows conclusively that either a rape or an attempt to rape was perpetrated on Miss Rappé by Roscoe Arbuckle. The evidence discloses beyond question that her bladder was ruptured by the weight of the body of Arbuckle either in a rape assault or an attempt to commit rape.
FALSE WITNESS
Brady’s case was based almost entirely on Delmont’s police statement. And the case certainly appeared substantial—at least until Brady looked into Maude Delmont’s background after she gave her statement. Then he discovered a police record containing more than 50 counts of bigamy, fraud, racketeering, extortion, and other crimes (including one outstanding bigamy warrant, which Brady would later use to his advantage).
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED
Brady later learned from other guests at the party that a very drunk Maude Delmont had actually been locked in a bathroom with Lowell Sherman, another party guest, during the entire time that she claimed to have witnessed Arbuckle with Rappé. She could not have seen any of the things she claimed to have seen—and if that were n
ot bad enough, Brady later discovered that on Wednesday, September 7, Delmont had dashed off the following telegram to two different friends as Virginia Rappé lay dying at the St. Francis Hotel:
Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, has a hidden billiards room. (Billiards were illegal in Virginia.)
WE HAVE ROSCOE ARBUCKLE IN A HOLE HERE CHANCE TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF HIM
BLIND AMBITION
District Attorney Brady had no case—there wasn’t a shred of physical evidence to indicate that Arbuckle had committed any crime against Rappé; his only “witness” was a woman with a long criminal record; and the telegrams demonstrated clearly that Delmont’s police statement was part of an attempt to blackmail Arbuckle. Despite all this, Brady decided to bring the case to trial. Why? One theory: Brady, whom acquaintances described as a “self-serving, arrogant, ruthless man with blind ambition and a quick temper,” was gearing up to run for governor of California. He probably figured that winning a murder conviction against Hollywood’s biggest comedian would score points with the public.
JUDGE NOT
Still, the case could not have gone to trial if the police judge, Sylvain Lazarus, had dismissed the case due to lack of evidence. But Judge Lazarus refused to throw it out, citing the “larger issues” surrounding the case:
I do not find any evidence that Mr. Arbuckle either committed or attempted to commit rape. The court has been presented with the merest outline....The district attorney has presented barely enough facts to justify my holding the defendant on the charge which is here filed against him.
But we are not trying Roscoe Arbuckle alone; we are not trying the screen celebrity who has given joy and pleasure to the entire world; we are actually, gentlemen, trying ourselves.
Uncle John’s True Crime Page 16