"When you have wiretapped audio, you think it's all awesome."
A conversation about crime reporting with I Got a Monster co-author Brandon Soderberg.
Brandon Soderberg is a Baltimore-based journalist who covers drugs and crime. He is the co-author of I Got a Monster, a narrative history of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF). GTTF was a horde of super-corrupt cops who robbed, kidnapped, and terrorized folks around Baltimore and were eventually taken down and tried in federal court.
Last month, Brandon and I got on Zoom to talk about the book, how to construct narrative scenes in a crime reporting context, money, writing collaboratively, and more.
How did this book come about?
There was a big trial for these officers and the trial was a sort of nuts — movie stuff. It's a federal court, so it looks more like a movie. There's no video or audio of the trial, so the only record is your notes, which is interesting. One of the cops, Daniel Hersl, had been in this big scandal we had written about back in 2014, so it kind of ties to music for me. I had been writing about Young Moose, a rapper here in Baltimore and started to hear how the cops were messing with them. The public facing daily news story was Rapper In Trouble With The Police or whatever, like it always is. We found out that [the Baltimore PD] were using his lyrics and his videos as probable cause and evidence that he violated probation. Really crazy, egregious stuff like one video of his where he's holding a gun in the video. It's clearly a fake gun. It's not by handling firearms.
We wrote about that in 2014 and started to know Moose and his family a little bit. They were telling us stories and they sent us videos. They had a mixtape store in Baltimore and the cops would raid. They’d show us videos of the safes busted open and tell us the cops were stealing from them. We tried our best to write about that and then keep covering it. That went on, as it often does with the criminal justice system, for a really long time. Then in 2017 it was announced that seven Baltimore police officers were indicted for conspiracy and racketeering, things usually charged to gangs or the mafia. One of them was this Hersl cop that we'd been writing about.
On one level it was like, Oh, we were kind of on to something. A lot of people made fun of us writing that story. That we were just kind of dumb alt-weekly journalists believing this rapper and all that kind of racially-loaded baggage that comes along with it. On another level, we had missed that there was a criminal conspiracy operating in the police department that was far worse than anything in the reporting we had done. We paid attention to it. More officers got caught up in it. Then Hersl and another officer decided to plead not guilty.
They went to trial and so we covered the trial. It seemed really exciting and interesting and rare that cops go to trial. This was bigger than the state's attorney or district attorney charging a cop with a homicide, like what happened with Freddie Gray and has happened a few other times around the country. They don't usually get into a lot of trouble or are found not guilty. With the Freddie Gray trial, for example, all the cops either had their charges dropped or were found not guilty. But these were officers facing gang charges: dealing drugs, stealing money, stealing drugs, lying about overtime, and routinely violating people's rights. It reflected what I had started to hear as I became more of a crime reporter in Baltimore. I began to understand in a more sophisticated way by reporting what people meant when they said the police here are a gang. But when the feds — even though it was Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, to be clear — are saying the cops are operating like a gang within the police department, it’s pretty compelling stuff.
Did filming interviews on camera help get subjects to open up more? What was the process like for you?
I was surprised by how much it helped. I was with a camera crew and that kind of interviewing, which I had never done before, is way different. It’s your job to be present and show that you’re really looking at them and paying attention. It’s very different from interviewing someone for a story because you’re walking around or talking over lunch or something. Even with deeper investigative stories I’ve done, I’m very much someone who hangs out. I may hang out with someone for weeks as I’m writing a story. With this, you have an hour with them before you start interviewing and you have to shoot the shit with them because you don’t want to get too deep into it. With this, you’re asking people to dig up trauma and talk about crimes they’ve done. Baynard compared it to something like a confessional. The framing of the interview made people, I think, feel like they had to be really present and they had to give a lot even without us asking for that. I think we got people to talk in a way they maybe wouldn't have talked or maybe it would have taken weeks to get them to that moment at the same time. It also got us people that wouldn't have ever answered an email from me.
It helped in unpredictable ways. It was also the only way we were able to do the book, money-wise. We had optioned the book into a movie production deal before we sold the book, which was strange but, paradoxically, having production companies interested in the book helped us sell the book. So we had the money we sold the movie for and we had the book advance, which was not very much. We worked on the documentary for two summers and got paid a weekly rate. It all added up to not that much money, to be honest. I probably made $65,000 or 70,000 over two and a half a years to do this project. But it also meant I got to do exactly what I wanted to do and got all this weird experience, like making a documentary. So I bring this up because, as a writer, it was an interesting way to parly a series of things on top of one another that kept us going. Otherwise, it would have been really hard to write a book like this if we had day jobs. It was going to have all this Hollywood stuff floating around.
What is it like to go from writing on your own to writing collaboratively with a partner?
The first real collaborative writing happened during the Baltimore protests in 2015. You couldn't put together something for the paper that reflected the protests by yourself. We were interested in narrative journalism so oftentimes you were doing dispatches. It might be me with one group, Baynard with another group. Then you put the pieces together and file a few different voices , you have to start to find some commonality between them. Some of your personal style maybe gets a little sanded off but also your tricks get exposed — the things we do to get through a piece of writing that didn't need to be there. They're often poor impulses or just lazy writing.
The first pieces I really collaborated on in that way were the pieces about Moose and the police. I knew the music and I knew a little bit about his situation. Baynard is primarily an arts writer, too, but he knows his way around documents and things like that. We wrote together because there were things that I could do that he couldn't do and things he could do that I couldn't do. If he had tried to write about the music part, I'd probably just rewrite it anyway and I just didn't quite have the language for turning a police report or something for a deposition into something compelling.
Also, when your alt-weekly starts to lose resources, you’re going to do whatever to make it work. If that means I cover the first half of a city council meeting and then I have to take my dog out, so someone else covers the second half, you have to find a way to glue that together. We arrived at a style that was narrative and voice-y that just sort of split the difference between how we both write.
You described the style to me before we spoke as a “trashy crime novel,” which is amazing. How did you guys decide on that?
That took a long time and involved a lot of rewriting. I really love long anecdotal leads. Baynard can sometimes lean on short sentences. We had to think about how we could reign me in, how we could push him further. But the through-line was that we wanted it to be accessible and an easy read. I wanted to write a book my dad would read: he’s a normal dude. If you can write something that a normal dude who doesn’t read a lot of books would be interested in, that’s cool.
One of the things that I thought was really fascinating when I heard you and Baynard talk at [Covid Safety Ed. Note: of course I mean via Zoom but how do we phrase this???] The Ivy Bookstore was how you used Instagram to put together additional details for scenes. Can you tell me a little bit about the unconventional, or unconventional-seeming, ways you found additional details for scenes in the book?
There are two robberies in the book that are like set pieces. In the first chapter, there’s a really long, in-depth robbery and later there’s a robbery where a couple is kidnapped after shopping at Home Depot. The cops took them to their house, robbed them for a lot of money, didn't charge the couple with anything, and then spent their money on dinner. There is a lot to work with. You have pieces of information that are facts or quotes. You become able to fact check what people said. By starting with the facts, you would sort of get the rhythm of the scene.
If you want to accentuate the things that mattered to the characters. For this scene, it was being in this Home Depot and feeling like you're being followed and not knowing why you're being followed. It made sense to walk into Home Depot and think about that. Home Depots all smell the same, right? That's a fact we can stick with. I was curious about what music was playing. This would have been July 8, 2016 and we went in there like September in 2018. That was a question. If we could figure that out, that might be a good detail because we have wiretaps that tell you the time that this all happened, when the cops are saying basically, You’re following the guy we’re going to rob soon, right? There are timestamps. Sometimes we’d have images or videos that tell you the exact time something happened. You become hungry for details. Sometimes you ask subjects what they were doing before [what you’re reporting happened] on that day or about what they were wearing. You start to accrue these details through facts or that are so general, that you can get away with it. The smell of Home Depot is a good example. But it’s about tension: I know all these things but what does a reader need to know?
I found a lot of people through Instagram. A lot of them are people that don’t want to be found, who are living normal lives who are or were involved with the underground economy who are used to reporters calling them like, “Hey, I heard you got arrested last week…” and not “Hey, I don’t care what you did, I want to know what happened to you.” But sometimes you find someone’s Instagram and become an internet creep and just go through it.
There's one example where we had security camera footage of a victim’s condominium, just the hallways and the entrance because the cops snuck into the building and strong-armed a security guard into letting them into this woman's apartment. Then they went into the apartment, claimed to have found a bunch of heroin, harassed her 14-year-old child, and arrested her husband. We had all this really great footage of the beginning of the robbery because we had security footage of the cops coming, a cop pretending not to be a cop casing the place. But this woman didn’t want to talk to us, so we had a hole in the story. We have testimony, wiretaps, video footage of the exterior and the interior of the condo building, interviews from an investigator. The hole is, What does the apartment look like? So I found her Instagram and was able to see exactly what she did that day. There’s a picture of her in the kitchen on that date hours before she was robbed. Going back further, her daughter had this birthday where Lor Scoota, this big rapper in the city who was actually murdered later that summer, came to her party. Originally, I wrote about all of this but we pulled it out because it was too much.
The trial also really determined which details mattered. The cops were really into any kind of success their victims had, whether they were in the underground economy or not. They were really into focusing on what people’s homes looked like, some weird class shit, These details become important because they represented something to the police in their paranoid racist minds.
The more broad version would be to reach out to people and ask them to go as wide as possible — ask them what someone one sounds like, what someone was wearing, anything you can stock up because sometimes a detail about a cop might be relevant. If someone said he was listening to a certain kind of music, you can use it to mean something about their character. You take the basic reportedly things — documents, interviews — and expand that by being aggressive about how you can use your observations and the internet. Google Street View is awesome. Instagram is amazing because it’s a constant document of everything. You can put in a location, go through the timeline, and you can look up the weather and stuff like that because my pure chance some rando took a selfie in a location near a robbery on some day, so I know exactly what the sky looks like at that time on that day. Why does the sky matter? Because in the case of the [Home Depot kidnapping], they were so far out of their jurisdiction, the victim’s house was far away from everything. To put in the rolling hills and the purple sky, it means something different than details for the sake of details.
What, for you, were the most remarkable differences between taking edits while working on the kind of journalism you’ve always been doing as opposed to working with a book editor?
Our book editor, Marc Resnick at St. Martin’s Press was really macro. He does a lot of military stuff and the exploration macho-ness and infrastructure and organizations and the State that was interesting to him, then all that gets flipped on its head because these guys are criminals that are cops. But his edits were pretty macro, almost always just getting us back on track. He was kind of a wizard with it in ways that I didn't realize quite until we were done. I think he realized that because it was two of us, it would have been really hard to navigate really heavy handed edits. His edits were often just like focus, focus, focus. He really pulled us back from indulgences.
When you have wiretapped audio, you think it's all awesome. It's insane to hear it. There's one scene that was turned into two sentences in the book. I had transcribed all the audio in which one of the cops is calling this girl he was supposed to be meeting in New York but hadn’t been able to leave Baltimore because he spent all day robbing people. He calls her on Friday night, she’s in bed and you can tell by her voice she’s really mad. She’s giving him a ton of shit and he’s trying to sound cool but can’t be like, Do you understand that I was dealing drugs and robbing people all day? There’s a lot of tension.
They go back and forth and in the background, she’s watching a town hall about police brutality on BET. You can hear Killer Mike in the background talking about police brutality. This is a Black cop, to be clear, and I get the sense that he became a cop because it was an easier way to be a drug dealer, not because he believed in the institution of the police department. So Killer Mike is going on this economic empowerment rant. He says to her that whoever she’s listening to doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He starts mansplaining banking to her. It was amazing stuff. And the scene just had a big circle around. Marc said there was too much dialogue — a lot of people have said there’s too much dialogue in the book.
The other thing that Mark really focused on as an editor waa the things we couldn't see because we were too deep in it. At the core, it’s about the main cop, Jenkins, who is this super-cop psychopath criminal — this white meathead classic cop — and Ivan Bates, a Black defense attorney who was onto these cops for a long time and was right behind them, knew they were doing dirt, and was trying to expose them but because he’s a defense attorney, it wasn’t exactly his job. The structure we landed on was to invert the cop story — think of something like Heat — only here, the robbers are the cops and the cops are a defense attorney. We didn’t realize that was the structure early on. Marc was able to say, Jenkins and Bates are your characters. And that had been a problem when we were first trying to sell the book. People kept asking, Who’s your hero? And our answer was, There are no heroes, this is a story about unrelenting cruelty and brutality, which is not a good way to sell a book. We didn’t realize it was a cat and mouse game between those two until six months in.
Those were kind of our marching orders: character, character, character, plot, plot, plot. And once we had that, it helped us a lot. We’d been editing each other for so long that we were kind of good at taking direction. Maybe some other people would have been more resistant.
And lastly, what is in the Brandon Soderberg toolkit for writing scenes?
Start with the facts. Anything that you know is true. In our case that was often based on documents or interviews. The next step is figuring out the action of the scene. But the facts determine the scene. For our book, if you didn't have enough facts, it couldn't be a scene. What gets cut are things that don’t add up either factually or have too many discrepancies. As a reporter or a writer trying to tell a story, that really sucks because you’ve given something great that you don’t actually have a handle on. The scene is fleshed out by the details which come from documents, observation, and internet deep-diving. And just about anything else you can figure out. Between those three things, you can start to build something that feels like a scene.
The second part of what you need to do is interviewing and reporting because you've built out the scene and you have new questions. Then the last thing is figuring out the rhythm and the pacing. That’s shaped by the facts but also by what’s going to come before it or after it. I thought a lot about records and albums and songs. Some songs are shorter than others. Sometimes they're interludes. Sometimes interludes have the coolest sonic ideas but don't work as a full song. With scenes, it's kind of the same. That’s the music writing thinking I bring to it.
Here’s the best non-song interlude to take us home.
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