THIRTY CENT BADGE

Synopsis

It is 1973. Lieutenant Owen Tallis works internal affairs for a department that started the unit mostly to be able to say it had one. Eight years. Forty-one closed files. No friends anywhere in the building. In August they send him to the Fourteenth District, north side, where Sergeant Frank Duso has a price. It is not a large price. A case of rye at Christmas. A hundred dollars a month from a bookmaker on Vine. Everybody knows it. Nobody hid it. And the nineteen men in that district who take a share of it are also the only nineteen who still answer calls on the blocks the city stopped counting.

Who this is about

Lieutenant Owen Tallis works internal affairs in a city that created the unit to prove it had one. In eight years he has closed forty-one files and made no friends.

What goes wrong

In the Fourteenth District, Sergeant Frank Duso's price is known to every bartender, bookmaker and beat cop on the north side. Nobody hid it because nobody ever thought anyone would come.

What's at stake

The full report ends nineteen careers in a district where those nineteen men are the only ones who still answer calls in neighborhoods the city gave up on.

Why it keeps going

Each episode Tallis interviews one more man who is guilty and useful, and learns what the neighborhood would lose if he did his job all the way, and what it loses if he does not.

Takeaway

Corruption survives longest where it is cheap, because nothing that cheap looks worth the trouble of ending.

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