Imagine “The Wire,” “Serpico,” “Prince of the City” and “The Shield” rolled into one. It’s why Hollywood producers should read “The Code of Silence” and give Chicago freelance journalist Jamie Kalven a call.
It’s a remarkable, 20,000-word, four-part online series in The Intercept: an unseemly tale of two rank-and-file Chicago cops who stumbled upon a sweeping criminal enterprise among colleagues. But then, they “were hung out to dry” by a corrupt department.
It’s also a tale both of how mainstream media often blows law enforcement coverage and how potentially important stories run smack into journalistic conventions and just get lost.
His expose is like the grittiest fictionalized drama: dirty cops, abject poverty in crime-ridden projects, people wearing wires, murders to silence informants, the good guys being demonized and put in real peril, and ultimately a department hierarchy looking the other way.