For 28 years, Michael Buckley introduced listeners to new kinds of music and interviewed some of the region’s most fascinating people as part of his weekly Sunday Brunch radio program on Annapolis’s late WRNR 103.1 FM. A blend of musical genres and a celebration of the Chesapeake’s vibrant culture, it was a beloved weekly ritual for listeners across Maryland.

Five years after launching the show, Buckley would incorporate a regional interview into each broadcast called “Voices of the Chesapeake Bay,” ultimately interviewing hundreds of the estuary’s most notable subjects, from watermen and environmentalists to Civil Rights leaders and Indigenous tribe elders.

The station went off the air in February, but in Buckley’s state-capital studio, the music and stories play on. Listened to archived episodes via voicesofthechesapeakebay.net and tune into his new show, Americana Voices, on Saturdays at 2 p.m. via 88.5 FM.

What got you interested in interviewing people?
When I was 16, I dropped out of high school and hitchhiked across the country for eight years. I learned how to talk to people. When they pick you up, they want you to talk about yourself, but then it gives you a chance to interview them, too. It taught me a lot. But as time went on, I started to feel like I’d missed a lot by not going to school. I thought knowledge should be shared, it should be available to people of all ages, and we can all learn from each other.

You don’t have a background in broadcasting, but you worked with WRNR for 28 years. How did you get started?
I was running the big music store at the flagship Borders [in Montgomery County] and I put together music programs on new releases, with one panel discussion about the radio revolution. Later, I ended up having a meeting with Jake Einstein [who founded WHFS and later WRNR] and ranted about all the music that wasn’t getting played.

He listened to me contentedly, and after about a half an hour, he said, “You should have a radio show—do you have a tape?” I didn’t. But I said, “Yeah, I got a tape,” and I went home that night and used all these different artists, and he loved it. He put me on Sunday mornings, for a five-hour show, 7 a.m. to 12 noon. And I did that until WRNR went out of business.

What was your vision for the Sunday Brunch?
I have this philosophy, which is free form: a DJ should pick the music right on the spot while they’re doing the show. So I did my thing; I wanted the world to have the experience of listening to all different kinds of music—classical, jazz, folk, blues, mixed together in harmony and in one place…I wanted to get people to look at things from a variety of points of view, and I had a captive audience. The interviews for “Voices of the Chesapeake Bay” were based on this common passion for this Bay that we live around. Everybody’s got a great story to tell. Everybody has twists and turns in their lives that lead to extraordinary moments in a lifetime.

What do you think as you look back at 28 years with WRNR?
Each show is like my child—I can’t pick a favorite. But I’m blessed to have done all of these interviews. I’m enchanted with this country that we live in, which is so rich in stories, so massively beautiful. I wanted to find out if people are basically good people, and I think I’ve found that people are genuinely friendly, impressive, approachable. For me, it’s one form of living a full life. I have gotten to interact with and encourage people to have an awareness of how rich their lives are.

The first time Mahala Morefield met Weasel, aka Jonathan Gilbert, she was a law firm receptionist posing as a music writer from the Lone Star Dispatch. It was 1975. Morefield had relocated to Washington, D.C., from Austin and stumbled across a high-pitched nasal voice spinning records on an eclectic midnight to 6 a.m. show at a 3,000-watt station with the call letters WHFS (“High-Fidelity Stereo”).

Little Feat, the Stones, Frank Zappa—a Romani-French jazz guitarist named Django Reinhardt with only eight good fingers—somehow it all fit together each night. “I had a musical crush on Weasel,” recalls Morefield. “I set up a phony 5 a.m. meeting and held on to the cassette tape of that ‘interview’ forever.”

Fast-forward almost 45 years. The WHFS days—including the later years when the station moved to Annapolis and blasted its new 50,000-watt signal toward Baltimore—are long past. The station’s epic HFStivals, of course, are gone, too. But Weasel, whose nickname was bestowed by an American University classmate who thought he resembled the creature on the cover of the Zappa-produced 1970 album Weasels Ripped My Flesh, is still on the air, spinning now for Towson University’s WTMD.

Because Gilbert doesn’t drive—he still lives in the same Bethesda building where the old WHFS studio was located and where its transmitting tower remains impaled on the roof—a revolving band of 50-plus volunteers, fondly referred to as Weasel’s Wagon Train, takes turns transporting the unlikely D.C.-Baltimore cultural icon to Towson to record his once-again, organic, free-range shows on WTMD. (Passionate, engaging, witty at the microphone, Gilbert isn’t quite a recluse off air, but he’s not on Facebook or other social media, either. “Why would I do that? I want to listen to music and I want other people to listen to music.”)

A Long Island native, Gilbert’s extraordinary curatorial gifts begin with a great natural ear, followed by a deep curiosity and impeccable memory. “It started with a transistor radio when I was 10 years old,” he says. “I’d stay up all night, covers pulled over my head, not wanting to miss a thing—sometimes that was one of the great jocks from WBAI in New York, sometimes it was a baseball game—on a good night you could get Bob Prince from Pittsburgh. I listened to Chuck Thompson from WBAL long before I came to Baltimore.”

An older brother introduced him to Chuck Berry and Little Richard. He heard the records his uncles, aunts, and parents played, their personal interests skipping from folk to jazz to Sinatra and big band. Singing in the school choir, playing clarinet through 12th grade, and graduating high school in 1967 when album-oriented rock was transforming radio, Gilbert absorbed everything.

To this day, his playlists pop with surprises and style as he juxtaposes songs in the same key and effortlessly raises and lowers the tempo. “You create a narrative, an emotional journey,” he says, thumbing through a tattered notebook during a recent set that spanned gospel, early civil rights-era, and black-power soundtracks on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. “Music is visceral first.”

In between, he provides the kind of nuggets and backstories that music lovers geek over. “When I hear something new that I like—and it could be something that’s old—I’m still that 10-year-old kid,” he says. “I want to hear it 10 times. And, like a guitar player figuring out the chords, I want to slow it down and see how they did what they did.”

By coincidence, Morefield, who moved back to Texas in the late ’70s, returned to the area shortly before Gilbert joined WTMD nine years ago. After not conversing since her “interview” when both were in their mid-20s, she’s now a friend and occasional Wagon Train driver. A whole lot and nothing has changed. “He plays your soul, your heart,” she says of his Weasel Wild Weekend shows. “A maestro of the radio. One song vibrating off the next.”

True Laurels has evolved from a blog to a fan zine to a glossy print publication since it began in 2011, and its next iteration begins tonight, when Red Bull Radio launches True Laurels radio show at 6 p.m.

True Laurels founding editor Lawrence Burney will be joined live in the studio in New York with Baltimore legend Lor Choc, the 20-year-old West Baltimore R&B hip-hop artist featured on the cover of issue 3 of the print edition.

The hour-long radio show will stream live each Wednesday on redbullradio.com, hosted by Burney and exploring the music and culture across the African diaspora through discussions with artists, journalists, and other guests who can bring insight and perspective.

A Baltimore native, Burney sees music as a byproduct of society and wants to investigate those connections, covering music from his home region as well as the South, the Caribbean, West Africa, and beyond.

Also a staff writer for Noisey, Lawrence splits his time between Baltimore and Brooklyn.

“To me, the music is not just the music,” Lawrence told Baltimore in an interview earlier this year. “Music is the best introduction to any society. That’s why it has to be taken seriously.”

Early this spring, when President Trump proposed the elimination of federal funding for public broadcasting, WYPR kept its cool. “Every few years there is a threat,” says the station’s program director, Andy Bienstock. 

“What it does is remind listeners how important their support is. In this current news cycle, people need sources they really trust.” To wit, in six short days in March, audience members pledged more than $370,000 in the station’s most successful fundraising drive to date.

But this wasn’t the first time 88.1 FM had to overcome a period of uncertainty. Like in 2002, when its predecessor, WJHU, was sold. Or in 2007, when the station—now WYPR—weathered the financial crisis without laying off a single employee. And then there was the Marc Steiner debacle of 2008, when the host’s dismissal launched an outpouring of audience protest. The station stood its ground and hired Dan Rodricks, who became a hit. 

“We look to the future a lot in this business,” says president Anthony Brandon. “We don’t speculate too much on what we did yesterday.” 

The station has had to evolve in other ways, too, like investing in digital and social media, but even that didn’t go quite as expected. “As we’ve looked at all these new ways of reaching listeners, be it podcasts or Facebook Live, the idea was that regular radio listening was going away,” says Bienstock. “But our numbers are as good as they’ve ever been in our history.” 

Over the past 15 years, the NPR affiliate has grown from a 14- to 41-person staff, with 220,000 weekly listeners and an annual budget of $5.8 million, up from $1.4 million in the final days of WJHU. Programming has remained fluid, with familiar faces like Tom Hall and Sheilah Kast moving time slots, beloved old-timers walking the plank (RIP Car Talk), and new shows joining the lineup, like the Out of the Blocks docu-series and Future City with Wes Moore. 

“The fact that we’re even here talking about this is an incredible success,” says Bienstock. “We never lose sight of the miracle that is public radio.”

The digital clock in the studio reads 11:45 and it’s Friday night, which means it’s time for Fran Lane to entertain her longest-tenured caller, a happily married, 59-year-old Annapolis college professor who goes by The Captain. Each week for the past 22 years, give or take a rare miss, The Captain dials in and plays a faux cat-and-mouse love game with the WLIF 101.9 nighttime host of Love Songs with Fran Lane, who does her best to play along. It started with his first request, “Nightshift” by the Commodores, way back when.

“It goes out to you and anyone else who may be working,” he told Lane across the airwaves, flirting with the woman who brings five hours of love-song requests and dedications to Baltimore every weeknight.

Normally, The Captain greets Lane with an over-the-top imitation of William Shatner’s signature line from the TV show Star Trek, “This is the captain speaking!” But tonight, Valentine’s Day approaches.

“Hi Captain, how are you?” Lane asks.

“I’m fine, but this is Dan Cupid,” he says, switching character. (He occasionally goes by the Easter Bunny in April, Uncle Sam on a day near the Fourth of July, and the Great Pumpkin or Tom Turkey in the fall.)

The 51-year-old Lane, who could easily pass for thirtysomething and possesses a preternaturally soothing voice, sits alone behind a silver microphone extending from her desk inside the WLIF studio near Mt. Washington. She prefers the lights be kept low. A pair of black headphones rests over her long, dirty blond hair. Three computer screens surround her, brightening the darkness. The soundboard is at her fingertips and a cup of coffee not far away.

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot,” she replies, playing it straight. “How are you Dan?”

“I’m terrific! How are you?”

“I’m great,” Lane says. “It’s Friday. And you’re here.”

“Yes I am,” he replies. “Of course, this is a very special weekend . . . ”

If radio is the theater of the mind, as Lane believes it is, then she’s the director from 7 p.m. to midnight every Monday through Friday. The “actors” come from all over 101.9’s broadcast reach and include frequent dialers with on-air personas such as The Captain or Big Kat, who sends out a “special of the week” at the end of his calls. But they also include the nightly, more serious one-off requesters, like Julie from Westminster, who wants to encourage her fiancé through the difficult start of a new job with “Keep Your Head Up” by Andy Grammer, and listeners who fall somewhere in between, like Michelle Hope, a 46-year-old bus attendant from White Marsh, who first called in while going through a difficult divorce.

The production is rooted in love, one of the world’s endless pursuits.

“What’s on your heart tonight?” she asks. “You can tell me about it.”

There is a formula to being a friend in the night, to drawing emotion from strangers, and Lane has the science down. “What’s on your heart tonight?” is her catchphrase, to which she usually adds, “You can tell me about it,” before sharing the station’s phone number. During weather updates, skies aren’t clear, they are moon-lit. From her seat in the Lite FM studio, she sets the mood with sympathetic and soothing one-liners.

On a recent night, Lane plays Orleans’ familiar 1976 soft-rock hit, “Still the One.”

“Who’s the one for you?” she asks.

“Can I make a request?” asks a middle-aged man from Odenton who wants to hear, “You’re Beautiful,” by James Blunt, dedicated to his special someone.

“That’s what I’m here for.”

It’s a drizzly, winter Monday afternoon when Lane arrives at Atwater’s in Belvedere Square Market for a scheduled interview. First, however, she needs a pick-me-up. “What’s the strongest coffee you have?” she asks a cashier.

Wearing a black coat and scarf, she sips from the white paper cup, hands cradling it to enjoy the warmth and then admits she’s not that comfortable talking about herself. “I’m kind of shy by nature,” she says. “The anonymity of radio works for me, as well as the callers. I’m very comfortable with that.”

Then she leans forward with a polite smile. “But what do you want to know about our little show?”

Lane lives in the Mayfield neighborhood of Northeast Baltimore, which is also where she grew up. She knows everybody there and says the best part of her day is the “talking walks” she takes with her two Irish wolfhounds, Magda and Jude, and her husband of 23 years, Tom Fink. He’s a graphic designer. He’s also president of the Junius B. Booth Society, a nonprofit that has worked with Harford County to turn Tudor Hall, where Abraham Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth grew up, into a museum. Both share an interest in 19th-century history.

“Tom’s interested in theater,” she says. “I’m more interested in the architecture. It’s just a fascinating time in our country.” She also has a 31-year-old stepson, T.J., a U.S. Army veteran who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lane met her future husband about as far away from Baltimore as you can get in the U.S.—and by pure coincidence. On vacation in Los Angeles, she was supposed to hang out with a childhood friend who was in the movie business. But he got a gig the day before her flight left from Baltimore, and told her a neighbor was available if she needed to get someone to show her around town. That was Fink.

“Do you have a certain someone on your mind?”

“We just hit it off immediately, yakking away. We had a lot of the same interests,” Lane says.

“A lot of people ask me, ‘Is she as nice off the air as she is on?’” Fink says later. “And yeah, she definitely is. She really cares about people. She has a great heart. One of the things she loves most about her job is her audience. She puts them first.” To her husband’s point, each February, Lane makes “Valentine” workplace visits to the loved ones of contest winners, delivering candy, flowers, theater tickets, restaurant gift certificates, and hotel vouchers on their behalf.

Not that everything is roses when you talk about love, of course. Hearts get broken, relationships end. Not always well.

Hope, the bus attendant for Baltimore County Public Schools, first spoke with Lane after her divorce left her insecure and dealing with trust issues. “She heard my story and, ever since, has put me on the air every time I call,” Hope says. “I adore her. I want to thank her for everything she does for all the people in Baltimore and whoever can get her show.”

“Maybe you just need a song to take you someplace else.”

In her own life, Lane is facing some of the difficult feelings that inevitably come with love—whether it’s a romantic, platonic, or familial bond. Her father, Florian, who turned 88 in January, was diagnosed with kidney cancer this fall, after an unrelated surgery. A Fells Point native born to Polish immigrants, he spent a career in sales working for an industrial chemical company. Her mom, Marge, now 85, took care of Lane and her four older siblings, and later worked at T. Rowe Price. Together, they provided their daughter, who never went to college, all the education she needed for a job no one could plan.

“My parents were a great example to me of a loving relationship,” she says. “They are kind of opposites. My dad is super outgoing and my mom is more of an introvert. They had different interests and common ones, too. If my mom was interested in something, he was interested in it. It might not have been his favorite thing, but they did that for each other. They are best friends. I knew that’s what I wanted to have in my life.”

“Need one for the ride?”

At 9 p.m., there are only four cars in the dark parking lot of the CBS Radio building off of Falls Road, and one of them belongs to Lane. Inside, she is a one-woman show, taking the calls, editing them on the fly, and turning them around for live broadcast. She has no producers or support staff. The building also houses Mix 106.5 and 105.7 The Fan, and sports talk-show host Terry Ford, who also works evenings, waves as Lane passes by.

A Monday Night Football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Redskins is on a TV with the sound turned off in her studio. Lane is a sports fan, too. She’s into the Ravens and, in the summer, Orioles games serve as her background viewing of choice. The O’s typical 7:05 p.m. first pitch aligns perfectly with the start of her show.

“I grew up loving radio,” she says, adding that she idolized local top hits disc jockey Johnny Dark, who she later worked with briefly at 101.9. “As a kid, I always felt like he was talking to me. It was one-on-one. I’ve always tried to emulate that.”

“It’s a place to reveal your heart.”

While Lane counts the Rolling Stones among her all-time favorite bands, she also appreciates jazz and modern pop stars like Adele and Ed Sheeran. For the most part, she fits the 25 to 54 female demographic that makes up the bulk of her audience. That said, she gets requests from a wide variety of folks—teenagers, seniors, male and female—even occasional second-generation listeners whose parents put them to bed with WLIF.

“My parents were a great example to me of a loving relationship. They are opposites. . . . They are best friends.”

“What she does is a unique craft,” says Dave Labrozzi, CBS Radio Baltimore vice president of programming. “In my estimation, there’s nobody better in the country doing that type of show, especially the way she puts callers on the air and gets them involved. That’s a special art that she has mastered.”

After working at an AM station in Bel Air right out of high school, Lane had jobs at rock stations in Portsmouth, NH, and Boston before returning to her hometown. An acquaintance at WLIF asked if she could fill in for a nighttime host who had been felled by the old entertainment line “break a leg” after slipping on ice. That 10-week gig is closing in on a quarter-century.

“I never thought this would be what I’d end up doing, but I love what I do. It’s something positive,” she says. “There’s a certain intimacy with nighttime radio, an immediate interaction, and it’s local. You’re talking to your community and giving them a voice.”

When she started, the format was slightly different, however. Listeners called in, but their dedications weren’t heard on the air. A child of the ’70s, Lane felt she needed to bring a bit of Wolfman Jack, the famed DJ featured in George Lucas’s early film American Graffiti, to Charm City.

“We get a little lost in love and lost in the music, too.”

“They’re not tuning in to hear me talk about my problems,” she says, offering a glimpse at what has kept her part of 101.9’s top-rated local programming for so long. “Doing it is a great distraction. Let’s focus on what’s going on with somebody else. It is a little therapeutic [for everyone].”

In The Captain’s opinion, the show will go on for another 20 years. It’s the local flavor—at least 25 callers a night get their voices on the air, with many more names mentioned—that he thinks will stand the test of time and competition from satellite radio and other media. He plans on playing his role, hitting the airwaves with regularity before Lane’s signature signoff, “Sweet dreams, Baltimore.”

“She’s part of Baltimore culture,” he says. “She’s kind of like the Senator Theatre and Bengies Drive-In. I don’t know how many people would recognize her on the street, probably nobody, but the way she does it, everyone feels connected.”

Lane has vacation days to use, but won’t take them all. She’s committed to her callers in that way. Nor does she necessarily aspire to bigger and better. There is someone out there named Delilah, who is essentially the nationally syndicated version of Lane’s voice in the Baltimore night. Typically, Delilah can be heard the same five hours as Lane, doing the identical love-request format, in many cities across the country.

“You never rule it out, if she wants to retire . . .” Lane acknowledges with a smile. “But not many people get to work in their hometown. I would miss that. I’ve been really fortunate to be able to do this. I love it.”

“What’s on your heart?”

You recently received a grant to host a new podcast/radio show on WEAA titled Baltimore: The Rise of Charm City.
What is it about?
It’s going to be intergenerational stories of place and memory in Baltimore City. We’re going to look at neighborhoods and talk to some of the older residents who are still living there, or used to live there, and then connect with younger people who are still living there. The idea is to present the history of the place through the memories, and just sort of track the changes and lack of change. It also will have narrated research and some interviews with historians interwoven.

How did the collaboration with WEAA come about? Did you bring them on board or was it the other way around?
The Association of Independents in Radio is funding 15 cities’ public radio stations’ new projects. I’m the Baltimore one, and WEAA is the [selected] public radio station. WEAA had to put together its own proposal, just like the independent producers. They looked at my proposal and then they looked at theirs and thought we’d be a good fit. I agree. WEAA’s tagline has long been the voice of the community and they are very committed to community engagement and community uplifting. Because I want this to have that kind of tone, I was really excited that they were on board with this. Their sensibility and the sensibility of this project seem to match.

The first episode airs in January. What will it be about?
I’m reaching out to a few places that I know I definitely want to work with. One of them is Shake & Bake Family Fun Center.

Where’s that?
It’s in Upton on Pennsylvania Avenue and it’s really, for that area, the only community center that still exists. Upton has a really, really high concentration of children but they don’t have much besides [Shake & Bake’s] skating rink and bowling alley. We want to talk about how that has been a hub of safe community. It has been a really big deal for that community to have that space. Also, Upton has been in decline for a long time, but it has a really interesting history. So we want to try to talk about that.

So this is going to be a hyper-local show. Do you feel like you’re part of a trend toward telling hyper-local stories?
I do think that there’s a trend toward local storytelling, in podcasting particularly. It’s a relatively new medium, I guess. We’re all looking for different ways to present personal stories that have broader resonance and that give people something to connect to that’s larger. One of the reasons I think we were selected was because of the Baltimore Uprising earlier this year. We wanted to talk about how the history [of Baltimore] isn’t just the things that are problematic. There are things in each community that are very special and very important to the people and they rely on even when there’s unrest. So we wanted to talk about those things in conjunction with—or as a way to juxtapose—the national coverage that we were seeing earlier this year.

You are new to radio and podcasting. You come from a writing background.
My background is entirely in freelance writing and before that it was in education. It’s a new experience for me, working in audio.

Well you have a nice voice. So that should help.
I was worried about that! I thought about hiring a different host but we’ll see how it goes.

Really? You thought about not hosting it, even though you pitched the idea for the show?
I briefly considered it, and then I talked to the people I’m collaborating with at WEAA and they thought it would be best if I did it. [Laughs] But I was really timid about being the on-air voice. And then we also bounced around [the idea of] maybe not having it narrated at all. But because we also wanted to do the historical aspect, we definitely need that narration. At this point, I comfortable with the idea of it, but at first I had some hesitation. So I think it’s just going to be me on-air.

You’ll be like the Sarah Koenig of the show.
Apparently.

Speaking of Sarah Keonig, Serial had a Baltimore narrative at the center of its first season. Do you in any way see your show as a response to Serial and other media in which Baltimore—fairly or unfairly—has been depicted as dangerous?
Not Serial, specifically, but I think just generally Baltimore gets such tough coverage, especially this year with the homicide rate being higher than it has been in most recent years. A lot of national attention has been paid to that, too. So because of that, we’re hoping that a lot of national listeners will take notice of it and add [our stories] to their framework of what the city is about. I feel like Baltimore has always gotten, sort of, a lot of bad coverage, more than it has gotten good—and there’s so much good here.

Where did you go to school?

Milford Mill High School. UMBC. (I was a commuter—not so good.) Temple U. (Finally, out of the house—yeah!)

What book or film most changed your life?
I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb. This is such a powerful story—I couldn’t put it down. It rejuvenated my love of reading. Now I have to have my head in a book every night.

Who is your favorite Baltimorean, living or dead?
My mom—she’s the best!

What is the best advice you ever got?
Be true to yourself. And if you want something, stop whining about it. Go after it. Make it happen.

What is the bravest thing you’ve ever done?
Taking the job here at 98 Rock not having a clue as to how to operate the equipment. I was flying by the seat of my pants those first few nights. I seriously thought my dream job was history.

What is the greatest problem facing Baltimore today?
Besides the obvious—crime—I’d say the lack of 24-hour eateries. Sometimes, you have to have a greasy burger at 3 a.m.!

What are your thoughts on The Block?
I’m over it. . . .

Who would play you in the movie of your life?
Katharine Hepburn before she started shaking.

If you could write Baltimore’s motto, what would it be?
Baltimore Rocks!

98 Rock is a bit of a boy’s club. How do you fit in over there?
You don’t have to be one of the boys to get along with the boys.

Do you miss vinyl?
Hell no! Cueing up records was a major pain. Nothing like the old album cover art, though.

Best on air interview?
Ozzy Osbourne. He’s great even when you can’t make out what he’s saying.

Does it feel like 30 years?
God no! Time flies when you’re having fun.

Any on-air bloopers?
I had only been on the air for about three months. We were doing a promotion with the Hair Cuttery. For $10 you could get a cut and blow dry with proceeds benefiting a charity. Let’s just say I messed up and had a Freudian slip! My program director was listening and almost drove off the road. Lucky for me, she was laughing!

On clear days, Ed Norris rides his new motorcycle, a Victory Kingpin, to his four-hour radio gig, where he holds forth on everything from the war in Iraq to the Ravens to the city schools.

Some days, there will be crises, of the sort that come up at radio stations, over equipment breakdowns or airtime. Some days, on the ride in to work, he can’t help it. All he can do is grin.

Few would have imagined this life for this man. Certainly not Ed Norris himself. Not during his spectacular rise from beat cop in New York City to police commissioner in Baltimore, where he brought the city’s notorious murder count below 300 for the first time in a decade. Not when he fell from grace three years ago, pleading guilty in a lurid federal corruption case that charged Norris with using an off-the-books police expense account to bankroll personal shopping excursions, steak dinners, bar tabs, and romantic liaisons.

While he was serving his six-month sentence in federal prison, Norris couldn’t imagine any life on the outside. He knew his conviction meant he could not return to policing. After he was released, in February 2005, he discovered that finding any work would be a complicated endeavor. He got an $8-an-hour job selling soap and cologne at the perfumery Caswell-Massey because it was the one store near where he and his wife were living at the time in Tampa, Florida, that did not include the question on its application form: Have you ever been convicted of a crime? Two months later, someone complained to the store’s corporate headquarters about its ex-cop, ex-con employee. Norris was out of a job again.

But, now, here he is, every weekday from 10 to 2, presiding over a call-in radio show gaining popularity at such a rate that local CBS Radio executives are discussing shopping it for national syndication. One on-air promo for the show intones: “The Ed Norris Show, locked and loaded,” although its host (a felon) can no longer own a gun. The show is heavy on Maryland politics, with Martin O’Malley—the state’s new governor, and Norris’s old boss—a frequent subject of discussion. But because of his conviction, Norris couldn’t vote in last fall’s election. The man who once controlled a 3,000-officer police department now controls this pulpit of talk radio. So, he talks. He talks about race. He talks about terrorism. He talks about movies. He talks about Britney Spears. He talks about rebuilding a life.

“No offense, you earned it, but not everybody gets a second chance like you,” a caller said one day.

“I’m lucky. I know it,” Norris replied.

At age 46, he is making real money—”more next year than I’ll ever make as a cop,” Norris says, maybe unconsciously holding out hope that he could rejoin a department. He plays a recurring character on the HBO series The Wire, he tools around town in a red BMW 325 coupe (back when he was allegedly living large as the city’s $137,000-a-year police commissioner, his personal car was an aging Volkswagen Jetta, he notes for the record).

Norris and his wife, Kathryn, have moved back from Florida and settled in Baltimore County (Norris says that his wife declined to comment for this story). Everywhere, he is stopped by people who want to say hello or shake his hand or give a nod of approval.

“They just want to touch him,” says former Governor Robert L. Ehrlich, who hired Norris away from the city in December 2002 to head the Maryland State Police, the job he had to leave a year later when the federal charges came down. One of Norris’s new colleagues, Baltimore radio personality Maynard Edwards, puts it this way: “He’s gone from police officer to folk hero.”

There’s only one problem with this new Ed Norris: He wants to be the old Ed Norris. If he could have any job he wanted, any job on Earth, he would be a cop again.

“I’d probably be the commissioner of Baltimore again. I’d like to just re-right that ship,” Norris says. “Yeah. . . . If I was absolved today, I would really like to just go back and fix it—from what I hear, they’ve got a lot of problems.”

His voice trails off. He laughs. Later, he goes back to it again.

“It’s just how I’m wired,” says the third-generation police officer, who worked 24 years in policing before it all collapsed. “It was all I lived for, to help people. I don’t want it to come across like I’m not happy in my new career, because I love it—I’m really loving this job, it’s a great career, and I’m going to continue in it. Becoming police commissioner is not in the realm of reality, so it’s not going to happen. But I’ve just had this thing, I’ve always been like this—helping people, it’s the best thing you can do. When I thought that was taken from me, that I was never going to get to do that again, I was really devastated.”

Public life is littered with once-powerful men brought down by their vices. And the story of Edward T. Norris seemed destined to join that canon. When he swept into town in 2000, Baltimore hardly knew what to make of its brash, fast-talking out-of-town top cop. He had his police shirts custom made and wore a black leather uniform jacket. He got regular manicures and became a fixture at the city’s best restaurants. He also would occasionally jump out of his police vehicle and give chase through the roughest streets of Baltimore: Unit One, rolling. Norris’s mentor in New York City had been Jack Maple, the bon vivant cop credited for the dramatic crime reduction in that city in the 1990’s and known for his penchant for bow ties, two-tone shoes, and extravagant meals.

Norris, it seemed, had been a good student. Under him, Baltimore’s homicide count began to drop. From 305 in 1999, the year before Norris started as commissioner, to 253 in 2002, the year he resigned.

“I thought to myself then, and I feel now, that he was the guy,” says former Maryland State Police Lt. Colonel Mark “Steve” Chaney, who closely followed Norris’s efforts in the city and then served as his second-in-command in Annapolis. “Guys like him only come around once in a while. He was the person who could come down and who could relate to things, he had the city experience, he had the leadership . . . I think that he had the uncanny ability that a lot of police leaders lose along the way to step back and put himself in the shoes of his officers.”

University of Virginia business professor James G. Clawson uses the turnaround of the Baltimore Police Department under Norris as a teaching example in his graduate-level leadership class.

“In the original go-around, I sort of viewed him as a true American hero,” Clawson says. “And in many ways, I still do, in the sense that he saw something that needed to be done and he was able to do it in large measure, regardless of resources or support. It was sort of John Wayne trying to fix the situation.”

Now, when his class reads the case study of Ed Norris, though, there is an epilogue about how it all unraveled.

It started with stories in The Sun, disclosing the existence of an off-the-books expense account and offering a glimpse of how the city’s captivating commissioner did business. There were pricey steak dinners, stays at the posh W Hotel in New York, outings to Orioles games. There was no public money in the loosely structured account, and most of the roughly $180,000 spent during Norris’s three-year tenure had directly benefited the department. But some $20,000 was in question. Norris said he would pay back any personal expenses. He took his licks in the press.

It didn’t end there. A few months after Norris left the city to head the Maryland State Police in December 2002, federal prosecutors picked up the case. In December 2003, they brought an indictment packed with titillating details about gifts for three women bought at Victoria’s Secret the day before Valentine’s in 2001, a $367 meal at Fleming’s Steakhouse in the Inner Harbor, shoes for $163 at Dan Bros. Discount Shoes, and more.

Norris read the charges, and he felt sure he could beat them. The shoes? They were combat boots bought the day after the Sept. 11 attacks; even the indictment noted the date on the receipt, Sept. 12, 2001. The dinner at Flemings that the indictment suggests was Norris and a female friend celebrating a birthday dinner for $376.10? It was dinner with a member of the police department, and there were two other men at the meal. The Valentine’s gifts? Norris says he never used cash from the fund to pay for personal gifts, and the court records showed that while prosecutors had a black robe to introduce as evidence, they didn’t have any receipts submitted to the fund for reimbursement.

Bring on a trial, Norris said. Prosecutors came back with what defense lawyers told him was the head shot. Investigators found that Norris took $9,000 from his father to help pay for his house and then later paid the money back—meaning it should have been considered a loan and reported on federal tax forms. The feds had Norris on a fraud count with a 30-year maximum sentence. His father could have faced charges. Norris says he didn’t see any choice. He pleaded. He stood in court, said he was guilty, and got a sentence of six months in prison, six months’ home detention, and 500 hours of community service.

The day before he reported to the minimum-security federal prison at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, two old friends from the NYPD picked Norris up so his family would not have to drop him off at the prison. The three friends had one last run. “It was like The Last Detail with Jack Nicholson,” Norris says, a reference to the 1973 movie where two Navy officers assigned to take a young offender to prison determinedly show him a good time along the way.

“We went, we had a steak, we had booze, went to a topless bar, we got it all in,” Norris says. “Then the first thing I did that next morning, I woke up early, I banged on all their doors, I go, ‘I want to get this done. Get up, get up. Let’s go.’ It was like, ‘I want to do this. The sooner I get there, the sooner I get out.'”

After a few months at Eglin, Norris and other prisoners were evacuated for Hurricane Ivan. He spent six weeks sleeping on the floor of a federal prison in Mississippi and later was transferred to the federal prison in Atlanta. Some prisoners knew his story. Others assumed the white guy with the shaved head and long beard was a meth dealer. Inmate number 41115-037 had spent his life locking up criminals. He never had thought much about the nuances of prison life. Now he was sleeping with his feet pressed against the door of the cell to keep out the rats. But what haunted him most was what he would do when he was done doing time.

“I had no idea. No idea. It was the worst,” Norris says. “Actually, a guy [convicted in an accounting scandal] came up to me, and he was like, ‘For the rest of us, this is bad, but we’ll recover. We have capital. We have businesses, we’ll create more businesses. But you—this is it. You can’t work in your field.’

“I said, ‘I know. I have no idea what I’ll do.’ For me, that was my biggest fear. I knew I could get through the tough part of it in prison and home detention. But the rest of my life—I’m still pretty young. I’ve got to work another 30 years.”

So Ed Norris began to rise again.

While he was serving his six-month home detention at the small house in Tampa, where he and his wife and their young son, Jack, had moved to escape the public eye of Baltimore, the former commissioner agreed to go back into that public eye. He started appearing, by phone, for an hour each day on the Big O & Dukes show on WHFS (105.7 FM). He started by talking about life on the inside. Life on home detention. His case. What it was like to work for Martin O’Malley. What it was like to work for Bob Ehrlich. The same blunt charm that won over the city a few years earlier was at work again.

When his home detention ended and U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett ordered that Norris had to perform his community service in Baltimore, he had a job waiting as co-host of the retooled show, Ed Norris with Big O & Dukes. Soon enough, it became, simply, The Ed Norris Show.

Other opportunities came as well. A cameo appearance as a homicide detective on HBO’s The Wire while he was police commissioner had grown into a recurring character. When Norris was out of prison, the show’s creator and executive producer, David Simon, invited Norris back to the set. Simon never considered cutting Norris, but he wasn’t sure that Norris would want anything to do with a city where things had gone so wrong.

“I didn’t think we’d see much of him in Baltimore,” Simon said. “I had a feeling that whatever love he felt for this town was going to be gone. And I thought, what does a guy like that do? You know, when you’ve been a career cop, what do you do? But, you know, [F. Scott] Fitzgerald is full of [crap]. There are second acts and third acts and fourth acts in a lot of lives.”

These days, his television character is the closest Norris gets to police work. At his sentencing, prosecutors suggested Norris would find work after prison in consulting. But no town wants an ex-convict advising their police force, Norris said. When he was first released, he volunteered to perform his community service in Iraq, helping U.S. troops train the country’s police force. His conviction blocked that as well. Instead, he has spent the past year, a few hours at a time, serving out his community service working with The League for People with Disabilities. He expected to complete his 500th hour early this year. He still has one year of supervised release ahead. And then?

“You pay your penalty, but you never finish paying it. You never finish,” Norris says. “And I’m doubly outraged, because in my mind, I still didn’t do it. I’ve been convicted of a crime I never committed and now I’ve got to live with this forever.”

For Norris, that is the worst part. He pleaded guilty to things he says he did not do, and so in what should be a victory lap—a celebration of his swift, successful reinvention—he is slowed by the weight of the details of the case: the 34 instances of improper activity detailed by prosecutors. He goes through each one in his head, and he grows angry all over again.

“I didn’t do it. I know I didn’t do it. I know who I am. I know what I’ve stood for my whole life,” he says. “I’m a lot of things—I don’t steal anything. I’m not a thief. You want to believe I slept with six women? Make it 12. Make it a [expletive] hundred. I don’t care. Think what you want—it’s not a federal crime.”

Not everyone loves the new Ed Norris. Not everyone has forgiven the old Ed Norris. Callers to the radio show still bring up the case sometimes. One of his former bosses, Governor O’Malley, won’t discuss him. But he has plenty of fans.

One is his other former boss, Ehrlich, who, while he was still governor, invited Norris to the mansion in Annapolis to celebrate the radio show’s soaring ratings.

“I thought he got the short end of the stick. I thought he was not treated fairly. That view’s been well expressed by me. And to see him come back like this is very satisfying,” Ehrlich said in an interview shortly before he left office. “What occurred, it is what it is, it’s never going to change. On the other hand, in life you can either be captured by the past or you can go back out and compete—and he has gone back out and competed very successfully.”

In his public defense now, Norris has some new ammunition. The U.S. attorney who brought the case against him, Thomas M. DiBiagio, later was reprimanded for pushing his staff in emails during the summer of 2004 to bring three “front page indictments” by Election Day. Justice Department officials in Washington blocked DiBiagio from bringing any public corruption cases without their approval. Supporters of Norris saw it as evidence that the case against him was driven by a prosecutor looking for political pelts. “You were the 8-point buck,” Norris said he was told once by Ehrlich. “Who better to get than you?”

Now in private practice, DiBiagio flatly disputes that notion. “I think he’s confusing two things. He stole the money. He did commit the crime. And whether I in-artfully stated goals for the office is something completely different. He knew the system. He knew if he didn’t think he was [guilty], there would be a trial.”

“From the office’s standpoint, our core belief was justice without fear or favor, and the law applied to a popular police commissioner the same way it applied to a young kid on the street,” DiBiagio said. “The evidence was overwhelming that he stole money from the police department. To look the other way would be wrong.”

For the ex-cop and for the ex-prosecutor, the case is one of blacks and whites. Others see much gray.

“The fact that he can’t utilize his skills now to help Baltimore, or any other place like Baltimore, is not a victory for anybody,” says Simon, a former police reporter who had been impressed by Norris’s efforts to overhaul the city’s troubled force. “Ed Norris is going to make more money outside of government than he would inside government. I’m sure he’s there. His penance should be, you have to go back to be chief in Baltimore. The ultimate punishment? You want to sentence the guy? Sentence the guy to get the murder rate down another 30 percent. Because he’s the guy that could do it.”

Bob Philips, senior vice president for CBS Radio in Baltimore, says the “sky is the limit” for Norris in his new career. But even Philips does not pretend to think that this life is his new star’s first choice. “I would say it hasn’t been easy. It would have probably been a lot easier for him to move to another marketplace to start over,” he says. “I think deep down, he misses police work. He had something taken away from him that he lived his whole life for. And I think there isn’t a day that goes by that he doesn’t miss it.”

If it weren’t for the radio, if it weren’t for The Wire, if it weren’t for the generous welcome he found back in Baltimore, Norris isn’t sure what he would be doing now. He might have taken a job in construction. He might have sold suits. Instead, he got a job where tens of thousands of people listen every single day to what he has to say.

“If I lost this job tomorrow, because they switched the station to gospel or something, I’d still thank them for the job, because I never would have had this opportunity for people to really get to know me,” he says. Of the case, of everything else, he says only: “I don’t know. I don’t know why this happened. Big picture: I have to think this happened for a reason. Otherwise, I couldn’t live with myself. So, maybe, who knows what will happen. Maybe I will train somebody some day and he will be the guy to win the war on terror. I don’t know.”

He isn’t sure why it all happened. How, exactly, he became this new Ed Norris. But one thing is for sure: He doesn’t want to forget it.

When he got out of prison, when he got back to Baltimore, he got a reminder tattooed on his back. He wanted it to be permanent. He wanted it to hurt. Some days, when he is at the gym or trying on clothes, he catches a glimpse of it in a mirror.

It is a phoenix, rising.