PASADENA, Calif. _ It was a bad day when undercover officer Joe Halpin discovered he was being followed by the Los Angeles Police Department. A veteran of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department for 18 years, Halpin knew a tail when he saw one.
"I was driving and I noticed someone off to my right, and the way he sat in his car," says Halpin.
"I thought, 'That guy must be an off-duty cop.' I kept driving, made a right, and the guy went with me. I thought, 'That's strange,' made another right, and then he and other cars went with me too.
"So I thought, 'Now we're going into a circle, so I'm being followed.' I pulled into an ATM and I pretended I was walking up to the ATM and watched them park. And they backed into spaces, which is another tell because cops always want to get out fast. So I started walking toward one of them, and as soon as I did, he took off. I got his plate, and I was in an undercover car, a truck. I ran the plate, and it came back 'no record on file,' which tells me they're cops."
Halpin immediately called his lieutenant at headquarters. "I said, 'Murray, I'm being followed!' He goes, 'You're being paranoid.' A half-hour later he called and said, 'OK, somebody IS following.' I found out later that my department was following me, but they got worried that there would be ramifications from that, so they farmed it out to LAPD, and I burned them on the first day."
It turned out Halpin was suspected of falsifying search warrants and consent forms, but nothing came of it. Nothing, that is, but an entirely new career.
At this point, Halpin was scraping bottom. He was suffering the breakup of his marriage and being investigated by his own. "That was really the turning point for me. I said, 'I'm no longer effective as a cop. Obviously they've lost confidence in me because they feel like I'm doing things illegal. I've lost confidence in myself because I don't think I'm the same guy that first pinned on the badge.'
"I thought, 'I'm not doing anybody any good and I could end up like a lot of cops _ being either a drunk or a madman at the end of the career.'"
A short time later, Halpin sold his first spec script. That sale was the pivotal point. He's been working in Hollywood ever since on shows like "Hawaii Five-O," "Secrets and Lies" and "The Lottery."
His latest series, "The Oath," premiering on Crackle March 8, reveals a little-known fact about law enforcement that won't go down easy. It seems some cops form real gangs _ sort of fraternal organizations that unite the officers in an omerta that occasionally blurs the line between the letter-of-the-law and expediency.
"The gang starts out with people with their backs against the wall and protecting each other," says Halpin.
"You're in this weird world when you're a street cop. You don't have support of the administrators because those are political people who are not going to do anything to defend you. And then the public at large _ every encounter you have is a negative one because cops aren't called to any good situations, and you have to immediately take control of the situation. So you're being bombarded by the negativity and dealing with the public that you end up banding together to protect each other.
"From there it's the little microaggressions that you deal with every day that snowball, and you end up going down the wrong path. Everybody who has a badge on their chest honestly I think goes in with good intentions. I don't think anybody goes into it with bad intentions," he says.
"I think it's a high octane life where life and death becomes a daily occurrence. There's a lot of fear, there's a lot of insecureness about your job and what's going to happen if you make the wrong choice. And I think that causes, that's kind of baked into the process of starting to band together to protect each other."
These gangs pledge allegiance to each other and carry names like the Vikings, the Regulators, the Cavemen. Halpin's gang was the Reapers. Each gang member sports a defining tattoo. Pulling up his pants cuff, Halpin reveals his inscribed on his ankle. Each symbol within the tattoo identifies the gang.
The former cop says he's grateful he got out when he did. Now he finds running a TV show with 185 crew members not so taxing. "The training of being a cop has served me well in dealing with crises," he says. "It's also served me well at dealing with people. When you see people at their worst, you learn to deal with them in whatever mood they're in, nothing overwhelms you anymore because you've been where it's been the worst it can possibly go."
SERIES HUMANIZES TRAGEDY
"The Looming Tower," a new series premiering on Hulu Wednesday, is based on Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning book. It follows the people planning the chaos of 9/11 and deals with one of its casualties, John O'Neill (played by Jeff Daniels). When he was doing research for the book, Wright says he needed to find a way to take the massive tragedy and humanize it.
"And how do you do that? In my experience, you find individual stories that encapsulate the tragedy," he says. "And when I spotted on the Washington Post site an obituary a couple days after 9/11 for John O'Neill, it made him sound like he was a disaster.
"He had been washed out of the bureau. He had taken a job as the head of World Security at the World Trade Center. And I thought, 'How ironic: The man who was supposed to get bin Laden didn't get him; bin Laden got HIM.' But I now think it wasn't ironic at all. It was Greek.
"Friends told O'Neill, 'You'll be safe now, John, because they already tried bombing the World Trade Center in 1993.' And he said, 'No, they'll come back to finish the job.' So he instinctively placed himself at Ground Zero."
CBS PLANS SUMMER COMPETITION
Mark Burnett has come up with another game show for CBS. Tentatively called "TKO," it will feature a player running at breakneck speed through obstacles while others, along the way, try to take him out and slow him down by firing over-the-top projectiles at him. Burnett calls it "an obstacle course meets dodgeball."
The show will premiere this summer. No one has been more successful than Burnett with these competitive series like "The Voice," "Survivor," "The Apprentice" and "Shark Tank." Burnett tells me he got his entrepreneurial spirit from his parents. "They both worked in factories in east London," he says. "My father in Ford Motor Co. and my mother in the car battery factory next door. Mother always said to me, 'Mark, you can be anything you want to be. Just as we had to work in factories to pay the bills, you have to know the guy who started Woolworth's started with a shopping cart on the streets and now has 1,000 stores. You can be anything you want to be.'"
'THE VOICE' FEATURES NEW JUDGE AND NEW RULE
"The Voice" is back on NBC this week for its 14th outing. Grammy-winning Kelly Clarkson joins judges Blake Shelton, Adam Levine and Alicia Keys in the cat-bird seats. This season judges have the power to prevent a fellow judge from pushing that button and maybe competing for the chance to mentor a particular artist. But, the trick is, they can exert that power only once.
The show, which tries to single out the best vocalist among a roster of terrific singers, is not just based on the quality of the vocal chords, says executive producer Audrey Morrissey.
"There's a lot of strategy among the judges in splitting the vote," she says. Sometimes the contestants are split off on purpose by their mentor-judge. "They might think, 'Wow, I have a lot of a similar types of artists and I might split the vote and I'm trying to win.' ... Sometimes they just want a great battle and have a great moment and may the best person win because they don't want to split the vote. There have been seasons _ I'm thinking of Josh Kaufman (winner of Season 6). He got bumped two times. He started out on Adam's team, he got stolen by somebody else, I forget. He might've been stolen by Blake, and then Adam grabbed him back. He ended up winning. So it's incredible how these things take twists and turns that nobody can predict."
