EYES DON'T LIE

EYES DON’T LIE A Chicago Undercover Narcotics Cop and Journalist Bond in a Dangerous City Written by Acclaimed Journalist Rick Telander Book/Podcast/Documentary

In the Summer of 2016, celebrated sports journalist Rick Telander

embedded into the mind and Chicago Streets of Chicago Police Officer Danny O’Toole, who at the time was a tactical narcotics investigator.

Eyes Don’t Lie is a book, podcast, and documentary series

on the life, investigations, and hallucinatory journey of both O’Toole & Telander as they navigate America’s dangerous City.

Part memoir, part in-your-face embed into a dangerous world, Rough

Men also poses hard questions about the socio-economic and political engines of policing in America, and it delves deep into officers

battling ptsd, and the complexities of mental health on the job.

FROM THE AUTHOR OF: • Heaven is a Playground • In The Year of the Bull: Zen, Air, and the Pursuit of Sacred and Profane Hoops • Joe Namath and The Other Guys Rick Telander is a sports journalism legend.

The Summer of 2016 was a hot one in Chicago, terribly hot.

There were periods where stagnant, moist air, heated by the stones and concrete and blacktop of the city, which themselves had been baked all day under the smoldering sun, made it feel as if some giant vaporous animal—a huge, wet, ungroomed dog, perhaps—had settled over the city to sleep. If you didn’t have air conditioning, the heat could be deadly. Even at night the heat would hang on as if fearful it might forget to spread its weight once morning arrived. It was the kind of heat that breeds violence in a big city like Chicago. Like algae in fetid puddles, the heat made what was ugly and biding its time below the surface bubble up, to bloom. Chicago Police Sergeant Danny O’Toole had been promoted three years earlier from a narcotics policeman to a tactical sergeant.

It was a step up in the cop world, but mostly it allowed him more freedom to execute search warrants, feel less constrained, and more in charge of his daily work. As a side bonus he no longer had to wear a uniform and perform his duties in plain clothes and look like an average citizen. However, on this day in late July he was riding with two fellow policemen in an unmarked squad car, himself in the front passenger seat, in full Chicago policeman regalia. The men were watching for whatever might be out there of danger or suspicion, but the reason all three were in uniform was that Eddie Johnson, the new superintendent, had ordered all but the most secretive police to wear identifying blue and white. The Summer of 2016 was that dangerous, the murders and shootings that out of control, the danger that high, that the chief was worried for his charges’ safety and wanted none of his men or women unrecognized for who they were, enforcers of the law.

Danny noticed a car ahead of their patrol car, an older model with three people in it. He couldn’t make out much else, except that like the cops’ car, the windows of this one also was open, and the passengers crooked arms protruded in the breeze. The trio of cops studied the car. Something about it didn’t feel right. There is an instinct that veteran cops develop, a feel for situations or people that is hard to put into words. Sometimes they just know. A white female was driving the car with two black males as passengers. Not here. Not in the deep ghetto. This meant something. The car was moving erratically, swerving just a little, progressing slowly, then fast, then slow. When it rolled through a stop sign, that was enough.

``Pull it over,` `be careful,” Danny said.

The officers covered the car as it came to a stop. Danny took the passenger side, and almost immediately he saw there was a handgun in the center console, and the shirtless man had his hand on it.

“Get out of the car!’’ he hollered, pulling his 9mm from his holster.

“Do not touch that gun! Keep your hands where I can see them!’’

As the man exited the car, Danny put his own weapon away and attempted to handcuff him. Abruptly the man bolted.

This was the kind of criminal that needed to be locked up, that could singlehandedly raise havoc in a community, who could make big city living into a kind of merciless torment for the innocent and the law-abiding. On his left forearm he had a tattoo that was a warning signal, a globe with the words, ``Fuck The World’’ inscribed inside.

He was the kind of villain that cops were sworn to go after at almost any cost to themselves. The heat index that afternoon was 93 degrees, and Danny would not soon forget the feel of the man’s bare skin and the sweat that made his body as slippery as an eel’s as they fought. Like so many other thoughts from his day-to-day business, it was not one that he wanted to cling to. But it was there, that image, impervious, silently playing, just a split screen away if he wanted to see it, if he didn’t stay focused on better things. It was almost five months after this incident, while he was still rehabbing the injury but preparing to jump back into full time police work, that Sgt. Danny O’Toole and I first met. He was not what I expected. But then I probably wasn’t what he expected, either.

EYES DON’T LIE

is a multi-media storytelling experience with an audio book, podcast, and documentary, narrated by Rick Telander & Danny O’Toole, that tells a story of the city of Chicago, and their roles as lifers, interlopers, and in the case of O’Toole — a career spent in the trenches, arresting, and convicting some of Chicago’s most dangerous and brazen criminal gangs.