Shock in Cincinnati

Cincinnati has long been heralded as one of the nation's best-policed cities. Pedestrians can safely roam downtown Fountain Square even at night.

Pornography is hard to find. Topless and bottomless dancing are strictly forbidden. Thus it came as an extraordinary shock when a county grand jury indicted Cincinnati Police Chief Carl V. Goodin, 42, the commander of the vice squad and six other cops last month for charges ranging from bribery and extortion to perjury. At the same time, Larry Flynt, paunchy publisher of the raunchy new skin magazine Hustler, was indicted on charges of bribery and sodomy. Last week the grand jury reconvened, and still more indictments are expected.

Tremendous Shock. "People were kind of horrified," declared City Manager William Donaldson. Goodin and the six other indicted police officers were suspended without pay. Although not linked publicly with any wrongdoing, Deputy Chief Embry Grimes and a district captain abruptly resigned. "It has been a tremendous shock to the city," said Mayor Bobbie Sterne. The grand jury is expected to hand up many more indictments, involving a number of officers as well as some civilians.

Chief Goodin, facing five felony charges that could lead to as much as 15 years in prison, insisted that "I will be vindicated--I have done nothing illegal, unethical or immoral."

An up-from-the-ranks officer, Goodin graduated first in his class of recruits and was named chief in 1971. He won nationwide attention with a neighborhood team-policing concept, which involved taking cops out of their cruisers and assigning them to long-term service on beats so that they could get to know their assigned neighborhoods. He also established an alcohol-action project, which included mandatory rehabilitation classes for drunken drivers. His department was a model for other cities in the early 1970s.

Then last summer an anonymous postcard advised investigators that all was not well. Other tips followed, including a letter from nine unidentified police officers, disclosing that patrolmen were being forced to pay kickbacks to their commanders for off-duty work and that a cops' slush fund for social affairs and special police equipment had mysteriously disappeared. A department probe was launched, and when it began unearthing evidence of corruption, the grand jury took over. What it was investigating was a story of vice cops soliciting bribes and police shaking down people for money, merchandise and prostitutes' services. Under Simon Leis Jr., 41, Hamilton County prosecutor and a personal friend of Goodin's, the grand jury charged the chief and two officers with having lied to the jurors during the investigation.

The probe involved police tolerance of flagrant offenses in Cincinnati's taverns. One of them was the Clock Bar, a joint that offered free meals and booze to cops who overlooked the flourishing trade in hard drugs carried on there (one report said 646 bags of heroin were seized there in an eight-month period last year). Yet the Clock kept ticking; it did not close until a plainclothesman was shot to death near by last summer.

Publisher Flynt, who claims a 1.5 million circulation for his monumentally vulgar magazine ("We're looking to turn the reader on, not respond to some sexual fantasy"), is charged with offering the services of a prostitute to one of the city's vice-squad members. Flynt runs three Hustler Clubs in Ohio, tacky rip-offs of the Playboy Clubs, offering expensive drinks and leggy "hostesses." His Cincinnati dive has been in and out of trouble with the police and the state's liquor-control commission for several years.

What went wrong? Longtime observers point out that the department's reputation as a superclean force may have lulled the community into smugness about the police. Both Cincinnati's city hall and its two daily newspapers were tame watchdogs. Said one dismayed patrolman: "The top man has been indicted; it couldn't be much worse. There is a dark cloud hanging over all of us." So much so that when Acting Chief Myron Leistler took over, one of his first acts was to replace the entire 13-man vice squad.

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