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Philadelphia Police Detective Philip Nordo was an unusually lone wolf. In the tightly regimented bureaucracy that is big city policing, he was rarely supervised and often worked alone. The upside? He got results. Nordo was known throughout the department for having a hand in efficiently convicting more than 100 people. He was a third generation cop who worked around the clock to solve cases, earned a prestigious promotion to the homicide unit in 2009, and doubled his $80,000 annual salary with overtime pay. So why was he interrogating suspects murder suspects about their interest in gay porn?
That’s just one of the questions at the heart of this week’s episode of Reveal, which revisits the Nordo case with the help of Philadelphia Inquirer reporters Chris Palmer and Samantha Melamed.
All of this might sound like the stuff of lurid true crime sensationalism, but dozens of real people’s lives were upended by Nordo’s actions. What reporters, and eventually an investigation by the district attorney’s office, eventually found was a disturbing pattern. At best, Nordo used questions about sex to test a detainee’s willingness to cooperate. At worst, Nordo was a sexual predator who used his police badge to exploit a power imbalance. “This is the perfect place for a sexual predator to be,” says Vincent Corrigan, an assistant district attorney in the Special Investigations unit. “In the middle of this massive vulnerable population.”
Perhaps more disturbing than Nordo’s actions was the stunning inaction by law enforcement. Complaints about Nordo’s behavior were ignored or mysteriously dropped for years before he was finally charged, tried, and convicted for his crimes. That inaction is still impacting people’s lives. Milique Wagner, a man who spent years in prison after he says he was set up by Nordo and the brother of his former girlfriend, doesn’t think Nordo’s conviction is closure in his ordeal. “I have no faith in the system because I know how corrupt the system can be, and I don’t want to take that chance with my freedom against,” he says.
