During my years with the Baltimore County Police one of the nicest characters I had the privilege of working with was Detective Sergeant John Munch of "Homicide, Life on the Street".
Well, not exactly. You see the character of Detective Munch, played by Richard Belzer, was inspired by a real life Baltimore Police Homicide Lieutenant, Jay Landsman. Jay was featured in the book by the same title and needless to say couldn't be left out of the television show.
My work with Jay Landsman was however real life. When I first met him he was still a homicide supervisor in Baltimore city. Jay was a wealth of information. He possesses a great, morbid, sense of humor which always came in handy while working murders. Munch was very much Jay Landsman.
His memory is what impressed me the most. While working a murder in Baltimore County I called Jay to run a nickname by him. A witness identified "Peanut" as being the shooter. "Peanut" is a common nickname in Baltimore crime circles but Jay said he believed our"Peanut" had the name of Anthony Williams and lived at 5** Gold Street off of Pennsylvania Ave.
Searching BGE records revealed that Williams did live at that address. We identified Williams as the killer and thanks to Jay saved an awful lot of time trying to track down "Peanut".
Jay had a side business at the time of removing deceased bodies from death scenes, natural and un-natural. His company would transport the victims to the Medical Examiners office for autopsy. On one occasion he responded to one of my murder scenes and immediately recognized our dead guy as a suspect in two previous city murders. In our case he attempted to rob his own cousin of drugs and was shot and killed by cuz.
It was always a pleasure to run into Jay at crime scenes or the M.E's office as he always had a story to tell to make you laugh.
Approx. 1994-95 Jay retired from the city police department and joined Baltimore County Police where he eventually became a homicide detective and later a supervisor.
Jay also became a regular on the HBO crime drama, "The Wire", both as a fictional character and a co-star.
The fictional Sergeant Jay Landsman was played by actor Delaney Williams. He portrayed a homicide unit supervisor.
The real Jay Landsman portrayed Lieutenant Dennis Mello (picture above with uniform on) a commander in the Baltimore City police force.
Now that "The Wire" is off the air Jay Landsman is back to real police work.
The Landsman inspired character "Munch" has gone onto make television history.
Munch has been the only fictional character played by a single actor to appear on eight different television shows. These shows were on four different networks: NBC (Homicide: Life on the Street, and Law & Order franchise), FOX (The X-Files, Arrested Development), UPN (The Beat), and HBO (The Wire). Munch has also been one of the only television characters to cross genres, appearing not only in crime drama series, but also the genres of sitcom (Arrested Development) and science fiction (The X-Files).
A muppet representation of Detective Munch appeared in the Sesame Street sketch "Law and Order: Special Letters Unit".
3 comments:
I grew up with Jay and his family as I lived about 50 yds. from his house. He was always a good kid with a sense of adventure. since I was older I hung around with his older brother Jackie but remember Jay fondly and I recently had a chance to meet with him at Jack's house during a re-union. Great guy, great family.
very interesting! thx!
That is a picture of the actor Richard Belzer, not, Jay Landsman.
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