This bullshit coroner’s report at least partly blaming George Floyd for his own death has me remembering how I learned from my daddy that sometimes the police lie.

If you know me in real life, you might have heard me tell the story of how my dad — we called him Nurn — helped bring down Nixon by proving through magnetic analysis of the 18 1/2 minute gap that the tape had been deliberately erased. (He also taught me that sometimes Presidents lie. He was ahead of his time, huh?) So you might ask, how do you get a gig like that? Well, first you build a track record in another audiotape case… on behalf of the Mafia. No lie:

In early 1970s New York City, Joe’s Candy Shop got raided by the police. Wasn’t just a candy store; in the days before state governments got into the lottery business, Joe’s was a front for a Mafia numbers ring. Cops busted in, shut it down, hauled all the wise guys off to jail, put ’em on trial. At trial, the prosecution offered what they said was incontrovertible proof of guilt: the police had audiotaped the whole thing. Realtime evidence, kind of a primitive body-cam, amazing technology!

They played the tape in court, and all the mob dudes were like, “WAIT JUST A MINUTE THERE. Where’s the part where the cops offered to let us go if we cut them in for a share of the profits?”

So they argue back and forth, and finally the Mafia lawyers do some research and they find that there’s a company up in Boston that says it can do analysis of audiotapes to see if they’ve been altered in any way. That’s where Nurn works. His team isn’t super comfortable defending organized crime — but they know that if this is true, the cops are organized crime, too. So they’re on the case.

And yup, whaddya know, it turns out that it’s very obvious from the way the sound is laid down on the tape that it’s a dub, a duplicate, with two parts that don’t match up. Something happened in between “Hands up, this is a bust!” and “You’re all under arrest” that didn’t make it into the record.

In Nurn’s telling, that was the punchline, the happy ending; I don’t ever remember him saying what if anything might have happened to the policemen. I never thought to ask. He was a beloved storyteller with a belly laugh for the ages, and he always told this as a funny adventure.

Took me years to realize what it meant: sometimes the police lie. And that coroner’s report is some bullshit for sure.