The crime fighter

With Tulsa Crime Monthly, Cornel Williams ridiculed criminals, raised public awareness

I think I started to notice it in 2006 or 2007—a thin-papered rag that started showing up at Urban Tulsa Weekly where I was managing editor, and occupying the same table as alt weeklies we subscribed to and would sift through from time to time, our eyes peeled for story and design ideas.

Tulsa Crime Monthly stood out, though. It’s colorful cover looked like a ransom note, with too many headlines crammed on the page in bad font, accompanied by homemade art, mug shots sitting atop cartoon bodies and the faces of city officials cut-and-pasted into clip-art scenes. It was completely irreverent and a little strange, and it called out thugs, thieves, and murderers as well as the mayor, chief of police, and city councilors. 

It was funny in an “I-can’t-believe-they-said-that” kind of way, outright mocking criminals in a time before Just Busted made mug-shot voyeurism a hobby, and satirizing the misdeeds of government officials with the gall of someone who couldn’t care less about the possibility of libel charges. There were columns, too: advice offered by a North Tulsa preacher who liked to fight, and restaurant reviews from a critic who rated meals by number of barfs induced. And always, there was a featured bartender, a scantily clad buxom beauty whose profile harkened back to the days of “women-seeking-men” classified ads.

We loved it.

Every month, we passed it around, smudging the ink with our fingers, laughing and gasping and shaking our heads in disbelief. Our reporter, Brian Ervin, wanted to find out who was behind the thing and interview him (or her, though we were pretty sure it was a him). He tracked down Cornel Williams and engaged him in a raucous interview—because that’s how most conversations with Cornel were—and we published the resulting story on the cover of the March 27-April 2, 2008 issue.

That was the first story anyone had written about Tulsa Crime Monthly, and, as far as I can tell, the best portrait of Cornel that’s been published, that captured his jovial spirit, his jokester tendencies, but also the depth of his character, and the tragedy that prompted him to start publishing Tulsa Crime Monthly.

I interviewed Cornel myself in 2011, when I was working as news editor of This Land Press, for a segment we called This Land Live. I interviewed folks I found interesting and we broadcast the interviews live via This Land’s Ustream feed. Cornel showed up to the interview wearing a long black trench coat and carrying an unlit cigar, his two constant accessories, and cracked jokes throughout the interview, which is still online. It looks like I’m asking a lot of serious questions about a silly magazine, but TCM was borne of a genuine desire to fight crime and make Tulsa a better place.

Cornel founded Tulsa Crime Monthly in 2004, after his friend Ples Vann was murdered “by some Hoover Crips.” They were classmates at Roosevelt Junior High but lost touch. A TV news report informed Cornel of his friend’s death many years later. 

“It convinced me I had to do something about the crime in Tulsa,” he told Brian during their interview. 

TCM was his answer—its purpose not only to “make the public aware of the city’s crime, but to ridicule the crime,” Brian wrote, “to take whatever glamour there might be out of it, and to show criminals their own idiocy and absurdity.”

The Tulsa Police Department, at first annoyed by the paper, came around to see it as a public service. Cornel told me he even had a few “informants”—both on the streets and within TPD—who would funnel him information and fuel his derision.

The other stuff, the ridiculing of city leaders, that was just to “piss people off,” Cornel said. “Because it’s fun—especially people with no sense of humor.”

Cornel had plenty of humor, and plenty of heart. An amateur boxer (and an expert on the subject) with a degree in political science from The University of Tulsa and a career in real estate, he spent most of his free time—what wasn’t used to maintain TCM—fighting crime another way: by mentoring at-risk youth. He accomplished this with his own gym, Main St. Gym, from 1987-1999, and then most recently through the Reed Community Foundation, another boxing-based outreach organization, founded by Keith Reed in 2006, that teaches kids discipline and leadership—and feeds them lunch every day. 

Through his magazine and his work at the gym, Cornel did what only a few can claim: he made Tulsa a tangibly better—and funnier—place.

Cornel Williams died on Nov. 8, 2016. He will be missed.