Busted (15 page)

Barbara stabbed a plastic fork into her salad, and I wiped grease and mayonnaise from the corners of my mouth with a napkin. We sat in silence, chewing. Then Barbara thought of something. “Wendy, what if there are more Samirs out there?” We remembered from combing through search warrants that Jeff's squad had raided a lot of corner stores. We didn't think much of it at the time, but now we wondered aloud why this elite narcotics squad had zeroed in on so many mom-and-pop stores.

The next morning, Barbara and I headed back to the search warrant room to pull every store raid done by Jeff's squad. We practically jogged to the criminal courthouse, and in a gust of excitement, we flew through the room's doorway—and then came to an abrupt halt, as if we'd careened into a concrete barrier. Two
Inky
reporters and an intern, perched on metal chairs, looked up at us. We exchanged polite yet leery hellos. They were methodically sifting through the onionskin-thin warrants. Barbara and I tried to appear unruffled and blasé, but on the inside, we seethed like territorial hornets. This was OUR secret chamber of buried treasures and it was being invaded by a battalion of
Inky
reporters.

We had learned about the search warrant room through an attorney source, and for the first few stories about Jeff, Barbara and I had the place to ourselves. Not anymore.

There sat Andy Maykuth, a former foreign correspondent first dispatched to Nicaragua in 1985 and later sent to forty-eight other countries, mostly war-ravaged and dangerous, including Afghanistan, where he shadowed anti-Taliban forces in bullet-pocked Kabul. As the
Inquirer
's correspondent in Africa from 1996 to 2002, Andy covered the blood feud between Ethiopia and Eritrea, genocide in Rwanda, apartheid in South Africa, and famine in Zimbabwe. But Andy was unassuming, not full of himself. I watched him flip through search warrants and wondered if he viewed the self-inflicted bloodlust between
Inquirer
and
Daily News
staff as absurd.

There was Joseph Slobodzian, or Joe Slo, an
Inquirer
reporter since 1982, who'd covered federal courts in Philadelphia for almost two decades.

On yet another day, we walked into the room to find Gail Shister, the
Inky
's prickly former TV columnist. Gail had written about television for a quarter of a century, or, as she put it, since “God was a boy.” She wasn't just a columnist; she was an
Inky
brand with her own link on the Drudge Report, a news website that got 2 million hits a day. Gail prided herself on unearthing celebrity dirt and knowing which TV shows were cued up for the morgue before the actors themselves. When CBS wanted to dump Katie Couric from the
Evening News
, Gail broke the story. On Gail's Facebook page, she posted a favorite quote (from Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the saucy daughter of Theodore Roosevelt): “If you haven't got anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me.”

Gail knew she could be caustic. She recognized herself in the best-selling novel
Good in Bed
, written by
Inquirer
colleague Jennifer Weiner. Though Weiner denied it, Gail suspected that the Gabby character, a sharp-tongued newsroom gossip, was modeled after her.

In 2007, Gail fell out of favor with
Inky
editors. They killed her TV column and booted her to the Metro desk. She was bitter about the reassignment, and the last place she wanted to be was the search warrant room.

Gail's editor, Rose Ciotta, expected Gail to pull and copy all of Jeff's search warrants. During a cell-phone call, Rose instructed Gail to use her own money to cover the copying costs—25 cents a page—and the
Inquirer
would reimburse her.

“You know how much this is going to cost?” Gail said, heatedly. “I'm not using my lunch money for this.” She looked at us, all pissy, and threw open a hand in a gesture that conveyed, “Can you believe this bitch?”

Barbara and I smiled, simpatico, and Gail hung up with Rose. “Even if I had a million dollars in cash, I'm not going to use my own money,” she spat. Gail was fifty-six and openly gay. She paired her foul mouth with a truck-stop wardrobe of oversize jeans and flannel shirts and sported a short and choppy hairdo that looked like she cut it herself.

Rose was a control freak with corkscrew curls that she dyed black using “a hair color called Snow Tire,” an
Inky
reporter joked. Rose relentlessly rode reporters, but on this battle, she wasn't going to win. So she sent another reporter, cash in hand, to meet Gail at the courthouse. Gail and Rose were like two stag beetles, horns locked, each battling to flip the other over onto her back. They shared Buffalo roots and an upstate New York twang, but little else. When Jeff Greenfield, a senior political correspondent with CBS News, came to the
Inky
newsroom to interview Gail for a story, Gail introduced Rose: “This is Rose. Before she worked here, she was a guard at Auschwitz.”

Barbara and I didn't know which was funnier—the fact that Gail was bickering with Rose over the search warrants, or that the
Inquirer
was scrounging up change to make copies, while Barbara and I had cooked up a system to Xerox for free.

On this day, we were twitchy. We couldn't let
Inky
reporters figure out that we had moved past Jeff and Benny and were now focused on bodegas raided by any cop in Jeff's squad. We pulled out a stack of search warrants, flipped through the pages, and set aside the ones we wanted to copy—facedown. Once they'd been copied, we reshuffled them like blackjack dealers into the stack.

We tried to hide our joy when we picked up a folder that
Inky
reporters had just scoured to find warrants they'd copied, lumped together, on top of a neat pile. They were all warrants we'd pulled weeks ago.

Back in the newsroom, Barbara and I spread out the search warrants on a conference table. We were amazed by how many stores Jeff and his squad had raided over a two-year period. Sometimes they hit two stores in one afternoon.

In six months alone, Jeff's squad and another squad, which included Jeff's brother, Richard, raided twenty-two bodegas, boutiques, tobacco shops, and other stores for drug paraphernalia. That number was seven times more than the unit's ten other squads combined. Those ten squads—made up of more than a hundred officers—had raided only three stores during the same period.

One of my best sources was a cop assigned to one of those ten other squads. I had met the cop, who we'll call Ray, in 2007 when I first joined the
Daily News
and was covering a story about a perv lawyer who got caught naked in a courthouse conference room with a fourteen-year-old girl. My job was to get reaction from people in the courthouse. I was outside a courtroom when I spotted Ray, his back resting against the wall as if he were seated on a comfy recliner instead of a stone bench. I walked by slowly, staring at him as I mulled over whether to approach him about the perv lawyer.

“Hey, how ya doing?” he asked.

Ray had a bright smile and a warm, casual way about him. He wore blue jeans and a neatly pressed pin-striped dress shirt. Turned out, Ray was an undercover narcotics cop like Jeff.

Yeah, he knew the perv lawyer or knew of him, but couldn't be quoted. The police department had strict rules about giving information or quotes to the news media. Ray could get in big trouble for talking to me.

I gave Ray my card, and he began to call me with story tips, like a big drug bust done by his squad or a cop who got caught with a racially offensive sticker in his locker. The sticker was a cartoon of a man, half as an officer in uniform and half as a Klansman, with the words
BLUE BY DAY—WHITE BY NIGHT
.

Ray was ballsy and almost cavalier about feeding me information. He'd meet me on a street corner near my office and slip me internal police documents. He'd make jokes about the clandestine handoff. “I should be wearing a trench coat and a fedora hat,” he'd say.

We instantly hit it off, and he became not only a great source but a good friend. He sometimes called me just to talk, like when his ex-wife was acting nutty or his kid was doing poorly in school. He had an offbeat sense of humor and a reputation among other cops as a jokester who never let the job of chasing down drug dealers and dopers get to him. When I saw him in the courthouse, I pretended not to know him. He was often at the center of a cluster of cops, all laughing and talking and slapping each other's backs. Everyone seemed to like him.

I could rely on Ray to tell it to me straight. He believed that right was right and wrong was wrong. Even if he was the one doing the wrong, he'd own up to it. During the Tainted Justice series, I called him a lot to take his temperature, to get his perspective as a drug cop who managed informants. He once met me at a library and patiently detailed the anatomy of a drug bust, from the initial drug buy to the search-warrant application and the dos and don'ts of house raids. One day I asked Ray if female cops thought Jeff was good-looking.

“I think a lot of cops think Jeff has sugar in his tank,” he said.

“What? Sugar in his tank? What does that mean?” I asked, laughing.

“Gay,” he said, with his trademark bluntness.

When I called Ray to ask what he thought about all the store raids, I wasn't surprised to learn that he had only done a handful of baggie busts in his twelve years as a narcotics cop.

Jeff and Ray, though in different squads, were both part of the narcotics field unit. The elite unit was supposed to go after big fish—kingpins who headed violent drug organizations that packaged and distributed mounds of poison, bringing entire neighborhoods to their knees. Arresting shop owners on misdemeanor charges for selling tiny ziplock bags was like shooting fish in a barrel. Store-raid jobs were the smallest of small-time.

Barbara and I divvied up the search warrants. We knew there was something there, but we didn't want to prompt store owners. We decided to avoid leading questions like “Did the police dismantle your surveillance cameras?” or “Did the officers take any merchandise or money?”

“Agreed,” Barbara said, and we went to work.

“Hi, I'm not sure I have the right number. I'm looking for the owner of Dominguez Grocery Store?” I heard Barbara say into her phone.

I got on the phone with another shop owner. “I'm a reporter with the
Daily News
, and I wanted to ask you about the police raid on your store,” I said.

My eyes widened as I took notes. When I got off the phone, I jumped up and ran toward Barbara, who was already halfway to my desk.

“Wendy! You're never going to believe this!” she shouted.

“I know! I know,” I said.

PHILADELPHIA WAS HOME TO ONE OF THE LARGEST AND FASTEST-GROWING IMMIGRANT POPULATIONS IN THE NORTHEAST, PARTLY BECAUSE THE
cost of living was lower than in other cities like New York. Between 2000 and 2006, 113,000 immigrants flocked to Philly, nearly as many as had arrived in the entire decade of the 1990s. The majority came from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Some came to reunite with relatives or work at the city's numerous hospitals, tech firms, or universities. Others were entrepreneurs who opened shops with the belief that if they worked long and hard enough, they'd earn a decent living.

Bodegas could be found on almost every other block in all four corners of the city. Immigrants ran them and patronized them. At these shops, both the food and the language were familiar. Without nearby supermarkets or cars, the people in these neighborhoods bought everything there.

Barbara and I had split up the search warrants, and we began to track down the merchants. Most spoke little to no English. I'd taken five years of Spanish in high school and college; Barbara had studied French just as long. But all we remembered were textbook-taught phrases like “Excuse me, sir, can you direct me to the toilet?” or “Do you know what time the train arrives from Madrid?”

None of that would help when we talked to store owners from the Dominican Republic or Haiti. Or Korea. So we overcame the language barrier by using their relatives, store clerks, and customers to translate. Sometimes we resorted to hand signs and gestures, almost like a humorless game of charades.

When Barbara walked into a cigar and tobacco shop, she was struck by the brittle and slight appearance of the owners. Almost birdlike, the Korean couple, Du Hyon “David” and Yun Lois “Eunice” Nam, stood behind a long pane of bulletproof glass. Eunice handed lottery tickets to a customer through an opening in the protective divide, just large enough for a hand.

The Nams earned a middle-class life the hard way. They didn't expect handouts and paid their taxes. They toiled away at their store ten hours a day, six days a week, and commuted two hours a day to and from their store. David had left Seoul for the Philadelphia area in 1981 with a master's degree in foreign trade. He first opened a deli, then the smoke shop. “America Dream,” he told Barbara with a bashful smile.

Barbara empathized with the Nams. Barbara was born on a chicken farm in Kent, England, about fifty miles south of London. She came to the United States with her parents and younger brother by way of the storm-tossed Atlantic in the bowels of Cunard's
QE2
. She arrived as a homesick, gangly twelve-year-old with a thick British accent. They moved to the Chicago suburbs, where kids teased her, threw paint at her front door, and beat up her younger brother—once with fists, another time with a bag of dry cement that they smashed over his head. “Why can't you leave us alone? We're not hurting you,” Barbara yelled.

As a teen, Barbara wanted so desperately to fit in that she used money, earned through chores and babysitting, to buy audiotapes of people speaking with American accents. Every night after homework, Barbara listened to the tapes and parroted the words until she'd purged her British accent.

Every once in a while, I'd catch Barbara using an English expression. When she didn't quite catch what someone was telling her, she'd politely say, “Pardon?” I was more inclined to say, in my brassy toot, “Huh? Hold on. Back up. What the hell are ya talkin' about?”