Busted (17 page)

“If he sees cops now, he freaks out,” Moe said. “My dad never been in jail. My dad never been in trouble. Now he's like a little kid that got bit by a dog. He won't go out.”

Ultimately, all the merchants decided to break their silence. Telling us what happened was their way of taking back control, of feeling empowered.

WHEN BARBARA AND I SAT DOWN TO WRITE THE LATEST TAINTED JUSTICE INSTALLMENT, WE HAD SEVEN STORE OWNERS AND AN ATTORNEY REPRESENTING
an eighth—all on the record. Some even agreed to be photographed. The number of victimized merchants would more than double in the next few weeks.

There was a collective catharsis among merchants across the city. They were angry and disillusioned. Once they started talking, they didn't want to stop.

Emilio Vargas was a teenager when he arrived in the US from the Dominican Republic. Now, at twenty-nine, he was jaded. Emilio was so rattled by the police raid that he walked away from his store. “I believed in the American dream. I still do. I believed that if you work hard, you get ahead. But everything changed after this. . . . I used to believe in justice in America. I don't know now. It makes me question the justice system.”

The story seemed to write itself—a rarity for us. We always wrote at my desk, sitting so close that the wheels of our swivel chairs sometimes clanked together and our shoulders touched. When staffers saw us hunkered down, typing with an intense, coffee-infused hysteria, they'd remark, “Oh boy, the Girls are up to something. Can't wait to read it.”

Barbara and I sometimes struggled in our writing. On those stories, we used all kinds of excuses to procrastinate. I'd get a cup of tea. Barbara checked in with her kids at college. We ran upstairs to get trail mix from the cafeteria and chatted up other reporters during bathroom breaks.

Not with this story. The words came fast, and I only stopped typing long enough to high-five Barbara. “I love it! Do you love it?”

“Yeah, I love it,” Barbara said.

We were amped up. What the cops had done to these store owners was an outrage, and we couldn't understand how the cops got away with stealing from these merchants for so long. The looting went on for years at stores all across the city, and no one said a word. It was a story hiding in plain sight, and these merchants were easy pickings.

The raid on Jenny Lu's store left her saddled with debt. The cops took every nickel, between $10,000 and $12,000, which Jenny needed to pay two mortgages, one on the store, the other on her house. She owed money to soda and food vendors and utility companies. Jenny, whose husband had died of lung cancer, was forced to close the store and take a cashier's job at a Chinatown supermarket, where she worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, earning $1,200 to $1,400 a month.

The thing was, Jenny and her adult children, who helped run the store, had followed the rules. Jenny's twenty-five-year-old daughter, Anh, didn't take shit from anyone. When customers came in and asked for baggies, she'd question, point-blank, “What do you need them for?” If they muttered “Weed” or “Crack,” she'd always say, “I'm sorry, we don't have any of those bags.”

Prosecutors initially charged Jenny, who was barely over five feet tall and 110 pounds, with a felony because of the large number of baggies found in her store. The city district attorney's office moved to seize the store through drug forfeiture. Jenny called Anh collect from the jail at 3:00 a.m. and told her to post bail. “Are you serious?” Anh asked when she got to the police station. “A fifty-one-year-old lady in clogs committing a felony?”

Barbara and I were close to finishing the story about the merchants when we contacted Jeff's attorney, George Bochetto. We already knew that there was no reason for cops to smash the stores' video surveillance systems and yank the wires from the ceiling. I had passed it by Ray, and Barbara had done the same with a high-ranking police source. Both cops told us that destroying cameras wasn't part of any police protocol and was actually in violation of a directive that read, “Unnecessary damage or destruction of personal property by police during a search is strictly prohibited and WILL result in severe disciplinary action.” We couldn't imagine how George was going to defend Jeff on this one.

George's response was quintessential George. “Now that the
Daily News
has created a mass hysteria concerning the Philadelphia Narcotics Unit, it comes as no surprise that every defendant ever arrested will now proclaim their innocence and bark about being mistreated,” he e-mailed.

We filed the story to Gar and watched him disappear into his office to read it. He seemed gone for a long while. Then at 6:40 p.m., right around the time Barbara and I wondered whether we should grab dinner, an e-mail popped up on my computer. It was from Gar, with a single subject line: “This might be the best story I've edited in my entire career.”

Barbara and I were stunned. Gar was the Ebenezer Scrooge of the compliment department. His e-mail was totally out of character, akin to planting sloppy wet kisses on our cheeks.

Gar's office was no bigger than a handicapped-bathroom stall and kind of smelled like one. Glue mouse traps, sprinkled with bait pellets, sat under his computer and behind the door. Mice had burrowed into the cushions of a small, faded black couch pushed against the wall. We sat down and caught a whiff of death. We suspected that at least one mouse was dead somewhere, a sofa coil wrapped around its tiny neck.

On the wall directly above Gar's computer, next to the “Despair” poster, was a reprint of a locomotive train emerging from the ornate and Gothic former Broad Street Station on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Gar, whose grandfather had worked as a railroad machinist, was one of those quirky adults who still loved trains. No one—and nothing—could beat the boy out of Gar, not even years of editing incomprehensible stories written by reporters with borderline personalities.

Gar had a love-hate relationship with his job. “It's very manic-depressive. I'm either so fuckin' depressed that I want to quit or I feel on top of the world because we've got a great story.”

He was having an on-top-of-the-world kind of day.

“We got these sons of bitches, dead to rights! We got 'em. We got 'em!” Gar screeched gleefully after finishing the edit.

Gar wanted reporters to see him as a gruff and hardened editor. But he secretly teared up when he read a poignant story, one with heart. “This is not fuckin' brain surgery,” he said about journalism. “It's simple. Write stories that evoke emotion, that make readers cry or laugh or get outraged or disgusted, and give them their money's worth.”

That night, Gar went home and told his wife, Marty, “We have a great story coming out tomorrow.” Marty knew not to ask for any details, including the general topic. As a longtime
Inquirer
reporter who covered the education beat, Marty was, technically, the enemy. Marty was the reporter who showed up at the search warrant room to give Gail money for copies. Of all the
Inky
reporters at Rose's whim, she chose to dispatch the wife of our editor. In all of their twenty-four years of marriage, Gar and Marty worked at Philly's rival papers. Staying married meant no shop talk.

Barbara got home around midnight. She was greeted by her dog, Seven, a name Barbara's daughter got from a
Seinfeld
episode in which George says he would name his firstborn child Seven after Mickey Mantle's jersey number. Seven was a rescue mutt with a pointy face and a mop of long, wavy brown, gold, and white hair over a Corgi-like sausage body. Barbara always felt guilty when she worked this late. Seven was crazed for attention and followed Barbara all around the house, her bushy tail sweeping the worn oak. With her three-inch legs, Seven had to angle her body to get down the steps.

Barbara ate like a single woman on a budget. She opened a can of fat-free vegetarian baked beans and grabbed a box of wheat crackers from a kitchen cabinet. As the beans heated in the microwave, she poured a glass of $8.99-a-bottle chardonnay and sat on the couch to watch
Nightline
. She capped off dinner with a Tylenol PM and went to bed.

I came home to find Karl, pajama-clad in plaid flannel, seated in his leather maroon recliner, rubbing Icy Hot into the arches of his bare feet. Karl, who jogged every other morning, liked to say that Icy Hot was the cologne of choice for middle-aged men who exercised. Karl was in front of the TV, watching one of his home-improvement shows. The entire living room reeked of menthol. He was in the throes of his make-your-own-furniture phase, having recently cobbled together a pair of faux-leather chairs. The cushions hung so far past the wooden frame that brave friends who sat down unexpectedly slid to the floor.

This was around the time that Karl started calling our Tainted Justice series “T'ain't Been Home in Weeks.” As usual, Karl left my dinner in the fridge on a plate covered with Saran Wrap. And as usual, it was his usual: penne pasta sautéed in olive oil, fresh spinach, and garlic. I took two bites and buried the rest in the trash can.

The next morning, I ran out my front door to get the newspaper. My stomach fluttered with excitement. There was nothing like seeing your story on the front page, especially one this powerful and explosive. The headline trumpeted, “Smash & Grab: Shopkeepers say narcotics cops disabled security cameras, looted and trashed their stores.” Underneath the headline was a photo of a bodega owner. He stood in front of his store with his arms crossed and a defiant scowl on his face. Bam.

The
Inquirer
had nothing. Yeah, we really got “mercilessly pounded” on that one, I thought.

THE FBI AGENTS ON THE POLICE-CORRUPTION CASE READ THE BODEGA STORY AND FLIPPED OUT. THEY DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THE STORE ROBBERIES
because Benny didn't know about them. All Benny knew was that Jeff sometimes gave him cartons of cigarettes and other goods. Now the FBI had to follow us. Agents immediately fanned out to interview store owners. This gave Barbara and me a little thrill, but we doubted that the FBI was overjoyed.

We were “feeling our oats,” as my mom always said when I got all cocky and full of my pint-size self, when my phone rang at work.

“This Wendy? I have video. Backup,” the man on the other end said.

“What? Did you say video? Of a raid on your store?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Video. I got computer hid. They went crazy looking for computer,” he said. “I got copy.”

“A copy? Of the video?” I said, practically yelling into my phone.

Jose Duran had come to the United States some thirteen years earlier, but his English was a nightmare. It's not that he didn't speak the language. He did. Only with an accent that smothered his words like a wet wool blanket. He had a high-pitched gravelly voice that reminded me of Tattoo, the midget who played Mr. Roarke's assistant on the TV series
Fantasy Island
. I asked Jose if I could get the tape that night. He gave me his address in New Jersey. He lived only five miles from my house.

I turned into his long driveway, and even in the dark, I could see that the house was a stately colonial with a wide front porch framed by ornate white columns. The three-story house, set back from the street, was parchment yellow with dark shutters. Oh shit, I thought, I hope he isn't some kind of big-time drug dealer.

Jose answered the door. He was stout, with a thick helmet of black hair and dark eyebrows, like two bushy caterpillars. He wore khaki pants, tan leather loafers, and a sweater with a dress shirt underneath. He had a long vertical scar on his forehead from when, as a thirteen-year-old in the Dominican Republic, he crashed a motorized dirt bike into a utility pole with a nail that ripped into his skin.

Jose was only twenty-eight, and at the time of the raid, he ran a bodega in Philly and a mini-mart in New Jersey. Turned out, Jose shared the house with a nest full of relatives, including his sister, her husband, and their kids. He handed me a copy of a CD containing ten minutes of footage, including audio. I knew from the search warrant that Jeff's squad had raided Jose's bodega, with Jeff's brother, Richard, in charge.

It was about 9:30 p.m., and I called Barbara from Jose's driveway, shrieking, “I got it. I got it!” Then I called Karl.

“I'm on my way home. I was gonna stop by the grocery store. Do you need anything?”

“Yeah, a wife,” he said, and we both laughed.

I couldn't sleep that night, thinking about Jose's CD in my black vinyl work bag. When I got to work the next morning, the first thing I did was call my cop source, Ray. Barbara and I wanted him to see the tape. We knew what Jeff looked like, but we needed Ray to help identify the other cops and school us on what was police protocol—and more importantly, what wasn't. Ray was nearby at the criminal courthouse and said he'd be right over.

In the two years I'd known Ray, we'd never met in the newsroom. This was a big risk for him. What if another cop saw him going into the
Daily News
building? Ray's curiosity won out over good sense. There was nothing surreptitious about his entrance into the newsroom. He strutted down the center aisle with a toothy grin.

Barbara had put the CD in computers all over the newsroom, but couldn't get it to play on any of them. Everything at the
Daily News
was janky. The computers were bulky and sounded like jet planes taking off whenever we turned them on. Barbara, Ray, and I walked over to a graphic artist who was computer-savvy to see if he could get the tape to play. Still, no go. Damn it. Damn this washboard newspaper with its old-timey technology.

We knew we'd have to drive back to Jose's house to play the tape. To our surprise, Ray offered to go with us. Barbara checked out a company car and Ray stretched his legs out in the back of a PT Cruiser, one of about a dozen fleet cars shared by reporters at both newspapers. Barbara drove. I told Ray that my driving scared Barbara because I was a nervous, brake-stomping wheel-jerker. I couldn't get my mind around the idea that we humans are really nothing more than souped-up monkeys who vroom down highways at eighty miles per hour, sometimes doing so while applying lipstick or texting or reading MapQuest directions. Even I was guilty of tweezing my mustache hairs while driving. I hated the idea of entrusting strangers to stay in their own lanes while driving and often thought how the only thing separating me and my car from a horrific crash, possibly death, was an imaginary barrier in the form of a white painted line. As I was explaining my driving phobia to Ray, I looked at Barbara, who gripped the steering wheel tighter and darted her head from left to right to check her side mirrors.