Authors: Wendy Ruderman
“You're freakin' me out,” Barbara said as she changed lanes.
We arrived at Jose's house by late afternoon. Jose and Ray shook hands in the foyer. “Ray is a friend. He's helping us with the story,” I offered with a shrug.
Jose was a savvy guy; he didn't ask too many questions. He led us to the dining room, where a computer sat at the head of a polished wood table with a glass chandelier overhead. Jose's wife flitted in and out of the kitchen, offering iced tea and snacks.
Jose told us he was a technology buff who loved to tinker with computers and electronic gadgets. After high school, he studied electronics at a trade school in the Bronx. He'd rigged his bodega with a sophisticated $15,000 surveillance system, which recorded video on a backup hard drive hidden behind a display of bobby pins in the store. The backup downloaded the footage to a secure Internet site that he could access from any computer.
“I record everything because sometimes I got to go out and I leave employees by themselves. That's how you find out who's doing right, who's doing wrong. Plus, the money. I got cameras watching the money,” Jose explained.
The four of us huddled around Jose's computer. He slid the CD in. We instantly recognized Jose on the screen, wearing baggy knee-length jean shorts, a dark blue polo shirt, and black Adidas slider sandals with white ankle socks.
In the video, Jose paces back and forth in front of the store's ice-cream freezer, which sits in front of the cash register window. As he chats with his brother-in-law in Spanish on a cell phone, Jose's back is turned to the store's front door when the first cop bursts in. The cop, a pudgy frat-boy type, has his gun drawn. He points it at Jose's head.
Ray recognized the cop immediately. “That's Tom Tolstoy.”
“The Boob Man?” Barbara asked, referring to the nickname for the cop who fondled Lady Gonzalez's breasts and was rumored to have sexually assaulted other women during raids. Barbara moved in closer to Jose's computer screen for a better look at Tolstoy's face. Tolstoy was a cross between Fred Flintstone and Bob's Big Boy, particularly with his doo-wop hairstyle. His bangs were moussed or jelled into a stiff point that swooped back, S-shaped.
“Hand me the phone! Gimme the phone,” Tolstoy yells on the videotape.
“Hey, I work here,” Jose says.
“Put your hands on your head!”
“I'm the owner.”
“Put your hands behind your back!”
Tolstoy spins Jose around and cuffs him. Five other cops, all wearing jeans and vests or shirts emblazoned with the word
POLICE
, barrel into the store behind Tolstoy. At first the cops ask routine questions, presumably for their safety: Does Jose have a gun? Does anyone live on the second floor? Are there dogs in the basement?
Sergeant Joe Bologna, a beer-bellied bully with a baseball cap who supervised the raid, looks up and wags his finger toward the ceiling.
“Whaddya got, cameras over there? . . . Where are they hooked up to?” Bologna barks.
Every cop in Jose's store is fixated on the surveillance system.
“There's cameras all over the place,” Jeff's brother, Richard, says. “Where's the video cameras? The cassette for it?”
“Does it record? Does it record?” Jeff quickly interjects. Standing next to Jeff, Richard appears much shorter and scrawny, lacking his brother's good looks.
Tolstoy glances up and scans the ceiling. “I got, like, seven or eight eyes.”
“There's three right here,” says Thomas Kuhn, a squat and chubby cop who is wearing shorts and a baseball cap on backward.
“Listen to me,” Tolstoy says. “There's one outside. There is one, two, three, four in the aisles, and there's one right here somewhere.”
Jose asks if he can call his wife, and Tolstoy gruffly tells him he can't call anyone. Then Tolstoy opens the cash register drawer and eyes the money, then looks up at the camera above the register, and back down at the money. His meaty frame stuffed in the narrow space behind the cash register, Tolstoy reaches up and swats at the camera lens. He can't get at it, so he walks away, comes back with a long serrated knife, and goes to work on the camera. There's a close-up of his wrist and the blade of the knife. Jeff is in the background, looking at the cash register. The camera eventually goes dark.
An outdoor camera, aimed at the street, catches Richard rummaging through Jose's white van without a search warrant.
Back inside the store, Kuhn on the other side of the counter steps up onto a blue milk crate and struggles to grab a camera above his head.
“I need to be fucking taller,” Kuhn mumbles as another cop laughs.
“You got a ladder in here, cuz?” Kuhn asks Jose.
“Yo,” Tolstoy calls out from behind the cash register. “Does this camera go home? Can you view this on your computer, too?”
“I can see, yeah, home, yeah,” Duran replies.
“So your wife knows we're here, then?” Tolstoy asks.
“My wife? No. She not looking the computer right now.”
“Hey, Sarge . . . Come 'ere,” Tolstoy shouts.
Bologna waddles over to the front counter, and Jeff leans in and whispers, “There's one in the back corner right there.”
Officer Anthony Parrotti, sporting a khaki military cap and a goatee, his forearms covered in tattoos, reaches up to a camera in front of the register, pulls a wire down, and slices it with a bread knife from the store's deli.
“It can be viewed at home,” Tolstoy tells Bologna.
“Okay. We'll disconnect it. That's cool,” Bologna assures Tolstoy.
One by one, the cops disarm and destroy all seven of Jose's cameras until the screen goes dark and the audio cuts out.
When the tape ended, we sat at Jose's table looking at each other. No one could watch that tape and not know that the cops were up to no good. We played it again, and Ray pointed out each cop by name.
“He no touch the money with the system looking at him. No, he touch the money after they destroy all the system,” Jose said while watching Tolstoy behind the cash register.
“These cops are in so much fucking trouble,” Ray said.
“Look at these i-d-i-o-t-s,” Jose said.
“I know,” Ray said, shaking his head. The two men busted out laughing, as if they were old friends.
It was a surreal scene, watching a narcotics cop and a merchant victimized by narcotics cops joking around together about the video. “He a good guy,” Jose said about Ray.
After leaving Jose's, Barbara and I took Ray to Applebee's for dinner. We sat at a booth, surrounded by families with whiny toddlers in high chairs and old couples chewing their food in silence. The food was bad, the place was loud, and the service sucked. It was pure paradise. We had the goods on these cops, the video was goldâand all three of us knew it.
OVER THE NEXT FOUR DAYS, BARBARA AND I WORKED LATE EACH NIGHT PUTTING THE STORY TOGETHER. THE MOST LABORIOUS PART WAS TRANSCRIBING
the audio portion of the video. I spent close to eighteen hours listening to, then pausing and replaying, the audio. I worried that the
Daily News
could get sued if I didn't get the verbiage exact or I screwed up which cop said what.
On one of those nights, at about 10:00 p.m., Barbara and I walked out the building's back door and got spooked when we saw a pickup truck.
The truck was idling at the stop sign on the narrow road that reporters crossed to get to the parking garage. The truck had a small flatbed and a Fraternal Order of Police specialty license plate. Two men, both white, glared at us from the truck's front seat. Barbara and I froze. “Wendy, they're cops,” she said, grabbing my arm, a gesture that grew out of Barbara's protective maternal instinct, not fear.
If they intended to hurt us, now was the time. At this hour, the area was desolate, with plenty of dimly lit crevices and alleys between closed office buildings. At least one editor had been mugged here. The corner bar, Westy's Tavern, was still open, but the place wasn't crowded on weeknights, except for Thursday karaoke nights.
The men, stone-faced, stared us down. We didn't recognize their faces from the video. Maybe they were friends of the cops on Jeff's squad. We didn't know. Barbara and I darted across the street, keeping an eye on the truck's reverse lights just in case the driver decided to flatten us. We got to our cars, parked close to one another.
“Wendy, they might follow one of us home. Make sure you lock your doors,” Barbara said. “Call me as soon as you get home.”
I spent the whole ride home checking my rearview window to see if the truck or some other car had followed me. Once home, I had to crawl over to the passenger door to get out because the driver's-side door, when locked, didn't open from the inside.
I checked in with Barbara; neither of us slept well that night, listening for the rumble of cars or any unusual house sounds.
By then, we'd practically memorized the store video. The cops' voices replayed in our heads. The cops unholstered their guns and stormed into Jose's store as if they were taking down Pablo Escobar or some other notorious kingpin. Not looking for a businessman selling ziplock baggies.
“You have any paraphernalia in here? Twelve-twelves,” Richard says to Jose on the video.
“What you mean, twelve-twelves?” Jose asks, hands cuffed behind his back.
“The baggies. You got twelve-twelves? . . . You have some?”
“A little bit, yeah.”
Jose tries to explain to Richard that he bought the store already stocked with merchandise, including baggies.
“Okay, it don't matter. You should know your business,” Richard says.
Richard then inexplicably asks Jose, “You have cats in here, too?” As if he's about to get mauled by a killer tabby.
Jeff tells Jose that he has to seize the cameras as evidence. “So we gotta get rid of it. You got yourself on video selling drug paraphernalia.”
“It's illegal, boss. It's illegal,” Richard tells Jose.
Yeah, and it's also illegal to lie on search warrants, Barbara and I thought when we viewed the video. The fact was, Richard got captured on video selling bullshit.
In the application for the search warrant, Richard wrote that he watched as a confidential informant went into Jose's store and bought baggies at about 4:30 p.m. on a September afternoon, about two and a half hours before the store raid.
Jose's digital surveillance footage was time-stamped. Barbara and I studied the stretch of tape between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. Not a single customer asked for or bought a ziplock bag. On top of that, the video shows Richard searching Jose's van without a warrant, which is illegal. Richard left it unlocked with the keys in the center console, so anyone could steal it.
The cops locked up Jose on misdemeanor charges, stole almost $10,000, and left his store in a shambles. Jose couldn't understand why the cops didn't just give him a warning or even a citation for having baggies in his store. “If it's illegal, okay, take it out . . . don't destroy my business and rob me,” Jose said.
A judge sentenced Jose to nine months' probation.
I called Charles Ramsey, the city's police commissioner, to tell him about the video and get a comment. Ramsey couldn't think of any reason cops would destroy video surveillance cameras. “You wouldn't just cut and take it because that's somebody's private property,” he said.
Ramsey wanted us to turn over the video to internal affairs and the FBI. “It's pretty serious, and I want to get to the bottom of it.”
Ramsey thought that Barbara and I only cared about getting a big story. In his mind, we weren't interested in nabbing dirty cops, not really. “You're looking at something I've not seen. I've got a task force that's looking into this entire matter. They need to be informed of this and they need a chance to look at it,” Ramsey said. “If we need a subpoena . . .”
“We'll give it to you. We're putting it up on our website tomorrow,” I told him.
Michael Days asked me, Barbara, and Gar to come into his office.
“This video is great stuff. It's unbelievable. And when you see that cop cut those wires with the knifeâwow, I mean wow,” Michael said with a chortle.
Michael intended to put the entire ten-minute tape online, along with a transcript. He wanted to name names. The only question was whether we should blur the cops' faces. There wasn't any law or court opinion that forced us to do so. After all, these cops routinely testified in open court, where they faced drug dealers seated a few feet away at the defendants' table.
“You know what? I think we should take the high road on this one,” Michael said. “I don't want anyone to accuse us of putting these cops' lives in danger, with them being undercover and all.”
It took hours for the photo and online staff to fog the cops' faces with grayish circles and make sure the blur followed them as they moved through the bodega.
Barbara called George Bochetto, who by this point was almost crying uncle. The fight in his voice was gone. When Barbara told him about the video, he didn't ask any questions. He didn't even ask to see it.
“I stand by what I said before,” he offered lamely.
Barbara and I recycled Bochetto's quote from the first bodega story in which he accused the
Daily News
of stirring up mass hysteria.
The front page was a freeze-frame of Officer Anthony Parrotti wielding a bread knife, seconds before he slices the camera wire. The headline was, “Caught on Camera: Narcs Snip Store's Surveillance Wires Before They Allegedly Loot & Rob It.”
Allegedly
. What a great word.
The next day, computers across the Philadelphia region kept crashing because so many people wanted to view the video. By 8:15 a.m., there were nearly a hundred reader comments posted online. That number would swell exponentially by day's end. Overwhelmingly, readers were disgusted with the cops: