Busted (19 page)

World's Most Stupidest Criminals.

Now will someone get “Training Day” out of the Police Department Film Library? My hope is that the
Daily News
is watching out for these reporters. . . . There are too many armed thugs with badges running around masquerading as good cops.

Barbara and I wouldn't hear from Bochetto again.

AFTER SEEING THE VIDEO, COMMISSIONER RAMSEY TOOK RICHARD CUJDIK OFF THE STREET. RICHARD JOINED HIS BROTHER AND JEFF'S PARTNER
, Robert “Bobby” McDonnell, on desk duty, where they spent their days answering phones and shuffling police paperwork, their law enforcement powers virtually nonexistent. Bobby hadn't been part of the raid on Jose's store, but he was linked to bogus search warrants with Jeff.

Richard went around defending himself to other cops, spinning his desk-duty stint as a mere hiccup in his police career. He believed he'd be back on the street soon enough. For Richard, the months riding a desk would stretch into years as the FBI-led investigation crawled forward. Richard, Jeff, and Bobby were stuck there, and Barbara and I were determined to land Officer Thomas Tolstoy, the Boob Man, on the desk with them.

Tolstoy's preoccupation with large-breasted women was an open secret among the cops in his squad. In fact, at least one narcotics cop from a neighboring town knew Tolstoy, a thirty-five-year-old married father of two little boys, as the Boob Man. Tolstoy was a predator, and we wanted him off the street.

Benny had told us early on that Tolstoy “fisted” a woman; at least, that's the story he heard from Jeff.

“What?” Barbara asked. She recoiled, not able to get her mind around it. “What do you mean?”

Benny blushed while explaining that Tolstoy supposedly shoved his hand up a woman's vagina during a drug raid. His words were peppered with nervous chuckles and awkward pauses.

The feds had told Benny not to talk to us. But he called constantly using throwaway Cricket Wireless phones. There were health dramas: a garage-bay door slammed down on his back at the auto dealership where he worked detailing cars. He tumbled down some steps and broke his foot. Sonia had a lump on her breast; she slipped on the sidewalk outside a doctor's office and smacked her head, which triggered a brain bleed. They made frequent trips to the hospital, mostly for painkillers, and to the offices of personal-injury lawyers.

There were Benny's I'm-gonna-die dramas: The cops were going to hire a hit man to make him “disappear.” One of the drug dealers set up by Benny and Jeff got knifed in prison, and the guy's relatives wanted to retaliate against Benny. He regretted turning against Jeff and wanted to kill himself. The feds sent Benny to a therapist, but he didn't trust her.

There were money dramas: He couldn't afford the rent at his new place, and the feds weren't helping him. He didn't have money to buy his kids birthday presents. He had to sell the family's wide-screen television. He couldn't afford a defense lawyer and feared the feds might charge him with theft or fraud for accepting money for drug jobs he never did.

Behind all the drama, there was an unspoken message: Barbara and I had ruined his life by writing his story. We were to blame.

As journalists, Barbara and I couldn't give him money, but we tried to help him in other ways. We went on ApartmentFinder.com to search for a cheaper place for Benny and his family to live. We called criminal defense attorneys to see if they would accept him as a client. I bought him groceries, rushing over to his home with bags of vegetables, turkey, and Dora the Explorer fruit snacks. I bought his son a Razor scooter for his birthday and told Benny to say it was from him. In retrospect, I wondered if Benny sold the scooter for drugs, but at the time, I was so plagued with guilt that I couldn't see through his manipulation and lies.

Barbara and I knew the things we did for Benny crossed the line. But that line—the one between reporter and human being—got blurry.

After we started writing about the bodegas, the FBI knew Tainted Justice was much more than a case of fabricating evidence for search warrants. It was going to get big. The FBI needed Benny to be safe, so they relocated him, Sonia, and their two kids to a fully furnished two-bedroom suite near Philadelphia International Airport. The rent was $2,600 a month, which the feds agreed to pay—at least for now. The suite, described in a brochure as a “chalet,” was like no place Benny and Sonia had ever lived. It was equipped with a washer and dryer, a luxury for most people back in the hood. The decor was simple and crisp, with a taupe couch, a glass coffee table, and a dining set with high-backed chairs. Powder-blue walls offset a spotless beige carpet. The suite's front door opened up to a courtyard with a manicured lawn bordered with shrubs and flowers.

Benny watched the store-raid video on a computer in his suite. “I couldn't believe it,” Benny said excitedly. “And Tolstoy . . . I was like this motherfucker, he's just a fuckin' bastard.”

The Hispanic community, particularly the Dominicans, was in a furor over the bodega raids. “None of these people should have spent half a day in jail over these bullshit charges,” fumed Danilo Burgos, head of the three-hundred-member Dominican Grocers Association.

One week after the
Daily News
posted Jose's video online, the city's Hispanic leaders banded together and wrote a searing letter to Ramsey. The letter, which they copied to the district attorney, a city councilwoman, and the mayor's office, called on Ramsey to crack down on bad cops.

“The fact that many reluctant businesspeople have felt compelled to come forward with their complaints, risking their livelihoods and that of their families, indicates that the problem of police abuse has reached a boiling point,” Danilo and five other Hispanic leaders wrote.

Jose's video forced Ramsey to do something that his predecessors had failed to do. He took a sledgehammer to the cliquish and chummy squads within the narcotics field unit, splitting up cops who had worked side by side for years.

Seven years earlier, a police watchdog had recommended regular reshuffling of narcotics officers and their supervisors to keep cops honest and prevent abuse. Police brass had ignored the recommendation—until now.

But Ramsey's move to break up the ten narcotic squads did nothing to appease angry Hispanic leaders. “That's just shuffling the deck. It's just window dressing,” one said.

Ramsey's style was to tackle thorny issues and criticism head-on. Before coming to Philadelphia in 2008, Ramsey had served as chief of police in Washington, D.C. As an outsider, Ramsey didn't care whether he was popular among Philly's rank and file. He agreed to address irate residents and merchants at a nighttime community meeting. The meeting was held at a church, not far from some of the bodegas raided by Jeff's squad.

We didn't both have to attend the meeting. One of us could have gone and written the story on deadline for the next day's paper, but neither of us wanted to miss it. Ramsey had to appease an entire community because of our stories. Typically, Barbara and I wrestled with our own insecurities, fearing that we weren't good enough or smart enough. For me, those doubts stemmed from grade school, when my teacher wanted me to repeat fourth grade and labeled me a “late bloomer,” which I thought meant I was destined for the tart cart, the short blue school bus that brought “slow” kids to special ed. Barbara's doubtfulness, in part, came from her mom, an advertising sales rep who pushed herself to be No. 1, and set the bar high for Barbara. Her mom often started sentences, “The problem with you, Barbara, is . . .”

Now, at the community meeting, our insecurities were on hiatus, temporarily banished by our egos.

Ramsey stood up at the podium, looking weary, as usual. Whenever Barbara and I saw Ramsey, he looked as if he had fifty problems on his mind. The boyish freckles smattered across his face didn't seem to mesh with his trademark stoicism. Ramsey had buried slain cops and fired dirty ones, each time finding just right the words to honor or scorn.

And here, before a contentious crowd of sixty or more, Ramsey again struck just the right note. “Corruption of any kind will not be tolerated in this department, period. And those who engage in it are going to face charges both from the department as well as criminal charges.”

Immediately, loud applause broke out in the church.

When the meeting ended, merchants and community leaders came over to Barbara and me. They grasped our hands in theirs and thanked us for exposing a wrong, for caring about them. I looked at Barbara and saw her green eyes moisten. We fed off their emotion and left the church feeling good about the
Daily News
and the power of journalism. At that moment, the death knell of our industry seemed remote.

BRIAN TIERNEY, AS CEO AND PUBLISHER OF THE
DAILY NEWS
AND THE
INQUIRER
, WAS IN THE FIGHT OF HIS LIFE. THE COMPANY WAS NEARLY
$400 million in debt, with the economy, advertising sales, and newspaper circulation in a tailspin.

It wasn't just Tierney's money on the line. It was his reputation, his image. What Tierney had once visualized as a Hollywood script about a champion of a man who saved a dying business was turning into a story of doom. His dream was just that—a dream, almost a fantasy. Tierney loved the challenge of being the underdog in a business brawl, but this appeared insurmountable.

Tierney's group failed to reach a deal with senior lenders, led by Citizens Bank, to restructure the debt load. And Tierney emerged as the protagonist in a Greek tragedy, playing out in US bankruptcy court, that would determine the fate of Philadelphia's two largest newspapers.

He was also under fire for taking a 37 percent raise, which boosted his pay from $618,000 to $850,000 just two months before the bankruptcy filing. Leaders of the Philadelphia Newspaper Guild, the union that represented reporters, were furious because they had convinced union members to give up a $25-a-week raise to help stem the company's financial hemorrhage. Tierney, who had put $10 million of his own money into buying the papers, argued he got the raise because he was doing two jobs—CEO and publisher—which effectively saved the company $1.25 million over two years. Still, Tierney rescinded the raise amid the outcry.

Barbara and I weren't worked up over the whole Tierney raise controversy. Tierney had saved my job, and I was grateful. As long as our paychecks covered the bills and mortgages, Barbara and I were happy. We didn't wish for Friday or watch the clock, willing it to 5:00 p.m. Journalism defined us. Our identities were so entwined with our work that when we were on a good story, everything else in our lives seemed rosy. My marriage was perfect, my kids were headed for Harvard, and Barbara went on dates with a confident zing and sang Rolling Stones tunes—off-key—while driving to work.

Even while home with the kids, I was still in work mode. I talked to Barbara so often that when my cell phone rang, Brody would say, “I hope that's not Barbara wanting a playdate.” Each summer Karl and I took the kids to a weekend-long YMCA family camp on a lake dotted with cabins. When I told Brody that I wanted to be in the camp talent show, he said, “What's your talent? Work? Are you going to get up there and work?”

For the first time in her journalism career, Barbara could work twelve-hour days whenever she wanted. When Josh and Anna were younger, she often had to race out at 6:00 p.m.—literally sprinting to her car—to shuttle Josh to hockey practice or Anna to dance class, and pick up the slack at home when her husband left for one of his many business trips. She had more freedom now that her kids were in college, but she felt alone. She missed the chatter and chaos of family life, and work filled a void.

As syrupy as this sounds, on most days Barbara and I saw the job as a privilege, and the Tainted Justice series affirmed it. A tidal wave was cascading over the newspaper business, with Tierney atop the peak in Philadelphia, yet Barbara and I were still on a journalism high.

Under Tierney, the
Daily News
was a favorite child. Even on Tierney's darkest days, when his boyish, contagious enthusiasm was hard to muster, he walked through the
Daily News
newsroom, a flurry of energy, wisps of hair fluttering over his ears, to catch an elevator to his executive suite. He could have avoided reporters and taken the hallway to loop around the
Daily News
, but it seemed he needed to siphon the spirit, zeal, and zaniness of the newsroom. Barbara and I thought all the chatter about stories gave Tierney a daily reminder as to why the battle was worth it.

“Love that story today about . . . ,” he shouted to reporters. If not too rushed, he stopped to chat about the big story of the day.

From the jump, Tierney and the
Daily News
staff got each other. Tierney was a “bare-knuckles player in a bare-knuckles town and the
Daily News
was a bare-knuckles kind of newspaper.” That's how Zack Stalberg, a
Daily News
editor for twenty years before Michael Days took the helm, summed up the relationship. Tierney also liked the fact that the
Daily News
was able to do a lot more with a lot less than the
Inquirer
. We were like a cheap date; we were low-maintenance—content to grab a Bud Light at a dive bar.

When creditors wanted to shutter the
Daily News
, not because we were bleeding money but because they thought our demise would help the
Inquirer
's bottom line, Tierney refused. “As long as I'm running the place, the
Daily News
will never be closed.”