Busted

by Wendy Ruderman

  But Barbara and I hit a roadblock. The city lawyer in charge of records requests was stonewalling us. We needed some legal muscle. The Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer had just one full-time lawyer on staff. Scott Baker was an ambitious thirty-nine-year-old corporate lawyer when he joined our company as general counsel. Brian Tierney, the charismatic and peacockish CEO of the Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Philly.com, wanted to grow readership and expand the business through acquisitions. Baker saw the job as a good opportunity.

  But no one, including Tierney, could predict the crippling recession that put the newspaper industry on its knees. Lehman Brothers collapsed, and the economy tanked. The newspapers lost millions in advertising sales, and Tierney struggled to pay off the creditors who had lent him $350 million to buy the newspapers back in 2006.

  Baker became mired in an effort to reach a deal with the lenders. Barbara and I would see him zipping through our newsroom, his eyes locked on his BlackBerry. He’d rush by and nod hello—a tall and trim blur in an Italian suit with salt-and-pepper hair. We e-mailed him: How can we get those search warrants? We called and left messages with his assistant: It’s about the search warrants. Then e-mailed again.

  Baker was working on our problem—ours and twenty others. The foundation of the newspaper industry was caving in, and all Barbara and I could think about were those damn search warrants.

  Obsessive and antsy, we looked up the law pertaining to warrants. We printed out a copy of Pennsylvania’s Rules of Criminal Procedure, which clearly stated that warrants, after police executed the search, were available for public inspection. The search warrants were stored in a dusty room on the fourth floor of the city’s criminal court.

  On Christmas Eve, just two weeks before Barbara went to landlord-tenant court, we walked over to the Criminal Justice Center with a copy of the rule on search warrants. The court staff was in the holiday spirit, eating cookies, drinking nonalcoholic eggnog, and getting ready to go home early. We found Marc Gaillard, the court’s second deputy, and showed him the paper.

  “Yeah, I know. I just talked to the city solicitor’s office,” he said.

  “Woo-hoo!” Barbara yelped.

  “Yaaay!” I said.

  We sprang forward like two jack-in-the-boxes and grabbed Gaillard in a hug. Surprised, he took a step back, then smiled at us, probably thinking, These crazy Daily News ladies.

  After Christmas, Barbara and I spent hours, days, in that dingy room, which was crammed with cardboard boxes, stacked floor to ceiling on metal shelves. Inside the boxes were yellow search warrants, thin as onionskin, crinkled and stuffed haphazardly into brown accordion folders. Written on each box in black permanent marker was the year, dating back to the early 1990s.

  “Holy shit,” I said as I sat cross-legged in jeans and sneakers on the dirty, school-cafeteria-like tile floor and looked through a box marked “Search Warrants 2006.” Barbara paged through the wisps of yellow paper, periodically wetting her index finger with the tip of her tongue, while seated on a black milk crate in an electric-blue skirt and knee-high leather boots. My back ached as I flipped through hundreds of warrants.

  We pulled three years’ worth of search warrants, every one with Jeff’s name and Benny’s informant number. We ended up with stack a foot high—at least. We knew it would have cost the newspaper hundreds of dollars to order copies of all the search warrants, so we did it the Daily News way. We lugged reams of white copy paper from our office to the courthouse and befriended court employees on every floor. We charmed our way to their Xerox machines, and like a two-person army of leaf-cutter ants, we skittered in and out of the room to make copies, one search warrant at a time.

  I had learned the art of getting something for nothing from my parents. At restaurants, my mom always asked the waitress for a plate of lemon wedges so she could make lemonade using water and sugar packets. My parents required me, my sister, and my brother to go to synagogue twice a year—on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, two holidays in which Jews sought repentance and atonement for past wrongs—but my dad refused to pay for tickets to attend services, so we snuck in through the synagogue’s basement. As a teen, I sat in the pew, arms crossed, wearing a petulant scowl and an ugly floral dress, and rolled my eyes at my dad as the rabbi urged the congregation to start off the Jewish New Year with honest intentions. Later, when my rabbi, Fred Neulander, hired two hit men to bludgeon his wife to death in their Cherry Hill, New Jersey, home, my dad finally relented: Okay, we’re done with synagogue.

  When Barbara and I finished copying search warrants free of charge, we divvied up the stack and hit the streets.

  Barbara and I went door to door, following MapQuest directions from one dealer’s house to the next. Many of the homes were in West Kensington, a largely Puerto Rican neighborhood stricken by poverty and drug sales. It contained Philadelphia’s most dangerous streets where bloodshed was so common it wasn’t considered news.

  Benny had told us which jobs were bogus, meaning that Jeff wrote in the search warrant application that he watched Benny make a buy at a certain house, but Benny told us he hadn’t. He’d bought the drugs elsewhere—or not at all. Those search warrants, Benny told us, were lies.

  We hit those homes first. We wanted to ask the dealers if they recalled anything unusual or fishy about the police raid. We thought we’d be less intimidating and have a better chance of getting people to talk to us if we went alone. So we split up and canvassed dangerous Philly streets taken over by drug dealers.

  Snarling pit bulls, baring teeth and spewing saliva, lunged at us. Wild-eyed, well-meaning crack addicts offered advice: “Honey, hope you gotta gun on youse, or at least some Mace.” Drug dealers, wearing their version of business casual—tan Timberland boots, low-slung baggy jeans, and crisp white oversize T-shirts—told us to watch our backs.

  “You know, you’re in a bad neighborhood,” drug dealers would tell us, as if we were naive adventurers who had wandered off across a border in search of designer knockoffs and good, cheap ethnic food.

  Barbara chatted up drug dealers the same way she did her mail carrier. “You know I own this block,” one drug dealer warned Barbara as she walked up the sidewalk.

  “Well, that means you got my back, right?” she replied with a smile. Taken aback, he shook his head in amusement and chuckled.

  At four-foot-eleven and ninety pounds, I took full advantage of my kidlike stature, even though I was pushing forty. I came across all pixie, with my Little Lord Fauntleroy haircut, flashing a puckish smile, but that was my secret weapon, perfect for disarming anyone from the career criminal to the corrupt politician. When I was out on the street reporting a story, I felt all badass—a legend in my own mind.

  I had once picked up a just-freed convicted murderer and secreted him away in my house so I’d have an exclusive. At the time, I worked for the Bergen Record as a statehouse reporter based in Trenton. Another reporter got a tip that Thomas Trantino, dubbed New Jersey’s most notorious cop killer, was about to be paroled.

  Trantino spent almost forty years in prison for the execution-style murder of two police officers. In the early hours of August 25, 1963, Trantino and a friend, Frank Falco, raged out of control at a North Jersey bar. Lodi Borough police sergeant Peter Voto and police trainee Gary Tedesco arrived to investigate complaints of rowdiness. Trantino beat Voto on the head with a gun, and then ordered him to strip. When Voto disrobed too slowly, Trantino pumped him full of bullets while shouting, “We are going for broke! We are burning all the way! We are going for broke.” Falco fatally shot Tedesco. New York police officers later shot and killed Falco while he was resisting arrest, and Trantino was sentenced to die in the electric chair. The US Supreme Court overturned the death penalty in 1972, however, and Trantino escaped execution. The state parole board, succumbing to public outrage, denied his parole nine times, making Trantino the longest-serving prisoner in New Jersey history.

  Trantino’s release in 2002, on his sixty-fourth birt
hday, was a big story for the Bergen Record. The slain cops had been from our region, and their relatives and friends still lived in our coverage area. The story was very competitive. Every news outlet in and around Manhattan wanted an interview with Trantino, the face of evil. Every editor wanted him first.

  My editors picked me for the task. I was the newspaper’s teeth-baring Chihuahua, but that’s not entirely why they picked me. Trantino was being freed from a halfway house in Camden—less than two miles from my house.

  My plan was to get to the halfway house ahead of the media horde. I set the alarm for 2:00 a.m., stopped at a WaWa for a large coffee, then parked my Honda Civic alongside a vacant lot across the street from the halfway house. The two-story brick building, surrounded by a tall metal fence, looked like a small jail. I sat in darkness, my coffee quickly cooling in the February air, and checked to make sure the car doors were locked. Camden had been ranked—yet again—among the top ten most dangerous cities in America.

  Pretty soon, I had to pee. Damn it. I unlocked the door, stepped out of the car, and looked around. My best bet was the abandoned lot. I tiptoed around the clumps of knee-high weeds and nearly slipped on an empty beer bottle. I yanked down my jeans and underwear and squatted, then sprinted back to the car.

  The sky turned from dark to pale gray, and by 9:00 a.m., I started to think the tip was bad. I didn’t see any other reporters or TV news vans. I felt frustrated. Tired. Hungry. Bored.

  Then I heard a rap on the car window. I looked up. An old man stood there. He had neatly trimmed white hair, a slim build, and a wrinkled face, and wore a gray sweatshirt and brown corduroy pants. I rolled down the window.

  “I hear you’re looking for me. The security guard told me you’ve been out here all night,” he said.

  Holy shit. It was Trantino.

  “Yes. Yes,” I said. “Get in. Get in!”

  I leaned over and unlocked the passenger-side door. Trantino sank into the passenger seat, using his sneakered foot to move aside a crusty cereal bowl, flecked with dried oatmeal. Yesterday’s breakfast. He dropped his black shoulder bag on the floor and eyed the dusty dashboard. A tangle of green, red, and black electrical wires hung from the car’s busted mechanical sunroof. The windows leaked during rainstorms, and the seats stank of mold. The check-engine light, which reminded me of an orange throat lozenge, was on, as always.

  “Man, your car’s a mess,” Trantino said.

  Oh yeah, and you’re a convicted cop killer, I thought.

  I didn’t want to piss him off. I also didn’t want other reporters to get a hold of him. Where could I take him? Instinctively, I drove to my house. I lived just outside Philadelphia in a working-class, mostly white New Jersey town, a slice of Wonder Bread, where local cops worked hard to keep Camden’s criminal element out. My Craftsman-style bungalow, with its leaky A-frame roof and faded yellow aluminum siding, sat under the flight path to the Philadelphia International Airport.

  The house was quiet when Trantino and I walked in. Karl was at work; we didn’t yet have kids. Trantino took in the living room, eyeing the black leather couch, hardwood floors, and shelves of art books. He noticed one of Karl’s paintings, an abstract with red, orange, and yellow slashes, a depiction of a violent thunderstorm. Trantino sat at the dining room table. I made him a cup of hot chocolate and gave him a Jell-O pudding snack.

  I asked the question I wanted to know most: Why?

  “I can’t believe that I did it. And that’s the truth. I can’t believe that I would kill anybody,” he said.

  We were wrapping up the interview when Karl came home from his job as an art director at an ad agency. Trantino stood and shook his hand.

  “Tommy Trantino,” he said.

  I could tell that the name didn’t register. Karl had no clue.

  “Nice artwork,” Trantino said, gesturing toward Karl’s painting with a sweep of his hand.

  While in prison, Trantino pursued an interest in poetry and art, particularly Asian art—Karl’s favorite.

  Karl and Trantino launched into a conversation about Khmer art, Buddha statues, Ganesha wall hangings. It wasn’t long before the two men had their heads buried in one of Karl’s many art history books. Trantino bragged that an art gallery owner in Tokyo wanted to present a show of his artworks.

  “You should stay for dinner,” Karl said.

  Oh, crap, I thought.

  “That’s nice. Thank you. But I need to get going,” Trantino said.

  By then, another reporter, who had joined us, offered to drive Trantino back to Camden. Trantino said he had a line on an apartment there. He borrowed an art book from Karl. We never saw him or the book again. When I told Karl who Trantino was, he was miffed but not furious. We’d been married for three years, and he was used to my shenanigans. A year after Trantino’s home visit, I signed up to cover the war in Iraq without first consulting Karl. It didn’t occur to me that he’d be mad.

  “C’mon, you know I would never volunteer to go to Iraq if we had kids. That’d be selfish,” I argued.

  Karl gave me a look, shaking his head. He wasn’t buying my bullshit. He knew me too well. A good story was my drug.

  Barbara drank from the same Kool-Aid.

  She thought nothing of plunking down her credit card to buy a powder blue bulletproof vest for a ride-along with cops on drug raids. “Don’t worry, honey,” she told her husband at the time. “You’ll see $795 on the Visa, but it’s for a bulletproof vest, and the paper will reimburse me.” She didn’t get why the color drained from his face. He told her she had a serious problem.

  Not long after that, Barbara had worn the vest as she shadowed narcotics cops into a crack den. Two little kids—one in diapers—sat on a soiled carpet, watching cartoons and eating Cheerios for dinner. A Phillies Blunt box filled with crack vials sat within reach. There was a filthy mattress strewn with lighters and matches. Barbara opened the refrigerator to find only ketchup, mustard, margarine, and wilted celery. She stood in the doorway as cops cuffed the glassy-eyed twenty-two-year-old mom. Her children sat just a foot away, with blank stares, their legs tucked under their tiny bodies. As cops led the mom outside, she walked by her kids, silent, not even looking at them. Barbara cried when she left the house.

  The next morning, Barbara called the Philadelphia Department of Human Services to see if a social worker could check on the children. An intake worker told Barbara that parents who smoked and sold crack don’t fit the city’s definition of abuse or neglect. Barbara was incensed. She told Ed Moran, a reporter she had partnered with for the story, that she was going to check on the kids. He told her not to go, but she wouldn’t listen, so he reluctantly went along.

  The children were playing outside when they arrived. Their mom, released from jail six hours ago, sat on a stoop a few houses away. She shot Barbara a steely stare. Barbara knelt down and asked the kids, “How are you guys?” A cluster of drug dealers walked toward Barbara. To them, she was a busybody meddling with their business.

  “Time to go, Barbara,” Ed said, heading to the car.

  “I’m not ready,” she said, shooing him away with one hand.

  “It’s time,” he shouted.

  The young dealers closed in on Barbara. A few reached into the pockets of their baggy jeans.

  “Barbara, NOW!” Ed bellowed in his thick Boston accent. Only then did she hop in the car.

  So when friends and relatives asked Barbara and me if we were scared to knock on the doors of drug dealers, we didn’t understand the question.

  6

  IN THE SEVEN YEARS THAT BENNY HAD WORKED WITH JEFF, THEY BEGAN TO LOCK UP SECOND GENERATIONS OF DRUG DEALERS. IN PHILLY, THERE were cop families and drug families. Children of cops wanted to wear the badge; children of drug dealers got sucked into an underworld of fast money.

  The first house that Barbara visited belonged to Jorge Garcia and his family, whose names have all been changed in this book. Benny had told us that he’d never bought heroin from Jorge, even thou
gh the search warrant said otherwise. Jorge lived in the Badlands, a four-square-mile drug bazaar centered in West Kensington, home to the city’s top three drug corners.

  Drug dealers hung on corners while lookouts, teens on four-wheelers, sped around the block, looking for cops in uniform or street clothes. They yelled various codes as a warning:

  Bomba! Aqua! Gloria! Five O!

  This was corporate America of the streets, home to a multimillion-dollar business that had a finely tuned organizational structure. Above the corner boys were the holders, or guys who stashed the dope, and the caseworkers who picked up cash and delivered it to the drug bosses. Blood was spilled over turf wars. Little else.

  By 2007, murder in the Badlands almost single-handedly gave Philly its nickname: “Killadelphia.” That year there were 391 murders, the highest rate per 100,000 residents among the nation’s ten largest cities, according to crime statistics compiled annually by the FBI. Gunshot wounds were so common that trauma surgeons from Sweden traveled to Philadelphia to learn lifesaving techniques they’d rarely need in their country. On average, one person was killed in the city every day. Many of these murders happened here in the Badlands.

  When kids walked to school, they saw dealers pushing their brands. At Cambria and Hope Streets, the dope was known as Louis Vuitton. At Cambria and Master, Bart Simpson. At Cambria and Palethorpe, Seven-Up.

  At Howard and Cambria there were two brands, Nike and Lucifer. This was the corner that never slept, one of the hottest drug spots in the city—and the most dangerous.

  Most children at the elementary school on Cambria Street knew at least a few people who had been killed. Some were relatives. Kids as young as seven spoke of gunfire and blood on the street as if it were part of life; for them, it was. Every morning, school custodians swept up used condoms, needles, vials, and trash from the concrete play yard before children arrived.

  Weathered memorials with teddy bears, balloons, and candles were scattered all over the Badlands. Sidewalks became street cemeteries. And these urban graves became part of the drug trade. Some dealers hid their heroin packets under worn stuffed animals.