Busted

by Wendy Ruderman

  A number of homes in the area were vacant or boarded up and reeked of pee and dead rats. Inside, addicts shot up, sitting on grungy mattresses or sofas with no springs. In the middle of some blocks, one or two houses had collapsed or been torn down to become weed-filled lots that looked like broken, missing teeth in a row of red brick. None of the battered homes on Jorge Garcia’s block was worth more than a $15,000 used Chevy.

  Barbara walked past the corner drug dealers and knocked on the door of the two-story redbrick row house with splotches of peeling cream paint. Jorge was still locked up, but his mom, Dolores Jimenez, was home. Dolores was suspicious of Barbara, almost hostile, but she was also curious about what Barbara had to say.

  Family portraits in wood frames hung from the living room wall. A cross with Jesus on the crucifix was on the dining room wall, near a glass-top table with four chairs. Dolores’s collection of black leather horses was inside an old wood cabinet. A playpen for her grandkids sat on the smudged linoleum floor. Two candles burned in clear glass. Her son Ricky’s dusty basketball, baseball, and football trophies were scattered around.

  Dolores’s skin was sallow, and she moved slowly, as if her body hurt. That’s because it did. Dolores suffered from high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, a severe anxiety disorder, insomnia, and a ripped bowel duct. “They tried to take my gallstones out, but they messed up and now I have a stent in my stomach.” She lifted her black T-shirt to show Barbara a dark, foot-long scar under her belly.

  Dolores packed about 225 pounds on her four-foot-eleven frame. Her long black hair cascaded down to her waist, but most days she tied it back tightly in a ponytail, accentuating her full lips and large brown eyes that looked tired of the struggle. She wore no makeup, never did, except for a hint of black eyeliner every once in a while. Her nails were acrylic, perfectly rounded and finished in a natural shine, no color. She chose sweats in the winter, shorts in the summer, T-shirts always.

  Dolores looked nothing like the other drug dealers that Barbara and I had met. When Barbara arrived, Dolores had just been released from prison on her own drug case. Eight years earlier, Jeff had busted her with Benny’s help. Dolores was Benny’s childhood friend, then a chunky, good-hearted, scruffy girl who went to church. Only a year apart in age, they rode the same school bus, and their moms were close friends. Later, she would become one of his drug suppliers.

  Dolores didn’t consider herself a drug dealer. In her mind, she was a thirty-six-year-old grandmom who dealt $20 bags of cocaine from her deep-pocketed black apron to make ends meet.

  At the time of her arrest, she lived in a neighborhood on the cusp, just fifteen blocks from the Badlands. Her seven-room home was subsidized by the Philadelphia Housing Authority, and she got a welfare check. So did her twenty-year-old daughter Sofia, her firstborn. Problem was, Dolores told Barbara, there were so many children to feed and clothe. Dolores had four children. Sofia had her first baby at fourteen, followed by three more, all about a year apart.

  Dolores had watched the mom across the street in disgust; the woman often left her seven kids alone with no heat so she could go “party.”

  “If you don’t feed those kids, they’ll take them away,” Dolores warned her. Sure enough, she lost her children.

  That would never happen to me, Dolores told herself. “I take care of my kids.”

  Dolores raked in about $1,000 or so a week, wads of twenties that gave her a taste of middle-class life. She bought a minivan. She had the house painted and fixed up because PHA seldom made repairs.

  “I bought the kids designer clothes,” she told Barbara with a proud smile. “Polo, Nautica, Nikes, Air Jordans.”

  At first Dolores was nervous about selling drugs. But then she shrugged; what the hell. It was easy, really. Her customers called her cell phone, said they’d stop by. She greeted them at the front door in her apron, the same one she wore to cook beans and rice or pan-fried chicken for her kids. She wiped her hands on the black cotton, then gave them ziplock bags of coke and folded their twenties into her apron pockets. Some buyers made small talk, but they never stayed long.

  Business was brisk. Paydays were golden, like happy hour at five on a Friday. All kinds came—blacks, Puerto Ricans, whites from the Pennsylvania or New Jersey suburbs. In a snap, she switched from Spanish to English in dope speak. “No offense,” she told Barbara, “but even Italians came,” as if somehow they were considered the drug world’s elite.

  She had been selling cocaine about a year when Benny knocked on her door in 2001, while Jeff watched. It was Benny’s first job as an informant.

  Dolores wasn’t suspicious, since she’d sold to Benny before. She pulled a $20 bag of cocaine from one pocket of her apron and put the cash in another. “It was like she had a little cash register,” Benny said.

  Benny felt a tinge of guilt, but nothing more. “Jeff was telling me, ‘You’re doing the right thing. You’re cleaning up your hood.’ I told Jeff I felt bad, but he said, ‘They’re sellin’ in front of their kids. They’re going to end up just like them.’”

  Dolores didn’t see it that way. “Yeah. We got in the game,” Dolores told Barbara unapologetically. “You get in the game to survive. And that comes with it, getting booked.”

  She figured she wouldn’t sell forever, just a year or so more to stay afloat.

  Dolores’s brother, Manuel, who lived with her, also helped with the drug business. Until Jeff busted them, neither had a criminal record. Dolores’s biggest crime had been a parking ticket.

  Manuel had worked for more than twenty years at Today’s Man, where he was a supervisor of the shipping and receiving department, making sure slacks, jackets, and button-down shirts landed in the right place.

  At home, Manuel’s closet was a shipping and receiving center—for cocaine. Everything they needed, including a metal sifter, digital scale, cutting agent, staples, and bags, was stored in a black leather bag.

  It was four days before Christmas 2001, around 6:30 at night, when Jeff and his squad knocked on Dolores’s front door. She cracked the door open and saw men she immediately figured were cops behind the iron-gated, locked storm door. She slammed the front door shut, scurried upstairs and flushed packets of cocaine down the toilet. In seconds, cops pried the steel apart with a crowbar and burst in.

  Dolores’s three-year-old grandson started to scream, terrified by a cop wearing a thin, silky black ski mask over his face. All anyone could see were his eyes. Some undercover narcotics cops who made buys wore masks during raids to conceal their identity, but Dolores’s grandson thought a monster was coming after him.

  Dolores said she’d never forget the way Jeff looked at her, like she was scum, or worse, a murderer. “It’s like his shit don’t stink, like he’s better than everyone,” she said. “It was like I was a nobody.”

  In Dolores’s living room, cops found 119 packets of cocaine at the base of a baby stroller. They were tucked inside a Christmas cookie tin with a picture of Santa Claus on the cover. There was more upstairs. All in all, cops found $10,000 worth of coke in Dolores’s house.

  Prosecutors called her house a drug “operation.” To them, it was people like Dolores who sank neighborhoods, smothered them like kudzu, that noxious coiling weed that quickly spreads over trees and shrubs until they die.

  Dolores and her brother were sentenced to three to six years in prison. Guilt ate at her. Not for selling drugs, but because she couldn’t be with her kids. “They was all lost souls,” she said. Her worst fear was realized; her three youngest were alone. Jorge was sixteen, Ricky, fourteen, and Elena, eleven. Dolores asked her mom to take care of them, but she doubted that would work. Her kids drifted. Jorge, the one she’d nicknamed Macho as a baby, got locked up for violating probation on a gun case. Jorge’s urine came back dirty because he was getting high on weed. The system couldn’t save kids like Jorge. When he was released, there was no one, and that, in part, sealed his fate.

  Jorge roamed the Badlands, the place Dolores knew
was trouble for her kids. But there was little other choice. After the raid, Dolores and the kids were evicted from the Philadelphia Housing Authority house. Ricky, ever resourceful, even at thirteen, made a few calls to find a place for which the landlord didn’t require references or job history. He found a three-bedroom house in the Badlands. The rent was $500 a month.

  Dolores was still behind bars when Jeff locked up Jorge. It was 2005, and Jeff was no longer a stickler for rules. Jeff was sure he’d find heroin in Jorge’s house. He just needed to get in there, and Benny knew exactly where to score dope. Benny purchased heroin from a drug house not far from Jorge’s place, and Jeff used that heroin as the basis for a search warrant.

  When Jeff and his squad raided Jorge’s house, they found three bundles of heroin on top of a china cabinet in the dining room. They were stamped GAME CRAZY. In the back of a black dresser drawer, in a rear second-floor bedroom, cops found six clear plastic baggies of cocaine. Just shy of his twentieth birthday, Jorge was sentenced to two to four years in prison.

  People like Jorge and his family almost always expected cops to lie, to be dirty, like pigs. They understood corruption. What they didn’t understand was snitching.

  “I’d rather someone stab me and let me bleed out before I’d become a fuckin’ snitch,” said Jorge’s brother, Ricky, hate blazing from his eyes.

  “He’s a rat. And a rat should get poison,” Ricky said, his lip curled as he almost spat out the words.

  Ricky lived with Dolores and on this day, as Barbara interviewed her, Ricky sat by his mother’s side, listening intently, interjecting frequently, as if Barbara was taking Dolores’s deposition and he was her legal advisor.

  Benny knew that we were going to talk to Jorge and drug dealers like him. He knew we were going to print that he was an informant, an informant who helped lock up dealers based on lies. And after we heard the venom spewed at Benny, we were surprised no one had killed him yet. It was then that Barbara and I realized that if Benny ended up dead, we’d be to blame. By talking to the dealers whom Benny had set up, we were salting the wounds.

  Barbara sat across from Ricky at his dining room table and wondered what, if anything, he’d do to Benny. Ricky was shirtless, with low-slung black pants. He had a goatee, combed his short hair forward, close to his scalp, and had a space between his two front teeth. His arms, chest, and back were adorned in tattoos. Stretched across the top of his back were the words ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME above an unfinished cross.

  Ricky seemed more upset that Benny played a role in his mom’s drug arrest than in Jorge’s. At fourteen, Ricky went to Dolores’s sentencing, prepared to beg the judge for leniency. “I would have told him she did what she had to do. I don’t blame her. People may see it as she was introducing me to drugs, but she raised four kids on her own, and how you gonna pay for all that? DPA don’t pay for that.”

  Ricky was fiercely protective of Dolores, and he took care of her. Late at night or early in the morning, he slipped into her room, careful not to wake her, and placed food, usually a fruit yogurt, by her bed.

  Dolores’s life was unlike lots of others in the Badlands. She was born in Puerto Rico in 1965 and lived in a wood house with her parents and seven brothers. She was the only girl—“Daddy’s little girl.” Life was hard for her dad, who delivered Coca-Cola by truck. The family moved to Paterson, New Jersey, when she was four or five. “We came for a better life.”

  As a girl, she bounced around with her family, mostly back and forth from Camden and Philly. Dolores hooked up with a high school boy, got pregnant with Sofia at sixteen, and dropped out. She met another man, Diego, when she was studying to become a nursing assistant. They had three children together, but had a turbulent, violent relationship. In the beginning he worked at a body shop, but he lost his job because he smoked crack all the time. He never worked again.

  “I wanted to go back to being a nurse, but he didn’t want that, so I didn’t,” Dolores told Barbara.

  When he got mad or hallucinated, he hit or punched her, threw lamps at her. Even as a young kid, Ricky was her protector.

  “I got in the way once. He cracked my head open. Here, feel this,” he told Barbara, as he bent down and put her finger on his thick black hair. He wanted her to feel the bumpy scar tissue on the back of his head.

  Dolores mustered enough courage to leave Diego when her dad got sick. “Poppy” was a diabetic with high blood pressure who endured heart surgery and suffered from Alzheimer’s. She slept on a cot beside him in the hospital. When he couldn’t walk, she stayed with him in rehab. She was the only one who shaved his face to his satisfaction. “He said his face had to feel like a baby’s bottom.” When he came home, she cooked him anything he wanted—hot dogs, boiled eggs, oatmeal, rice, and chicken.

  He died on May 3, 1998, a Sunday. He opened his eyes, smiled at Dolores, then took his last breath.

  Barbara understood Dolores more than she knew. Barbara’s mom died of pancreatic cancer in November 2000. After she was diagnosed, Barbara did everything to save her. She begged a Mount Sinai Hospital researcher to include her in his coffee enema experiment. She knew it sounded ridiculous, but she was desperate. Her mom was seventy-three. She wasn’t a candidate for surgery, and she refused chemo, said it would make her sicker. Barbara knew it wouldn’t help anyway.

  She wanted to die at home, even though she couldn’t say the word die. “I want to go home,” she told Barbara. And Barbara knew. She took a leave of absence from the Daily News and flew back and forth to Florida every week to sit beside her in bed all day and help her dad. Then she came home to take care of her two children because her husband needed to travel for work.

  Barbara cooked her mom’s favorite meal of roast chicken, boiled potatoes, and green peas. She spoon-fed her in bed while they watched her favorite reruns of Law & Order. When she could no longer chew, Barbara gave her broth, milkshakes, and Ensure. She sponge-bathed her, washed and brushed her thinning hair, and put lip gloss on her lips. As she slipped away, weighing not more than seventy-five pounds, Barbara stroked her cheek to trick her into opening her mouth so Barbara could slip in the painkiller Oxycontin. Barbara gave her more when she moaned. She changed her diapers. When her mom lost consciousness, she gave her Oxycontin in a dropper. Water in a dropper. Anything to keep her alive. Until the day Barbara knelt on the floor, held her limp hand, and told her it was okay to go. She’d take care of her brother and dad. Barbara didn’t know if she heard her.

  “How can my heart still be beating when hers isn’t?” Barbara cried when her mom died two days later.

  Soon after Dolores’s dad died, she started selling drugs. When her mom died, Barbara fell into a deep depression that she tried desperately and unsuccessfully to hide. It was the beginning of the end of her marriage.

  Death wasn’t all Barbara shared with Dolores. Barbara’s mom’s mom was a four-foot-eleven Orthodox Jewish bootlegger who stashed cash under her mattress in her tenement at C and Eighth Streets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Barbara’s mom hid under the bed each time cops busted into their apartment and hauled her grandmother off to jail.

  Her grandmom had a mission—her three sons and daughter would claw their way out of poverty and land careers to make her proud. When New York University had already filled their quota of Jewish medical students, her grandmom stormed down to the university with wads of cash in her purse.

  “What does it take to get my son in?” she asked someone in the admissions office, in her Yiddish accent, plopping twenties on the counter. Barbara’s uncle was accepted into med school and became a pediatrician. Another uncle became a rabbi; the other, an engineer.

  Dolores and Ricky knew they came from a different world than Barbara. Ricky seemed curious about her home, her neighborhood. “When am I going to come see your land?” he asked her.

  He told Barbara she must be comfortable. He thought Barbara lived in a mansion. She told him she lived in a three-bedroom home, nothing fancy.

  “Don�
��t bullshit me. Your three-bedroom home is different than my three-bedroom home,” he said.

  Ricky was right. She lived in a leafy, affluent Philly suburb just west of the city. The heart of her town was lined with trendy restaurants, with names like Plate and Verdad, and boutique shops that sold swimsuits year-round to rich housewives who went on winter cruises to tropical islands. Barbara’s house, a three-bedroom brick colonial with blue shutters, sat on an ivy-manicured hill.

  Unlike more than 90 percent of kids in Barbara’s neighborhood, Ricky didn’t have a high school diploma. “I didn’t graduate, but I got brains like I did.”

  Ricky, who described himself as a “hard-core Christian,” was cryptic about how he earned money, saying that he sometimes worked “off the books.” He asked Barbara if she knew of any jobs.

  Every so often, the conversation was interrupted by a knock on the door. Ricky would get up and furtively step outside for a minute or so. Dolores froze and lifted an eyebrow cautiously each time someone pounded on the door. The only person whom Ricky introduced to Barbara was “the Movie Man,” an obese guy in a white T-shirt and jeans with a kind smile. Ricky sifted through his stack of pirated movies and chose some for himself and his mom—the street version of Netflix.

  After the Movie Man left, Ricky brought the DVDs to Dolores and sat down at the dining room table. Barbara noticed he was staring at her hands.

  “No ring?” he asked. “You’re not married?”

  “No. I’m not married.”

  “No?” he asked with a coy smile. “How could that be?”

  “I’m divorced.” Barbara still cringed when she said that word.

  He asked about her children. She told him that her son, Josh, was in law school and her daughter, Anna, had just graduated from college and was working.