Busted

by Wendy Ruderman

He stared at her, locking into her eyes. “You’re still suffering from your divorce,” he said.

  The words took her aback. She didn’t tell Ricky, but she still kept photos of her ex-husband in her wallet—one family portrait and one by himself.

  “You need to get out more and live your life,” he told Barbara. “You have your whole life ahead of you.”

  He paused. “You know what? We should go on a cruise.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “You and me. A cruise.”

  In the span of an hour, Ricky asked Barbara to touch the back of his head, acted as her fortune-teller, gave her relationship advice, and asked her to sail away with him on the Love Boat. This was a typical day of street reporting for Barbara. On the other hand, when I went out on a story, people asked me if I came from a family of midgets or told me that I reminded them of Steve Urkel, the bespectacled nerdy character from the TV sitcom Family Matters. I’d think, Huh? But I’m white!

  7

  OF ALL THE PEOPLE BENNY BETRAYED, HE FELT THE WORST ABOUT HECTOR SOTO. HECTOR WAS LIKE A FATHER TO BENNY, MORE SO THAN HIS OWN DAD.

  Benny’s dad, Ventura Martinez-Perez Sr., was a local celebrity. He made Philadelphia history in 1971 when he became the first Latino officer on the city’s public housing police force. He earned his FCC license at Temple University in 1976 and moonlighted as a Spanish-language radio announcer. On the airwaves, he talked sports, music, and politics. His on-air name was El Coqui, a type of frog in Puerto Rico that makes a racket.

  Benny craved his father’s affection and approval but knew he was a disappointment, even an embarrassment.

  “My father always told me that I was a loser,” Benny said.

  Benny said his father once chased him down the street after he spotted him selling drugs on the corner. He kicked Benny out of the house and tossed all Benny’s designer clothes—the Sergio Valente and Jordache jeans, leather blazer, Adidas sneakers—because he knew that Benny had bought the high-end threads with drug money.

  Benny went to middle school with Hector’s son, Noel, and Benny spent a lot of time over at their house. Hector and his wife, Lucy, were fond of the boy they knew as Flash. Benny and Hector shared a love of salsa music. Hector was a record producer who worked with some of the biggest names in Latino music; Benny took up the timbales and got regular gigs as a DJ.

  When Hector wasn’t recording music, he dabbled in drug dealing. He drove nice cars, wore neatly pressed slacks and Panama-style hats, and raised tropical birds. He was everything Benny wanted to be, and Hector took him everywhere in his 1976 Cadillac Seville, a two-toned light and dark blue beauty. They cruised through the neighborhood, driving past row houses with aluminum awnings draped with Puerto Rican flags. Brassy salsa music bubbled from front stoops, where old men sat talking or playing dominoes, flyswatter in hand, on folding chairs on the sidewalk.

  Benny brought his girlfriends around to meet Hector, whom he introduced as “my pop.” When Benny needed money to take a girl to a hotel, Benny called Hector, sometimes waking him in the middle of the night. Hector often gave Benny money for a hotel room, a movie, whatever. Hector’s own son grew jealous. Noel couldn’t understand why Hector never gave him money. The reason, Hector told Noel, was that Benny pestered him and whined until Hector opened his wallet.

  Benny always spent Christmas Eve with Hector and his family. Lucy made her famous Puerto Rican soup, a stew of black beans and garlic, and her shrimp pastelillos. Benny got drunk and spent the night on Hector and Lucy’s couch. Lucy adored Benny. She would have let him move in, if he had asked.

  In 1990, around the time that Benny was hustling $10 bags of coke on the corner, the cops nabbed Hector for selling cocaine out of his house. They confiscated twenty-nine grams of coke, a grinder, pestle, heat sealer, and scale. Hector landed in jail on felony drug charges. He posted $50,000 bail. While awaiting trial, he jumped bail and became a fugitive. At forty-three, Hector went on about his life, lying low but not hiding. He probably would have avoided prosecution and remained free—if not for Benny and Jeff.

  When Benny turned police informant after Jeff busted him for selling marijuana and threatened to lock him up if he didn’t, he didn’t just flip—he transformed. He grew to like the power and got a rush from knocking on doors and conning his way into drug houses. He emerged from houses, drugs in hand, and strutted over to Jeff, bragging, “Man, I got these guys. They were supposed to be untouchable.” Benny began to see himself as a cop, and Jeff grew to rely on Benny and treated him like a brother, or so Benny thought.

  Over time, Benny’s loyalty and alliance shifted from family friends like Hector to Jeff. Nobody killed Benny, because they hadn’t figured out yet that he was a snitch. Benny was smoother than smooth.

  In 2006—almost fifteen years after Hector became a fugitive—Jeff got a tip that he was selling drugs out of his corner row house. The house was a fortress. The front porch was caged by black iron bars. A surveillance camera, rigged to a television in Hector and Lucy’s second-floor bedroom, was pointed at the front gate. Hector and Lucy described the camera system as a safety precaution in a dicey neighborhood, but Jeff knew that drug dealers used video cameras for countersurveillance on the cops.

  It was 6:20 a.m., still dark out, on a chilly October morning. Hector and Lucy were asleep in their upstairs bedroom. The air-conditioning unit, cranked on high to alleviate Lucy’s hot flashes, hummed and gurgled in the window. Lucy stirred slightly. Her barely conscious brain registered a muffled noise outside. Thud. Thud. Thud. Maybe the neighbor, hammering something. She had no idea that Jeff and seven other cops were at the front gate. Again and again, they slammed a battering ram into the metal lock until the wrought-iron gate banged open.

  The cops came in like a freight train, roaring up the narrow staircase, single file, guns drawn. As they reached the second floor, Lucy opened the bedroom door. She stood, terrified, in her nightgown, barefoot.

  A cop yelled, “Come down right now!”

  She hustled down the steps to the living room. The cops burst into the bedroom and handcuffed Hector.

  A cop shoved Hector to the ground. Hector fell on knees creaky and swollen with arthritis; he was an old fifty-nine. The cop struck Hector on the side of the head with the butt of a rifle. Hector’s right ear, which later turned black and purple, took the brunt of the rifle. His ear throbbed.

  From downstairs, Lucy heard Hector howl. She began to cry.

  “Bingo!” one cop blurted. They found a clear, knotted sandwich bag, secreted in a dresser drawer, with fifteen ziplock packets amounting to 37 grams of cocaine, worth about $3,700 on the street.

  A few days later, Lucy sat crying on the porch. With Hector locked up, she felt lost and scared. As she wiped tears from her cheeks, Benny happened by.

  “Ma? Ma? What’s the matter?”

  “You didn’t hear? They took Hector away, the cops, they took him.”

  Benny acted stunned. “If you need anything from me, if you need anything . . .”

  Hector pleaded guilty to two felony drug charges: possession with intent to distribute and conspiracy. With the 1990 case still open, Hector could have gone to prison for twenty years. In exchange for his guilty plea, the judge sentenced him to three to eight years. They shipped him to a prison two hours away from Philadelphia.

  Hector had been in prison for almost a year when Benny first came to the Daily News. Benny began to sob when he told Barbara and me about Hector. We believed he felt bad, but we struggled to understand how Benny could help set up someone so close to him.

  On a cold January day in 2009, while Barbara tracked down Jorge’s family, I drove from the Daily News to Hector and Lucy’s house on the corner of Seventh and Lycoming Street. I knew from court records that Hector was in prison, but hoped Lucy was home. A gangly teen straddling a bike on the corner watched as I struggled to parallel-park my shrimpy car in a spot big enough to fit two Hummers. I got it on my second try, not too bad on the embarrassment scal
e, though the back bumper of my car stuck out, all hokeypokey, more than a foot from the curb.

  Standing on the icy sidewalk, I was stumped by the iron bars encasing Hector and Lucy’s porch. The gate was locked, and there wasn’t a way to reach the front door.

  “She not home,” the teen called out. “You lookin’ for Miss Lucy, right? She not home.”

  “Oh. Okay.” I pulled out my reporter’s notebook and scribbled a note, asking her to call me. I folded the note around one of my business cards and stuffed it in the gate lock. A few hours later, Lucy called and arranged for me to come over the next morning.

  She greeted me at the gate. Lucy was a petite woman with bleached blond hair tied up in a ponytail. A girlish fifty-three years old, her face was smooth, except for a few faint lines that crinkled around her brown eyes when she smiled. A single freckle sat just above her upper lip.

  Her living room looked like a white-and-black checkerboard. The popcorn ceiling and the plaster walls were painted a crisp white. The couch and chairs were a velvety black. The thick carpet was a sea of black. Everything else—the china cabinet, coffee table, end tables, knickknacks—was glass. We sat down at her dining room table. I gingerly placed my tape recorder and notepad on the pearl-colored glass table.

  Lucy was eager to talk about Hector. She showed me a handmade Christmas card that he’d sent her from prison. On one side, he drew a heart and a rose with the words JUST LOVE underneath. On the other, he inked a portrait of them together, both smiling, with Hector’s arm around her waist.

  “I love him so much. You’d never believe how much I love that man,” she said.

  I told her what I knew. That Benny and Jeff set up Hector. Benny said he didn’t want to buy from Hector, so he bought a $20 bag of coke from a guy who sold out of a nearby bar.

  “For real?”

  She thought about it for a minute, quiet. She narrowed, then widened her eyes, her face a fan of expressions that changed from puzzlement to dismay. Lucy’s reaction reminded me of the plastic volcano that my son Brody got for Christmas. We spooned baking soda into the shot-glass-size base, screwed on the tepee-like cone, and poured vinegar into the narrow opening at the top. We watched as the white liquid fizzed from the volcano’s mouth and then bubbled over in an angry cascade. I don’t think the depth of Benny’s deception sank in until long after I left Lucy’s house.

  Later that evening, Hector called Lucy from the prison.

  “Poppy, you know who did this?”

  “Who?” Hector said.

  “Flash.”

  “Flash. Flash? No. No, I don’t believe it. He’s like my son,” Hector said.

  Hector and Lucy would later throw out all the photos of them with Benny. A photograph of Benny hugging Lucy went straight in the trash. Lucy told me that Benny was raised in a family with no love.

  “We gave him love, and look what he did. . . . If you see him, tell him that we don’t want to see his face.”

  8

  AFTER BARBARA ASKED JEFF ABOUT RENTING A HOUSE TO BENNY, JEFF HIRED A PIT BULL OF A LAWYER TO FEND OFF BARBARA AND ME. HIS SOLE job was to kill the story. Our job was to hold our ground.

  On January 31, 2009, George Bochetto launched the first salvo in the form of a letter. The subject line read: “Urgent Warnings Regarding News Story.” Just to make sure we got it, he sent the letter by fax, e-mail, and first-class mail.

  “Officer Jeff ________ is an undercover narcotics officer with the Philadelphia Police Department, and is married and has two school-aged children living in Philadelphia. Any publication of Officer Jeff ________’s name, address, photograph, or any other facts which could lead to his identification or home address will place Officer Jeff ______, his wife, and his children in extreme danger.”

  We thought this argument was ludicrous. Jeff routinely testified in open court. He took the witness box and not only said his last name, but spelled it. When the prosecutor asked Jeff if he recognized the person whom he arrested, Jeff pointed to the drug dealer seated at the defendant’s table. Jeff often made this identification in front of a courtroom full of other criminal defendants awaiting their own cases.

  Bochetto also wrote that Benny’s rap sheet read like a “credibility horror story,” and he urged us to meet with him immediately.

  On a late February afternoon, as heavy wet snowflakes fell, leaving faint pinwheels that quickly melted on the slick streets, Barbara and I stepped out of a cab in front of Bochetto’s downtown law office on Locust Street. With boutiquish French glass doors, hunter green awning, and white stone entranceway, it was nestled among trendy restaurants, shops, and theaters.

  I dressed for war. I ditched my size three and a half sneakers for tan leather pumps that I’d had to special-order from a shoe company called Cinderella. I swapped my owlish eyeglasses for contact lenses, put on crimson lipstick, eye makeup, and blush. I wore a plaid wool skirt and a purple V-neck sweater, with a brown scarf looped around my neck. Barbara, who had a wardrobe with clothes dating back to the 1980s, sported a black pencil skirt that she’d recently hemmed just above the knee, bringing the style into this decade. She paired it with a fitted jacket and her signature black leather boots, with the broken zipper and glued-on left heel. The Jewish hillbillies from Philly had arrived.

  Once inside the reception area, we took a seat on a chocolate brown leather couch, tufted with buttons, the kind we imagined could be found in an English riding club. The decor was brut masculine, heavy on soft leather and dark wood. We waited for what seemed like a good while, at least one Sponge-Bob episode, I figured, using my kids’ measurement of time. We wondered if the wait was intentional, if Bochetto wanted to make us sweat.

  A skinny guy, with pasty skin and slicked-back black hair, approached us. He looked like a boy who had dressed up in his dad’s pin-striped suit, which he paired, thoughtfully, with a blood-red silk power tie. A cross between Pee-wee Herman, a child vampire, and a pimp wannabe. He led us up a flight of steep, narrow stairs and ushered us into Bochetto’s office.

  Bochetto stood up from his massive, polished wood desk and shook each of our hands with a confident grip. He wore a smirk, an expression of amusement and curiosity. Clearly, he intended to make quick work of us. Bochetto’s minion sat off to the side in a corner, with a yellow legal pad and pen on his lap.

  We sat down across from Bochetto in matching teal-green upholstered chairs with deep seats and wood trim. When I sat back, the chair swallowed me up, clamlike, and my feet didn’t touch the floor. I felt like Lily Tomlin as her five-year-old Edith Ann persona in a giant rocking chair. So I scooted forward and perched myself on the edge.

  “Do you mind if I use my tape recorder?” I asked, as I placed it on his desk.

  “No. No. You can’t,” Bochetto huffed. “That’s a violation of Pennsylvania’s Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act.”

  I started to protest, but he cut me off. “This conversation is off the record.”

  “No,” I said, petulant and defiant.

  He looked at me incredulously. We could see him begin to simmer.

  “I’m sorry, but we can’t agree to that,” Barbara said.

  Ding. Ding. We were in Bochetto’s boxing ring, and round one had begun. The fiery attorney liked to fight. He was a fighter from the moment he was born.

  As an infant, Bochetto was abandoned at a Brooklyn orphanage and spent the first seven years of his life without a last name. He cycled in and out of foster homes and fell prey to street punks who teased him and beat him up. A family from Rochester, New York—the Bochettos—adopted him. The scrawny teen found a second home in a nearby gym, where he taught himself to box, punching a weight bag to toughen himself up—inside and out. Bochetto became an amateur boxer and later graduated, cum laude, from Temple University School of Law in 1978. Then-governor Tom Ridge appointed Bochetto state boxing commissioner in 1995, and the Pennsylvania Veteran Boxers Association named him Man of the Year in 1997. As boxing commish, Bochetto raised mon
ey to open gyms and boxing leagues in neighborhoods battered by violence. He dug into his own pocket to pay gym fees for poor kids.

  The fifty-six-year-old Bochetto oozed panache and power. Under other circumstances, we might have thought him handsome, in his stylish dark-framed eyeglasses and starched white dress shirt embroidered GEORGE near the breast pocket. He combed his thick graying hair back in a wavelike ripple.

  His office was a shrine to boxing. The dark green walls were decorated with posters of legends like Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson and photos of Bochetto with them. Silk boxing trunks autographed by Ali and Joe Frazier hung on the wall near oil paintings of fighters. Boxing gloves were displayed in an antique china cabinet with a glass door. On Bochetto’s desk sat a 1936 bronze sculpture of clashing boxers. The work, entitled The Uppercut, was created by boxer-turned-artist Joe Brown. A black T-shirt sold during the 1995 fight between Mike Tyson and Buster Mathis Jr. was preserved in a picture frame. As boxing commissioner, Bochetto had licensed Tyson to fight in Pennsylvania after Iron Mike got out of prison for rape, paving the way for the Philadelphia Tyson-Mathis matchup. On a side table was an original, unopened Wheaties cereal box with Ali on the front.

  Bochetto, who specialized in libel law, began to lecture us, his voice laced with anger and frustration. He couldn’t understand why we would even consider writing a story based on the word of a convicted drug dealer turned informant.

  “What do you guys think you are going to do? Win a Pulitzer Prize?” he sneered.

  Of course drug dealers arrested by Jeff, a decorated cop, would say that Benny never made the buy. They’d feed us any bullshit to beat the case, and Benny was a bottom-feeder, Bochetto told us.

  “Being a confidential informant, those are spaces occupied in the main by scumbags,” Bochetto said. “These are liars and thieves and snakes who will do anything and say anything for any reason. They never man up. They never face reality and accept the consequences. They are always looking for a crack to crawl in, a rock to crawl under.”