Busted

by Wendy Ruderman

  Police Commissioner Ramsey and Mayor Nutter spoke at Pawlowski’s funeral, where the cries of Pawlowski’s wife, Kimmy, his childhood sweetheart, echoed through the cavernous cathedral. Kimmy was five months pregnant with their first child, a son she would name after her husband. A grainy ultrasound photo was tucked into Pawlowski’s folded hands before undertakers closed his brushed copper casket.

  To some readers, Barbara and I were no better than killers like Scruggs. “It’s people like you who are to blame for the unprecedented violence against the Philadelphia Police,” one e-mailed us.

  Barbara and I were targeted on Domelights.com, an Internet forum where cops, their supporters, and cop wannabes vented anonymously. The website’s slogan—“The Voice of the Good Guys”—was a joke. Many of the postings were angry, racist rants. In one posting, the writer described black children as “a bunch of ghetto monkey faces.” Cops and others who posted on the site dubbed us “Slime Sistas,” some wished us dead, and a few wrote that they hoped we got raped and no one would respond when we called 911. I didn’t tell Karl that cops had posted our home address on the site.

  The verbal assault became so savage that our colleague Jill Porter felt compelled to write a column defending us. “You may be furious that a suspected drug dealer was freed—as well you should be. But don’t aim your fury at Laker and Ruderman,” she wrote.

  Again and again, our critics argued, Who cares if cops cut corners or lie to take a drug dealer off the street? They believed that the ends justified the means.

  The argument reminded Barbara and me of a famous scene from the 1992 movie A Few Good Men, a courtroom drama about two US Marines on trial for killing a fellow marine. When pressed by the prosecutor for the truth about the murder, Colonel Nathan Jessup, played by Jack Nicholson, barks, “You can’t handle the truth!” meaning that national security comes at a price. “Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You?”

  Yes, Barbara and I weren’t cops. We didn’t know how it felt to chase down an armed robber or deranged killer, only to find ourselves in a dark alley, staring into the barrel of a gun. But we did know that when reporters fabricated stories, when they invented people, facts, or quotes, they tarnished the entire industry and eroded trust. The same applied to cops, only more so. Martin Luther King Jr. put it this way: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

  12

  BARBARA AND I WERE HUDDLED OVER MY COMPUTER WRITING OUR NEXT TAINTED JUSTICE STORY. THE NEWSROOM WAS UNUSUALLY LIVELY FOR a Sunday evening. It was Oscar night, and editors had ordered pizza, as they did for all big events—election night, the Super Bowl, the World Series. Reporters and copy editors gathered, vulture-like, around a white cardboard tower of pizza boxes. They pulled apart the gooey slices, wiped their greasy fingers on thin takeout napkins—or on their jeans—and then zipped back to their desks.

  From my desk, I could see the Sunday-night editor, Will Bunch, furiously typing away at his computer behind stacks of yellowed newspapers. Will, the Ivy League–educated, fifty-year-old mad scientist of the Daily News, always looked like he’d just jammed a metal fork into an electric outlet, with his thin strands of hair zigzagging every which way. Between bites of pizza, Will took generous swigs of Diet Coke straight from the two-liter bottle. By night’s end, the bottle would be empty, left on a desk smeared with sticky brown crop circles of corn syrup and a dusting of dandruff.

  Will, like everyone else in the newsroom, had just learned that the parent company of the Daily News and Inquirer had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. As he worked on a piece about the filing, which he later posted on his liberal-infused blog Attytood, reporters began to Google “Chapter 11” to see if they’d still get paid.

  Barbara and I barely looked up, deaf to the chatter of doom around us. We had come in on our day off to write a story about a woman named Lady Gonzalez. Gar, our editor, wanted the story for Monday’s front cover. We could hear the thundering hooves of Inquirer reporters behind us, and we were determined to outrun them. That meant working double-time to get our story in the paper.

  We’d spent most of the week chasing tips that Jeff wasn’t the only blemished cop in his squad. A suburban narcotics cop who occasionally joined forces with Philly drug cops called Barbara with a tip that one cop in Jeff’s squad was known as the Boob Man.

  “Boob Man?”

  “Yeah. You know. He fondles women. He’s a perv. He goes up under their shirts and touches their breasts when he’s on a raid,” he told Barbara.

  “Oh my God. You’ve got to be kidding me,” Barbara said.

  “I’m not fucking with you. He gets them alone in a room. All the other cops know it. I hear he likes large-breasted women—the bigger, the better.”

  Around the same time, I’d heard similar rumblings from Benny. It wasn’t long before we discovered that the cop with the breast fetish wasn’t an urban myth. In hunting down people who had been set up by Jeff, we met Lady Gonzalez, a soft-spoken, almost demure woman with almond-shaped brown eyes, smooth skin, high cheekbones, Angelina Jolie lips, and a small diamond stud in her nose. Her father named her Lady because he thought his tiny, delicate baby was deserving of such a regal name.

  We met Lady on a Friday night in her tidy home with burgundy walls, CDs stacked in towers inside wood cabinets, comfy sofas, and family photos pinned to the fridge with magnets. She stood only five feet and had a curvy figure and a shy smile. Barbara and I could tell immediately from the moment we met her that she was not just skittish; she was frightened. She fiddled with the dark hair that swept over her shoulders and massaged her hands in an obsessive-compulsive way, and her sentences periodically drifted off as she tried to compose herself.

  Jeff and his squad had raided this house where she lived with her husband, Albert Nunez, and her five young children. Jeff had written in a search warrant that Albert had sold a packet of cocaine to Benny, but Benny told us that was a lie—he’d never bought drugs from Albert.

  When Jeff and eight other cops burst through the front door, Lady was home with the children. When Lady saw Jeff point a drawn gun at her, she froze. One cop took her children, crying and screaming, to a neighbor’s house. While the other cops ripped the house apart in search of drugs, one cop, whom Lady described as husky and average height, led her into a small room off the kitchen.

  Lady recounted how the barrel-bellied cop shifted his body, shuffling his feet closer to hers. She tried to back up, but there was nowhere to go. The wall was at her back.

  “He asked me if I had any tattoos. I told him I had one on my lower back,” Lady told us. “He told me to show it to him. He pushed down my jeans so he could see the crack of my ass and where I have a tattoo of the Puerto Rican flag,” she said, illustrating how low he pulled down her pants.

  “Mmmm, a Puerto Rican,” he said.

  He spun her around, unzipped her blue jacket, hiked up her shirt and bra, and fondled her breasts.

  “I was so scared,” Lady told us, her voice shaking as she wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “I was in a panic. I thought he was going to rape me.”

  The cop stopped and stepped away from Lady only when he heard the other cops stomp down the staircase and head toward the kitchen. At first, the cops found nothing more than Albert’s dime bag of weed, but during one last sweep, Jeff emerged from the back room with a teddy bear with a small pouch secreted inside. The pouch contained forty-seven packets of cocaine. Albert claimed the drugs were planted. Maybe. Maybe not.

  What shook up Lady most was that the cop who sexually assaulted her had then pocketed her house key and had warned that he’d be back. He promised that he’d return every day, every night. The night we met Lady, more than a year had passed since the cop had fondled her. He hadn’t been back, but Lady couldn’t get his face out of her head.

  “I think of him. I dream of him,” she told us. “Still, till this day, I think he’s going to come
back.”

  She hadn’t reported the incident to internal affairs because she didn’t think they’d believe her, and they might even retaliate.

  “I’m sorry, but why am I going to report this to a police officer when a police officer stood in front of me and molested me?” she asked us.

  She agreed to talk to Barbara and me only because she suspected she wasn’t the first victim, and probably not the last.

  We believed she was right.

  In the story, we didn’t identify the cop who fondled Lady by name. We didn’t have the goods. Not yet.

  Barbara and I finished writing our Lady story and were about to power down our computers when, at 11:38 p.m., Brian Tierney, our company’s charismatic CEO, issued a staffwide call to arms. The e-mail subject line read, “Important Notice.” It should have read, “Don’t Panic.”

  “As a company, we have been hit with a perfect storm, including a dramatic decline in total revenue, the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression and a debt structure which is out of line with current economic reality,” Tierney wrote. “Now more than ever, we need to continue the hard work that has already begun.”

  The company’s bankruptcy filing was the number-three story on CNN, right after North Korea’s suspected missile tests and President Obama’s stimulus plan.

  The Daily News and Inquirer were officially part of the Chapter 11 Club, joining the ranks of other major dailies on death watch. The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and the Journal Register Company, which owned twenty-two daily newspapers and three hundred nondaily publications—all were in bankruptcy protection.

  The Big Fall for the Daily News and Inquirer had taken only three years. In 2006 Tierney had spearheaded a group of Philadelphia-area investors who purchased the Daily News, the Inquirer, and our website, Philly.com, for $562 million, which included pension liabilities. Tierney, a flamboyant advertising and public relations executive who put up $10 million of his own money, was supposed to be our savior, the hometown guy who freed us from “the cold dead hand of Knight Ridder,” as Inky Metro columnist Tom Ferrick Jr. put it. Over the years, the publicly traded Knight Ridder Inc. had decimated our newsrooms with its slash-and-burn cost-cutting. Private local ownership was supposed to be the antidote to Wall Street’s iron-fisted demands for high profit margins.

  Tierney was a much-needed shot of energy and determination. He dreamed about flying. He really believed he could revive local and national advertising, reverse circulation losses, and beat back competition from the Internet.

  We were leery at first. Tierney had been an archenemy of Philadelphia reporters for years. He was known for intimidating and browbeating reporters in defense of his clients. If he hated a story, he was quick to call editors and complain, railing that the reporters were biased, unethical, and incompetent.

  Tierney grew up learning to fight for what he wanted. The fourth of five brothers, he spent his early childhood in a largely blue-collar Philly suburb, where his mom was a waitress and his father was a claims adjuster. He sucked his naysayers up with a straw and spat them out. He thrived on challenge, especially if the stakes were high. Philly was Tierney’s home, and he fit perfectly in this town of scrappers.

  Philadelphians were the stars of not one but two reality television shows: A&E TV’s Parking Wars, which featured ticket writers and car booters in confrontations with Philly loudmouths; and the Discovery Channel’s Wreck Chasers, in which the city is billed as “the Wild West of tow-trucking.” Television producers needed only to roll the cameras, and they were guaranteed drama.

  Philadelphia sports fans were famously obnoxious and rowdy. Their notoriety could be traced all the way back to a December day in 1968 when the Eagles played horribly and fans booed Santa Claus, pelting the red-suited Saint Nick with snowballs during the game’s halftime show. For a time, Lincoln Financial Field was the only NFL stadium in the country that housed a jail with four holding cells, for unruly Eagles fans.

  Tierney was a gloves-off brawler, and he wouldn’t have wanted to be a newspaper publisher in any other city. When he bought the Inquirer and Daily News, Tierney had put everything on the line—not only his personal wealth but his reputation. Tierney understood the importance of image and had an ego large enough to power every house in Philly. He wanted to go down in Philadelphia history as the local guy who single-handedly saved the city’s newspapers.

  In a sense, Tierney was our best hope. We knew to fail meant that Tierney had failed, and that wasn’t how Tierney wanted the story written.

  Tierney’s caffeinated enthusiasm was infectious. On his first day on the job, Tierney gave a champagne send-off to a fleet of delivery trucks adorned with the company’s new slogan: “Bringing Home the News.” He danced at a pep rally, brought in Eagles cheerleaders, and boldly declared, “The next great era of Philadelphia journalism begins today.”

  I had learned I was going to be laid off from the Inquirer four months after Tierney took the helm. Suddenly, Tierneyland didn’t seem so magical.

  Tierney blamed the cuts on a “permanent” free fall in ad revenues. Classified advertising, too, took a beating, as ads for jobs, real estate, cars, pets, and personals migrated to Craigslist and other Internet sites. At the same time, newspaper circulation was in decline. We had trained a whole generation of readers to get their news for free on the Internet while drinking $4 lattes. Not even the smartest people in our industry could figure out how to close the Pandora’s box that we had opened.

  Tierney’s group had overpaid for the papers, borrowed too much money, and now struggled to make debt payments. As they scrounged around for $20 million in savings, they discussed laying off as many as 150 of the 415 Inquirer newsroom jobs. Reporters who had worked at the Inquirer for almost a decade were in danger of losing their jobs. I had only been there four years. And I was number eleven on the Inquirer layoff list.

  “Tierney should change the company’s slogan to ‘Bringing Home the Pink Slip,’” Karl snorted when I called home.

  I tried to focus on work, but my bosses kept coming over to my desk. “Why aren’t you looking for a job?” they’d ask. A huge swath of reporters—myself included—began to spend our workday writing cover letters and tweaking résumés.

  I soon landed a job offer from the New York Daily News, but I wanted the Inquirer to lay me off so I could collect my severance. Bill Marimow, the Inky editor, was in his office when I got back from my interview in Manhattan. I summoned the balls to ask if he could finagle my severance pay, even though I’d be gone before the layoffs hit.

  Marimow was an old-fashioned newspaper man. He’d circulate through the newsroom, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows. An avuncular champion of his reporters, especially those who hustled, he emitted a quiet strength. “And how are you today, Miss Ruderman,” he’d say slowly, enunciating each word. When I told Marimow that I’d gotten a job at the New York Daily News, this soft-spoken, two-time Pulitzer winner sat back in his chair and smiled.

  “I didn’t know you’d be willing to work at a . . . tabloid,” Marimow said. “Let me make a call.”

  The next day at work, I answered my phone to find Tierney on the other end. “Congratulations on your new job at Philadelphia Daily News,” he said. I was saved.

  On January 3, 2007, my first day at the Daily News, Tierney sent layoff notices to seventy-one Inquirer employees. I envisioned tears, anger, and despair two floors above in the Inquirer newsroom. “The guillotine has finally fallen,” said one Inky reporter who got laid off. I had survivor’s guilt.

  But two years had passed, and now I was at the Daily News working on Tainted Justice, and the guilt had subsided—even vanished. Barbara and I were deep into the series, even though we knew that our industry, on journalistic hospice, appeared to be nearing the end, taking its last few labored breaths. Newspapers had become “quaint,” like the milkman or the paperboy.

  So on that Sunday night, when Barbar
a and I wrapped up the Lady story, we were relieved the paper was still alive, albeit barely.

  At 11:00 p.m. or so, we walked out of the newsroom, tense, tired, hungry. Barbara turned to me.

  “What if the paper closes before we’ve finished the Tainted Justice series?” she asked.

  13

  “YOU AND WENDY NEED TO BE CAREFUL,” A COP SOURCE WARNED BARBARA DURING A CONVERSATION FROM HIS PERSONAL CELL. “THE STUFF YOU GUYS are reporting is serious. A lot’s at stake. Cops could go down ’cause of this.”

  On top of the hate e-mails, Barbara and I had started to get nasty voice-mail messages and hang-up calls. The paper’s top editor, Michael Days, was concerned enough to ask the company’s telecommunications staff to trace the calls. Denise Gallo, the scarily efficient Daily News den mom who served as Michael’s right arm, came over to us with a printout of incoming calls to the newsroom. She highlighted calls to our extensions in yellow. “Girls, do you recognize any of these numbers?” At fifty-seven, Denise always referred to us as the Girls, though Barbara was fifty-one and I was thirty-nine. No number looked familiar, except for one—a hang-up from my home phone. Karl had a habit of calling and hanging up when I didn’t answer. The three of us erupted in giggles.

  We tried to brush off the anger directed at us, but our imaginations sometimes led to our brains’ dark crannies. I was afraid to get my morning newspaper. I’d open the front door and scan up and down my street before dashing to the lawn to snatch the paper. I’d quickly dead-bolt the door behind me.