Busted

by Wendy Ruderman

  As she ran, Barbara fished around in her bottomless, sacklike purse for her cell phone. She flipped open the phone and pressed my number. Her voice was a high-pitched squeak.

  “Wendy! Wendy! She hit me!”

  I was seated at my desk. I bolted up out of my chair and shouted, “What? What happened?” The reporters who sat near me looked up from their computers. The phone went dead. I dialed her back. No answer. I dialed and redialed, each time getting her voice mail. I began to panic.

  Barbara, cheeks aflame, closed her phone when she heard fast footsteps behind her. Barbara glanced over her shoulder and saw Tiffany, a wild-eyed, fuel-raged bullet train, screaming bloody murder into a cell phone.

  Tiffany had frantically called Jeff. At that moment, Jeff felt sick: he knew Barbara and I weren’t going to stop with just Benny; we planned to track down all of his informants.

  In a panic, Barbara finally found her car keys. She struggled to steady her hand as she unlocked the car door, jumped in, locked all the doors, and sped off. When she got a few blocks away, she pulled over and examined her face in the rearview mirror. She wanted to make sure she wasn’t bleeding. Then she called me back.

  “Tiffany hit me. Twice. Across the face. She threatened to kill me,” Barbara said. “But don’t worry, I got the notebook . . . but I lost . . . my pen.”

  It wasn’t funny at the time but later, the lost pen would become a running joke between us. The Daily News supply closet only stocked cheap Bics, which tended to leak and smudge, so Barbara bought her own special ones: Paper Mate Profile retractable ballpoint pens in assorted colors in packs of four for $3.99 at the grocery store. To her, losing a pen was a big deal.

  Barbara knew the city well, having been a Philly reporter for sixteen years, but this, her first assault, rattled her. Suddenly she couldn’t figure out how to get back to the office. She asked me to stay on the phone until she found I-95 South, heading toward Center City.

  By the time Barbara walked into the newsroom, Brian Tierney had gathered the staff for a big announcement. Barbara joined the circle of about forty reporters, photographers, and editors gathered around Tierney near the sports desk. Because Tierney had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection just a week ago, the staff was extra jittery and abuzz with rumors that Tierney planned to merge our ragtag ranks with the restrained Inquirer staff and close the Daily News.

  We’d been on journalism’s endangered species list for decades, and a lot of the old-timers had become numb to death threats, like prisoners of war. They put out the paper each day with an attitude that said, Either shoot me in the head or get out of my way.

  Tierney nervously swooped back his thick mane of chestnut hair, a cross between Donald Trump’s and Shaun Cassidy’s locks, and explained that starting March 30, the phrase “an edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer” would appear under the Daily News logo on the paper’s front page. He assured us that the two papers would remain intact, with separate news staffs, and that the move was purely economic. Tierney hoped that making the two papers a single entity with combined circulation numbers would help boost ad sales, and save us money as a single subscriber to wire services.

  “Instead of telling advertisers we have 330,000 circulation (at the Inquirer) plus the Daily News, it will help to say we have 440,000 daily circulation,” Tierney explained to a roomful of journalists trained to expose and rail against any cooking of the books in city government who were suddenly resigned to accepting our own creative math.

  But I barely heard what Tierney was saying. I kept looking at Barbara, who stood among the crowd, somewhat dazed, gingerly touching her cheeks, which sported angry red slap marks. I could actually see handprints parallel to her pearl earrings. She looked dainty in those earrings, with a long strand of fake pearls draped over a peach-and-cream-colored J.Crew sweater. What kind of person would hit Barbara Laker?

  I could feel a nervous giggle creeping up my throat. My reaction was inappropriate and insensitive, but I couldn’t help it. I kept thinking: What the fuck? Tiffany hauled off on Betty Crocker! It was funny in a horrible kind of way.

  “You okay?” I asked after the meeting.

  “Do you think it will bruise?” she said.

  “I’m gonna get you ice for your face.”

  When I got back from the cafeteria with Styrofoam cups packed with ice, Barbara was talking to Gar, our editor, who wanted her to press criminal charges.

  “If you get killed, it’s a good one-day story, but long-term, it’s bad for business,” I overheard Gar telling Barbara.

  She refused to file a police complaint against Tiffany, mostly because she didn’t want to become part of the story.

  The thing was, Tiffany came from a seamy world, one in which she could, if she wanted, find some lowlife to off Barbara for a price. And Jeff now knew that Tiffany had told us one more thing that could get him in trouble. Jeff and Bochetto wanted more than ever to shut us down. Bochetto got the private investigator right on it.

  Tiffany soon found herself in a scene straight out of a film noir. She climbed into the gumshoe’s Mercedes-Benz, and they sat in the Home Depot parking lot on Aramingo Avenue, a busy commercial artery lined with big-box stores.

  Russell Kolins, a private investigator since 1969, was an old hat. With his weathered, pleasant face and classy business suit, Kolins came off as both grizzled and imperial. He was a marine who worked counterintelligence in Vietnam, and the former owner of a Jersey nightclub called Private Eyes.

  The impeccably dressed Kolins began to pepper Tiffany with questions. What did the reporter ask? And what did Tiffany’s mom tell her? He needed details, specifically any minefields surrounding Jeff.

  Tiffany was spooked. In the mind of this hardened hood diva, Kolins was the embodiment of the Man. He might as well have been a state senator, judge, bank president, corporate CEO. It didn’t matter. She had to get out of that car.

  Once home, Tiffany wondered what the hell she’d gotten herself into. She called Barbara.

  “I’m real sorry I hit you,” Tiffany said.

  “Tiffany, that’s okay. I know you’re sorry. I know you didn’t mean it,” Barbara replied.

  I was standing by Barbara’s desk when she picked up the phone. My ears perked up: Tiffany? The notorious bitch slapper? I turned to the reporters and editors around me and stage-whispered, “She’s on the phone with Tiffany,” woodpeckering my finger above Barbara’s head. Everyone came over to eavesdrop.

  “Wow, Barbara has a new BFF,” joked hipster reporter Stephanie Farr.

  Tiffany explained to Barbara that she felt confused. She’d thought Jeff was a good guy. If she got jammed up on a traffic ticket or got collared, Jeff helped her out, often with cash. He talked to her like a buddy, all chatty and warm.

  “What’s going on, kiddo?” Jeff asked, fishing for neighborhood intel that might lead to his next drug bust.

  After talking to Kolins, Tiffany realized that Jeff had slapped her informant number on drug buys she never made. She was scared to venture out of her house. She felt like all the local dealers were giving her an accusatory stare-down.

  “They think I’m a snitch,” she told Barbara.

  The informant job, at least under Jeff, came with perks. Jeff rewarded Tiffany and his other informants with cartons of cigarettes, prepaid phone minutes, candy bars, and snacks.

  “Here, get your sugar up,” he’d say, tossing Benny a Snickers bar.

  Barbara and I didn’t really think about where Jeff got the stuff. Until we got a phone call from a Center City lawyer.

  16

  OUR STORY ABOUT TIFFANY AND HOW JEFF HAD PAID HER BAIL MONEY UNEARTHED ONE MORE EXAMPLE OF HOW JEFF HAD CROSSED THE LINE. A few days later, a Philadelphia attorney, Todd Henry, called me. Todd told me he represented a fifty-three-year-old Jordanian shop owner named Samir.

  “You know those cops you’re writing about?” Todd asked me. “Well, I have a client whose shop was raided by those cops, and he says they took thous
ands of dollars from him and other stuff like cigarettes,” Todd told me.

  My heart started to race.

  “And you know what, those cops cut all his video surveillance wires. So what do you think? You want to talk to him?”

  Absolutely. “Just tell me when and where,” I said.

  I darted over to Todd’s office later that day. Todd’s receptionist showed me into a conference room and shut the door. “He’ll be with you in a moment.”

  I took out my notebook, tape recorder, and a pen, lining them up on the glossy wood table. The anticipation of an interview, especially one that held so much promise, was one of life’s teeny pleasures, like that first sip of hot coffee in the morning or the gradual dim of lights at the start of a movie.

  Todd came into the room and I shook his hand. I looked behind him, expecting to see Samir.

  “I’m sorry. Samir changed his mind,” Todd said.

  Samir was too scared to talk. He feared retaliation from the cops and didn’t want a story in the paper.

  I walked the nine blocks back to the Daily News office, disheartened and anguished. Maybe if I went to Samir’s house, I could convince him to tell his story. Wait. No. That might wig him out. Might be better to show up at his smoke shop. . . .

  Barbara and I needed to brainstorm. We got something to eat from Gus and Joan, the Greek couple who operated a lunch truck parked outside our office. Barbara got her usual salad—romaine lettuce, tomatoes, egg, cucumbers, mushrooms, grilled chicken, and absolutely no cheese. I almost always ordered a BLT. Back at my desk, I opened a mayo packet with my teeth and squeezed creamy ribbons onto the bread.

  “Wendy, I’m telling you this as your friend, if you don’t eat more green leafy vegetables, you could get cancer,” she said.

  “I don’t like salad. It’s like eating grass.” We’d had this conversation a zillion times.

  As much as we were the same, Barbara and I were different. She was a frugal, coupon-clipping, to-the-penny bookkeeper; I never looked at my pay stubs and only learned how much money was in my checking account when I withdrew cash from an ATM and looked at the receipt. For breakfast, Barbara ate low-fat Greek yogurt, mixed with fresh berries and raw oatmeal; I ate a chocolate chip muffin. When Barbara’s lower back ached, she did core-strengthening exercises; I popped two Aleve. She religiously got an oil change every 3,000 miles; I rarely checked my oil. Barbara obsessed over her throw pillows, which she meticulously arranged on couches and beds in a complex puzzle of patterns and colors; I never bothered to make the bed each morning. I didn’t see the point.

  Barbara stabbed a plastic fork into her salad, and I wiped grease and mayonnaise from the corners of my mouth with a napkin. We sat in silence, chewing. Then Barbara thought of something. “Wendy, what if there are more Samirs out there?” We remembered from combing through search warrants that Jeff’s squad had raided a lot of corner stores. We didn’t think much of it at the time, but now we wondered aloud why this elite narcotics squad had zeroed in on so many mom-and-pop stores.

  The next morning, Barbara and I headed back to the search warrant room to pull every store raid done by Jeff’s squad. We practically jogged to the criminal courthouse, and in a gust of excitement, we flew through the room’s doorway—and then came to an abrupt halt, as if we’d careened into a concrete barrier. Two Inky reporters and an intern, perched on metal chairs, looked up at us. We exchanged polite yet leery hellos. They were methodically sifting through the onionskin-thin warrants. Barbara and I tried to appear unruffled and blasé, but on the inside, we seethed like territorial hornets. This was OUR secret chamber of buried treasures and it was being invaded by a battalion of Inky reporters.

  We had learned about the search warrant room through an attorney source, and for the first few stories about Jeff, Barbara and I had the place to ourselves. Not anymore.

  There sat Andy Maykuth, a former foreign correspondent first dispatched to Nicaragua in 1985 and later sent to forty-eight other countries, mostly war-ravaged and dangerous, including Afghanistan, where he shadowed anti-Taliban forces in bullet-pocked Kabul. As the Inquirer’s correspondent in Africa from 1996 to 2002, Andy covered the blood feud between Ethiopia and Eritrea, genocide in Rwanda, apartheid in South Africa, and famine in Zimbabwe. But Andy was unassuming, not full of himself. I watched him flip through search warrants and wondered if he viewed the self-inflicted bloodlust between Inquirer and Daily News staff as absurd.

  There was Joseph Slobodzian, or Joe Slo, an Inquirer reporter since 1982, who’d covered federal courts in Philadelphia for almost two decades.

  On yet another day, we walked into the room to find Gail Shister, the Inky’s prickly former TV columnist. Gail had written about television for a quarter of a century, or, as she put it, since “God was a boy.” She wasn’t just a columnist; she was an Inky brand with her own link on the Drudge Report, a news website that got 2 million hits a day. Gail prided herself on unearthing celebrity dirt and knowing which TV shows were cued up for the morgue before the actors themselves. When CBS wanted to dump Katie Couric from the Evening News, Gail broke the story. On Gail’s Facebook page, she posted a favorite quote (from Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the saucy daughter of Theodore Roosevelt): “If you haven’t got anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me.”

  Gail knew she could be caustic. She recognized herself in the best-selling novel Good in Bed, written by Inquirer colleague Jennifer Weiner. Though Weiner denied it, Gail suspected that the Gabby character, a sharp-tongued newsroom gossip, was modeled after her.

  In 2007, Gail fell out of favor with Inky editors. They killed her TV column and booted her to the Metro desk. She was bitter about the reassignment, and the last place she wanted to be was the search warrant room.

  Gail’s editor, Rose Ciotta, expected Gail to pull and copy all of Jeff’s search warrants. During a cell-phone call, Rose instructed Gail to use her own money to cover the copying costs—25 cents a page—and the Inquirer would reimburse her.

  “You know how much this is going to cost?” Gail said, heatedly. “I’m not using my lunch money for this.” She looked at us, all pissy, and threw open a hand in a gesture that conveyed, “Can you believe this bitch?”

  Barbara and I smiled, simpatico, and Gail hung up with Rose. “Even if I had a million dollars in cash, I’m not going to use my own money,” she spat. Gail was fifty-six and openly gay. She paired her foul mouth with a truck-stop wardrobe of oversize jeans and flannel shirts and sported a short and choppy hairdo that looked like she cut it herself.

  Rose was a control freak with corkscrew curls that she dyed black using “a hair color called Snow Tire,” an Inky reporter joked. Rose relentlessly rode reporters, but on this battle, she wasn’t going to win. So she sent another reporter, cash in hand, to meet Gail at the courthouse. Gail and Rose were like two stag beetles, horns locked, each battling to flip the other over onto her back. They shared Buffalo roots and an upstate New York twang, but little else. When Jeff Greenfield, a senior political correspondent with CBS News, came to the Inky newsroom to interview Gail for a story, Gail introduced Rose: “This is Rose. Before she worked here, she was a guard at Auschwitz.”

  Barbara and I didn’t know which was funnier—the fact that Gail was bickering with Rose over the search warrants, or that the Inquirer was scrounging up change to make copies, while Barbara and I had cooked up a system to Xerox for free.

  On this day, we were twitchy. We couldn’t let Inky reporters figure out that we had moved past Jeff and Benny and were now focused on bodegas raided by any cop in Jeff’s squad. We pulled out a stack of search warrants, flipped through the pages, and set aside the ones we wanted to copy—facedown. Once they’d been copied, we reshuffled them like blackjack dealers into the stack.

  We tried to hide our joy when we picked up a folder that Inky reporters had just scoured to find warrants they’d copied, lumped together, on top of a neat pile. They were all warrants we’d pulled weeks ago.

  B
ack in the newsroom, Barbara and I spread out the search warrants on a conference table. We were amazed by how many stores Jeff and his squad had raided over a two-year period. Sometimes they hit two stores in one afternoon.

  In six months alone, Jeff’s squad and another squad, which included Jeff’s brother, Richard, raided twenty-two bodegas, boutiques, tobacco shops, and other stores for drug paraphernalia. That number was seven times more than the unit’s ten other squads combined. Those ten squads—made up of more than a hundred officers—had raided only three stores during the same period.

  One of my best sources was a cop assigned to one of those ten other squads. I had met the cop, who we’ll call Ray, in 2007 when I first joined the Daily News and was covering a story about a perv lawyer who got caught naked in a courthouse conference room with a fourteen-year-old girl. My job was to get reaction from people in the courthouse. I was outside a courtroom when I spotted Ray, his back resting against the wall as if he were seated on a comfy recliner instead of a stone bench. I walked by slowly, staring at him as I mulled over whether to approach him about the perv lawyer.

  “Hey, how ya doing?” he asked.

  Ray had a bright smile and a warm, casual way about him. He wore blue jeans and a neatly pressed pin-striped dress shirt. Turned out, Ray was an undercover narcotics cop like Jeff.

  Yeah, he knew the perv lawyer or knew of him, but couldn’t be quoted. The police department had strict rules about giving information or quotes to the news media. Ray could get in big trouble for talking to me.

  I gave Ray my card, and he began to call me with story tips, like a big drug bust done by his squad or a cop who got caught with a racially offensive sticker in his locker. The sticker was a cartoon of a man, half as an officer in uniform and half as a Klansman, with the words BLUE BY DAY—WHITE BY NIGHT.

  Ray was ballsy and almost cavalier about feeding me information. He’d meet me on a street corner near my office and slip me internal police documents. He’d make jokes about the clandestine handoff. “I should be wearing a trench coat and a fedora hat,” he’d say.