Busted

by Wendy Ruderman

  Barbara and I were disturbed and repulsed by the cops’ behavior. Nothing pissed us off more than men in power who preyed on vulnerable women, and on a Friday night in May, Barbara would meet yet another Tolstoy victim.

  25

  BARBARA STOOD IN THE CENTER OF A WEARY BLOCK OF THAYER STREET IN WEST KENSINGTON, WHERE THE ACID OF THE DRUG TRADE HAD EATEN AWAY at its core. A pair of sneakers dangled from a utility wire that sagged from one side of the street to the other, probably a signpost, placed by dealers, to let junkies know that crack was sold here and to mark the block as theirs. Barbara could roll her foot over a drift of litter and find quarter-size drug baggies obscured by sticky soda cans, broken beer bottles, and Chinese takeout menus.

  Tolstoy’s squad had raided at least five homes on this block. Every single one was now boarded, some with plastic tarps covering glassless second-story windows.

  Abandoned homes were a pox on neighborhoods like this. There were some 40,000 vacant homes or lots in Philadelphia, and the drug war nudged that number higher. Under state forfeiture laws, the city district attorney’s office had the power to seize drug homes, which then sat empty for months, even years. Drug addicts weaseled through plywood to make crack dens or shooting galleries. Stray dogs and cats took refuge in basements with dirt floors and rodents burrowed into soggy drywall. Neighbors on either side struggled to keep the scourge at bay.

  Barbara took in the decay around her—slumped roofs on the verge of collapse, crumbled brick facades, rotted wooden porches, and missing front steps. It was around seven on a Friday night, and Barbara, tired and beaten down, called me. I was at my desk, flipping through Tolstoy search warrants in a manila folder marked “cases w/potential.”

  “Wendy, I’m on Thayer, and these houses are boarded,” she said. “I don’t know how we’re going to find these people.”

  “Just come on back. It’s getting dark,” I said.

  For eight weeks now, Barbara and I had been out knocking on doors. Winter had given way to spring, and summer was almost here. Each night, we went home sweaty and dirty. Our clothes and hair reeked of cigarette smoke and household insecticide, and our legs were pocked with flea bites. One night, I tossed my work bag on the stone-tiled porch and a plump cockroach crawled out. I yelped and stomped it to death.

  Barbara wasn’t ready to give up on Thayer Street. “I’m already here. Let me try a couple more neighbors,” she told me.

  Barbara climbed the steps to a rickety and cluttered porch, haphazardly covered in green outdoor carpeting. The man who opened the door was short, with a pencil mustache and ink-black hair, slicked back into curls at the nape of his neck. His name was Angel Castro, and he warmed quickly to Barbara. He vividly recalled the raid at the house next door.

  In a raid led by Tolstoy, the cops stormed into Angel’s neighbors’ house looking for marijuana. Soon after the cops left, a woman emerged; she stood sobbing on her porch.

  “Are you okay?” Angel asked softly from his adjoining porch.

  “No,” she said. Little by little, Angel coaxed details from her. “An officer touched my breasts. . . . He was feeling up on me. . . . He rubbed up on me.”

  Barbara got excited. “Oh, Angel. Do you know her name? Do you know where she lives now? Can you help me? Please, I have to find her.”

  Her name was Dagma Rodriguez, and Angel thought he might be able to trace her whereabouts through friends and relatives. “Let me make some calls,” he said, and Barbara took a seat next to him on the porch. About an hour later, Angel had an address.

  Barbara leaped up and hugged him, then bolted to the car, where she called to tell me, rapid-fire, what Angel had told her. “Can you believe it? I’m telling you, Wendy, we’re going to find this woman.” I gave Barbara directions to Dagma’s house.

  There was no way I was going home until I heard back from Barbara. I sat at my computer and gnawed at the jagged skin around my fingernails. Most everyone had gone home for the weekend, but the light was still on in Michael Days’s office. I ran through the newsroom and breathlessly flew through his door. “Michael! I’m so excited . . .”

  Barbara pulled up at Dagma’s house ten minutes later. Dagma’s cousin cracked open the door and said Dagma wasn’t home; she was out with her fiancé and would be back later that night. Barbara explained why she wanted to talk to Dagma. “Do you mind if I wait for her? I’ll just be out here. In my car.”

  Barbara sat in the dark and thought about Tolstoy. She felt for Dagma and knew what it was like to feel violated. When Barbara was in high school, a boyfriend had tried to force himself on her. She cried no and shoved him away. “You’re cold. You’re just a prude. No one will ever love you,” he sneered.

  Dagma arrived home in an old beat-up Chevy. “A reporter is here to talk to you,” Dagma’s cousin told her as she stepped out of the car. “She wants to know what happened during the raid.”

  Dagma walked slowly toward Barbara, as if in a trance. Barbara thought Dagma was tentative and leery; she wasn’t sure the woman would want to talk about the raid. Then Dagma held out her arms and embraced Barbara. She clutched Barbara tightly for a few long seconds. Dagma stepped back, wiped a tear from her cheek, and said something that Barbara would never forget: “I’ve been praying for this day.”

  Dagma recounted the dinnertime raid. It was a tale that would make Barbara despise Tolstoy.

  Dagma’s fiancé, Armando, was cooking rice and beans and frying chicken drumsticks on the stove when Tolstoy and eight other cops slammed open the front door. “What are you doing—killing cats?” one cop said.

  When a cop, whom Dagma would later identify as Jeff, saw the family’s pit bull, Goldie, he yelled, “Get the fucking dog out of here before I shoot it.”

  The cops flipped over the futon couch, ripped a closet door off its metal hinges, and tossed clothes, CDs, everything they had, on the floor. “Where’s the fucking gun? Where’s the fucking drugs!”

  Tolstoy almost immediately spied Dagma, who stood in the living room wearing a lime-green nightgown over a pair of gray sweatpants. He cornered her: “Do you have any tattoos? Let’s talk.”

  Dagma’s three kids—ages fifteen, nine, and eight—were outside on a porch of splintered wood planks. The cops had threatened to board her house, take her kids, and throw her out in the street.

  Tolstoy led her upstairs. He told her everything would be all right. He just wanted to talk. Dagma inched away from the beefy cop. They were alone in a back bedroom. The room was dark, cavelike, with just a glint of light from a shattered windowpane.

  She placed one foot behind her, then the other, and pressed her back against the faded blue wall. Her palms, slick with sweat, fluttered against the cracked plaster. He moved closer. She felt his breath on her face.

  “You know you got some big tits,” he said. “What size are you? Can I touch them?”

  “Please, please, no,” she whimpered.

  Tolstoy stood cocksure, his bay window of a belly thrust out. She saw a rabid look in his brown eyes.

  “Can you show them to me?”

  “No. No.”

  The thirty-three-year-old woman began to cry, tears streaking her smooth brown face framed by coils of long dreadlocks. She folded her hands and clasped them over her breasts. Her heart felt jammed in her throat, choking her. She feared she’d vomit.

  “Don’t cry. Shhh. Sshhh. Shut up. Be quiet.”

  She fell to her knees.

  “Get up.”

  “I’m nervous, and I got heart problems. I need my heart pills,” she said.

  “C’mon. Get up. Get up!” He yanked her up by the elbows and pinned her against the wall.

  Oh my God, he’s gonna rape me, she thought.

  He plunged his hands into the top of her nightgown. His thick fingers slithered under her beige bra. He rubbed her nipples, thumbs moving in circles.

  She grabbed his wrists, her hands trembling, and cried louder.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Tolstoy yelled.


  Now, as he forcefully groped her breasts, she had no way to escape.

  “I’m scared. I’m so scared,” she told him.

  “You don’t have to be scared. Scared of what?”

  Downstairs, the other narcotics cops noticed he was missing. They knew the deal.

  A cop, whom Dagma described as tall and handsome with blue eyes, came halfway up the steps. “Is everything all right?” he called out.

  Tolstoy took his hands from Dagma’s breasts.

  “Yeah. Everything’s all right. We’re about done here.”

  He stepped back, a smirk on his face. She slid down the wall and crumpled to the floor, wheezing and gulping.

  Tolstoy paused in the doorway and looked back at her.

  “Take your shit pills.”

  26

  DAGMA’S STORY WAS UNIMPEACHABLE. FOR STARTERS, SHE’D TOLD HER FIANCÉ WHAT TOLSTOY DID TO HER DURING A PHONE CALL TO THE JAIL, where Armando was locked up after the cops found three marijuana joints in his pockets and a rusty, unloaded hunting rifle inside the Thayer Street house.

  “I went off. I was in jail, and there was nothing I could do but punch the walls. All I could think of was that he could go back and do something more,” Armando told us.

  Next, there was Angel, who consoled Dagma as she cried on the porch.

  Lastly, on the night of the raid, Dagma went to the nearest police district. She was hysterical and shaken. “I’m here to make a complaint against this cop who came to my house.” An officer who spoke Spanish took a statement.

  An internal affairs investigator later came to Dagma’s house. He wanted to bag her nightgown, bra, and sweatpants as evidence, but Angel advised her not to turn over the clothes. Angel thought it unwise for her to part with the only physical evidence she had. Angel and Dagma’s guardedness was symptomatic of a pervasive lack of trust between the community and police. Of course, the police department didn’t help mend the rift.

  Internal affairs showed Dagma a photo array of some eighty cops. The photos were headshots of uniformed cops. Most dated back years, likely taken when they first joined the force, and Dagma didn’t recognize Tolstoy among all those baby-faced cops. “I felt like they were hiding him,” Dagma said.

  Tolstoy had assaulted Lady four months earlier. But unlike Dagma, Lady didn’t file a police complaint immediately after the raid; she went to internal affairs after Barbara and I knocked on her door. Dagma’s single complaint, coupled with an inability to identify her attacker, wasn’t enough for internal affairs to restrict Tolstoy to a desk.

  That all changed on October 16, 2008, when internal affairs yanked Tolstoy off the street. In the six months between Dagma’s complaint and October 16, Tolstoy did something that got him red-flagged.

  Police sources told us that Tolstoy had engaged in “sexual misconduct,” and Barbara and I were almost positive that the incident was connected to the woman Benny had told us about, the woman who’d been fisted.

  Benny thought the assault had happened near Torresdale and Orthodox Streets. Barbara and I pulled out a map, zeroed in on the intersection, and pressed “enlarge” on the Xerox machine, tapping the button until it reached 150 percent. We printed out two copies on eleven-by-seventeen paper and drew a fifteen-square-block radius in yellow highlighter. We circled the intersection with a navy blue Sharpie. We left the office with folders crammed with search warrants for raids on homes within the area’s zip code—19124.

  We went together; of course Barbara drove. Karl had bought me a GPS for Mother’s Day, but Barbara, who sometimes got lost while jogging around her own neighborhood, still managed to get all turned around. “Recalculating route,” the GPS girl crooned in a calm, robotic voice. We heard her voice so often that we gave her a name—Henrietta. I wanted to throw the thing out the window.

  Torresdale and Orthodox was a wide intersection with bus lanes. There was a pizza shop on one corner and a bodega across the street, next to an appliance store, where each morning the employees dragged used washers and dryers and fridges and stoves out onto the sidewalk, lining them up at curb’s edge. There were several car-repair shops and a seedy gentlemen’s lounge.

  We split up the search warrants and fanned out on foot. In between knocking on doors, we ran down every woman we saw on the street. We ambushed them as they stepped off the bus, emerged from a shop, or ambled along the sidewalk, some with kids in strollers. We asked them if a cop had ever touched them inappropriately, and we were surprised by the number of women who, without hesitation, started off, “Oh yeah. There was this time when . . .”

  They recounted chilling stories about a vice squad cop or district cop, or a cop who didn’t fit Tolstoy’s description. They’d say his name was John or Bill. Some said they’d never been sexually assaulted, but they had a friend or an acquaintance . . .

  We had so many tips that Barbara and I didn’t know which ones to chase. Some led us miles outside of the 19124 zip code. Because the women weren’t sure whether the victim they knew had been “fisted” by a cop, we thought we had to find out—so we could at the very least rule her out. We even asked the women who had supplied the tips to drive around with us while they scanned the streets for the victim they described.

  One description was of a white woman with blond, dirty blond, or mousy brown hair and a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder—or maybe her wrist. Barbara and I chased tattooed women down the street, trying to get a closer look.

  We began to question whether the incident was even connected to a raid. What if Tolstoy had assaulted this woman somewhere out on the streets? Maybe she was a prostitute. Torresdale and Orthodox was a short 2.3-mile drive from the ground zero of lost souls, an area known as K&A—short for Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, where blow jobs went for $20 and full-on sex in a car or alley was just $10 more.

  We spent hours talking to drug-addicted prostitutes with rotten teeth and scabbed faces and arms, the result of obsessively picking at their skin while high on crack. They wobbled around on rail-thin legs, wearing rhinestone-studded stilettos and miniskirts or worn-out Chuck Taylors and low-rise jeans. All had glazed eyes and vacant expressions.

  “Are you ladies from the church?” a waiflike woman came up and asked us. Candace had an angelic face—catlike blue eyes, high cheekbones, and dirty blond hair pulled up in a ponytail. She was almost twenty-eight, though she looked no more than twenty. She was drug-worn but beautiful. In her fist, she clutched a wad of bills. She told us she desperately wanted to get clean; she wanted to be able to care for her four-year-old son. I gave her my card. A cop arrested Candace for drug possession a few days later, and she wrote me a letter from jail. “Ms. Ruderman, I honestly need help once returning home. My mom reminds me her home is not my home, due to my addiction . . . I do not want to repeat that lifestyle of drugs and prostitution. I write to you with hope of direction. I therefore have no one else to turn to.” She included a postscript, “PS, one day maybe you can write a story of my success.”

  I wrote her back and contacted a social worker who met with Candace in jail. Four days after Candace got released, and two months after we met her, Candace was dead of an overdose. It was heartbreaking.

  Barbara and I grew frustrated, yet not discouraged. We decided to track down pimps, thinking it would be an easier and more efficient method to find a hooker who’d been victimized. We guessed that a prostitute might confide in her pimp.

  A lot of the pimps we met didn’t fit the stereotype. One was toothless and frail, in his sixties, and suffering from diabetes-related foot ulcers; another was a former hooker turned mother hen in her fifties. She had large, saggy breasts and wiry, broomlike gray hair.

  She suggested we find a pimp named Omar, who had a stable of hookers, but she warned us that he was violent, possibly dangerous, known to smack his girls around.

  I took one side of Kensington Avenue; Barbara took the other. The El trains whistled and click-clacked overhead. Barbara found one of Omar’s hookers outside a mini-mart. The
girl was skittish and her eyes shifted around in the sockets, chameleon-like. She gestured with her head toward me. “See that short little woman with the glasses . . .”

  I was on the other side of the street, talking to a black man wearing a white knit skullcap, even though the temperature was pushing eighty. He sat on a concrete step, his back against a reddish brown door.

  “Hi, I’m looking for Omar,” I said. “Do you know him?”

  “Yeah, I know him.”

  He was friendly, a bit of a jokester, and we started to chitchat. Somehow we got on the subject of our favorite movies. We both liked films about police corruption, like Serpico. Laughing, I handed him my card and asked him to pass it on to Omar.

  Barbara rushed toward me, crossing the street against the light. “What did he say?”

  I was puzzled by her excitement. “He said he’d tell Omar we were lookin’ for him.”

  “Wendy. That was Omar. You were talking to Omar.”

  I looked back, and he was gone. He’d slipped behind the reddish door. We knocked, and no one answered. I tugged on the handle, but the door was locked.

  I got home, and Karl was watching a home-remodeling show on the DIY Network. My escape was work; his was fantasizing about projects that never got done. He was adorable, with those damn Bambi eyes and heart-shaped lips that broke into a gigantic smile. I leaned in and kissed him.

  “How was work?”

  “I spent all day looking for a pimp named Omar.”

  Karl put his hand up. “Please, I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me.”

  Barbara and I could do crazy. We understood crazy.

  We both came from zany Jewish families that instilled a strong, often obsessive and neurotic work ethic. Karl summed up the Ruderman motto as “Work till you drop, then go out to a restaurant.” I was surprised Karl, who came from a reserved Catholic family, married me.

  A few months before our wedding, Karl went with my family on a trip to Martha’s Vineyard. It was my mom’s idea to go to a bathing-suit-optional beach. She stripped naked, wearing only sneakers and white tube socks, and slathered sunscreen all over her body. Karl averted his eyes. “Take a good look,” she told Karl. “See these raisin boobs—this is what Wendy will look like in thirty years.”