Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts

by Mark Bowden

  “And you don’t insult him, because you know when he gets back up, he can hurt you.”

  Everybody called George Woods “Georgie” or “Woodsie.” He was round. He had grown fat serving the people of Philadelphia, but, at thirty-nine, Georgie was still dapper and had a sometimes comic flair. His face, like his body, seemed as wide as it was long. His round cheeks and double chin framed small features: a nose fitted close to his face, small eyes, small mouth. Georgie had a rakish dimple in the middle of his chin, and a trim moustache on either side of the wide dip at the middle of his upper lip. He combed his thick brown hair back into what would have been a ducktail if it were long enough in the back.

  Georgie knew the streets of Philadelphia. He had grown up on them, and had spent most of his fourteen years in the police department patrolling them in uniform. He had faced scrapes. In 1971, patrolling up in the Northeast, he had stopped to shoo two boys who were loitering in a shopping center at Red Lion Road. In the argument that ensued, one of the boys tore a radio antenna from a car and beat Woods severely with it until the patrolman managed to draw his revolver and shoot him in the thigh. Five years later, in the Woodhaven Apartments in the Northeast, Woods and his partner coolly confronted and then shot to death a man with a shotgun who had taken a hostage aboard an old bus. Woods was a tough cop, but a likable guy who could see humor in even a bad situation. He had been transferred to the central police division as a vice detective exactly one year before 1245 Vine Street opened for business, so he knew his way around the neighborhood. He saw himself as a kind of pavement philosopher, a cop who was nevertheless one of the street people his job required him to police. He would say things like “What was said to me, was said to me,” with a wink intended to convey exactly what that meant, though others weren’t always sure.

  It is not surprising for a kind of conspiratorial camaraderie to develop between vice detectives and the pimps, prostitutes, numbers runners, and two-bit bar owner/gambling impresarios they are supposed to harass. Often a guy like Georgie Woods has more in common with the common folks than with the stern office faces at headquarters demanding a certain number of busts—enough to match last year’s totals, but, for God’s sake, not too many, we don’t want to be settin’ precedents here, Woodsie. Prudes and heavies don’t get assigned to vice; they couldn’t stomach it. To know what’s going on in the whorehouses and bars means mingling in the whorehouses and bars, and, face it, not all of these people are altogether bad. There are cops in Philadelphia who remember the neighborhood numbers man as maybe the one person on the block who would lend their family money for groceries when things got tight. And cops are human, too. Prostitutes make it their business to be alluring, and pornography does have its appeal. You get friendly with a bar owner, and…What? You gonna bust him for paying off a handful of quarters when somebody wins a hand on the video poker machine?

  Georgie Woods inhabited a dark and often tempting world. People were making big money peddling flesh and porn. The district attorney wasn’t prosecuting it. That, from where Georgie stood, looked like a tacit endorsement, or at least an admission that there was no getting rid of it anyway. So the only control the city exercised over vice was the threat of arrest. This made Georgie Woods a kind of power in the Center City sleaze districts. He could pick whom to bust and when. If you were on his good side, maybe most weeks he would look the other way.

  And Georgie was modestly ambitious. He had a wife and kids at home, and his youth was plumping quickly to middle age. Slipping Georgie a regular portion of the ill-gotten gains was one surefire way of staying on his good side. And Georgie, who could hurt you, could also be real pleasant.

  In March of ’81, Philadelphia was thawing out of an exceptionally cold, white winter. More than the weather had been bleak. Ronald Reagan was slashing federal funds for social service and employment programs vital to big Northeastern cities. Philadelphia’s transit workers were preparing to walk off the job. Even the anticipated return of the world champion Phillies was clouded by an imminent ballplayers’ strike. At JFK International Airport in New York, police apprehended an unemployed South Philadelphia longshoreman named Joey Coyle. Coyle had a one-way ticket to Acapulco and $165,000 stuffed in his new cowboy boots. Police had been searching for him for weeks, ever since two million-dollar money bags had dropped out of the back of an armored car and into Coyle’s lap. For a few weeks, fugitive Coyle’s stupendous luck and daring flight had captured the collective imagination of a struggling town.

  The whorehouse at 1245 Vine was in its first months of operation, and business was good. Cinnamon ran the place strictly. Each prostitute paid for a weekly medical checkup to ensure against venereal disease. She kept six women working eight-hour shifts. Each whore paid $25 per shift. Customers paid the house $25 for a photo session. Whatever else was exchanged in the back rooms was between them. On a good night, Hersing would pick up $700. Even on slow nights, the total was rarely less than $400. Out of that came upkeep, rent, a $150 weekly salary for Cinnamon, and money to repay Robertshaw’s initial investment.

  What was left over was enough to prompt Hersing and Robertshaw and a few other partners to invest even more heavily in vice. They opened a smaller whorehouse “modeling studio” at 2209 Walnut Street, and started a private club called the Morning Glory on Vine Street, two blocks west of the place Cinnamon ran. With three operations to oversee, Hersing spent a lot of time in Philadelphia. He often took a room overnight in the Holiday Inn at Fourth and Arch Streets.

  His Walnut Street studio was like a discount version of 1245 Vine Street. Up a quick flight of stairs from the sidewalk, it had a cramped waiting room with two chairs and a magazine rack stuffed with well-thumbed back issues of Hustler and Sports Illustrated. Doors to the session rooms were just two arm-lengths from the chairs. The manager sat behind a small desk in a closet-sized room to the right, directing traffic like the receptionist in a dentist’s office.

  The Morning Glory was in a two-story rowhouse of orange brick that was boarded up in front with plain brown panels, notable to the eye only because it bore along its western edge a long hand-lettered vertical sign, an anachronism, advertising “Rizzo for Mayor.” It was sandwiched between a delicatessen named The Bonanza on the corner and a bar named Doc Watson’s. The club got around having to acquire a liquor license by admitting only members, who consisted mostly of Inquirer and Daily News printers and truckers whose odd shifts brought them in and out from late afternoon until the blue hours of morning.

  The club caught on quickly. It was quite a bacchanal. Patients in beds at Hahnemann Hospital, which towered over the south side of Vine on that block, could look down from their windows and see a steady parade of men in work clothes going in and out of the building with the plain brown door and the big “Rizzo for Mayor” sign on top. Although the activities in the building had nothing to do with the former mayor, there was enough traffic in and out to spark rumors that Rizzo was plotting a comeback. Inside, the club’s video poker machine offered more than a free game for a winning hand. On a small stage, some of the girls from Cinnamon’s stable performed hugely successful acts of indecent entertainment. One of the Inquirer truckers, a stocky fellow with curly hair and a great bull belly, had even become a regular part of the show. Each night, naked, he would take turns whipping and being whipped by the female performers. He would soothe his welts in the whirlpool bath at the Philadelphia Athletic Club a block away, where he had become infamous as “the porno king,” and then bounce back for more every night. The Morning Glory had a special arrangement with uniformed central division police, Hersing says. It was paying $75 per week to be allowed to keep serving after the 3 a.m. curfew for selling alcoholic beverages.

  And there was still Georgie. By the time Hersing met Woods in April for the second payoff, he had to discuss buying protection for two whorehouses. They met on the littered sidewalk in front of the old Broadwood Hotel building on Broad Street. Hersing paid Woods $500 as they walked around the block.
They would give the Walnut Street brothel a month or two to get on its feet.

  During April they had a Dial-a-Bust. It worked like a charm, but it was more costly than Woods had explained. Woods said he needed $75 “grease” money to speed the prostitute through booking—$25 for the sergeant and $50 for a judge’s assistant. Then there were $300 in attorneys’ fees to get the charges dismissed. Hersing even had to pay a $100 bonus to get a whore to volunteer for the fall! Then, in May, Woods set $300 a month as the price for protecting 2209 Walnut Street. The first payment for that whorehouse would come due in June.

  Hersing didn’t like it. He was supposed to be running this business, but it felt as if the business—the whores and now the cops—were running him. As the weeks went by, he went from feeling put upon to feeling pinched. Woods was bruising his pride at the same time he was picking his pocket. It wasn’t enough that the detective kept upping the ante; he was also making life difficult with his Dial-a-Busts. It was insulting. Deep inside, Donald Hersing, international law enforcement expert, was seething.

  “I just couldn’t believe that they were so open about it!” says Hersing.

  “The way they squeezed ya! It pissed me off twice as much. We were paying right and left, and they were still harassing us with busts. Cinnamon didn’t like it. At one point when they called up demanding a girl for a sacrifice, because Woodsie needed a bust that night, Cinnamon just closed the place up and ran away! All the girls beat it out the back door. Who likes getting arrested, man? You got to sit around down at the station house all night. You lose money. Aletia, the Spanish girl they arrested one night, they wanted to take her out drinking first. She said, ‘Hey, man, I got to make some money! Take me to the jail and get me out! I gotta get back to work!’”

  So after making only the first two payoffs, Hersing called an old FBI contact in Bucks County, Chick Sabinson, and told him what was going on. Sabinson referred him to the Philadelphia FBI office, where Hersing was identified as “a longtime Bucks County informant.” He was assigned to two young agents who happened to be available, Mike Thompson and Andy Lash.

  Thompson is a friendly, loquacious former Air Force pilot who has preserved intact his honey-sweet, down-home North Carolina accent. He is solidly built with a tawny complexion and dark hair. The brown eyes under his thick eyebrows betray a lively sense of fun. Lash, who joined the FBI right out of college, is the more soft-spoken of the two. Where Thompson is puckish, Lash is pensive. Where Thompson is dark and solid, Lash is pale and slight. They are friends, and their personalities balance nicely. Lash is from Seattle. When they met Donald Hersing, Thompson was thirty-four years old. Lash was only twenty-eight. Neither man had been assigned to Philadelphia for two full years.

  They met Hersing for the first time on May 4, 1981. Their first impression of him was lousy; he was definitely not the sort of man they would invite home to dinner. But when they came to know him better, they were surprised by certain things. They were surprised by the extent of his past work and associations—he didn’t seem all that sophisticated, but he knew a lot. And despite his lifestyle and associations, they were surprised to find that Hersing was also a loving family man. Hersing had settled down with a warm and friendly woman who would soon become his second wife. She had two small children from an earlier marriage whom Hersing treated as his own. They maintained, at least on the surface, a normal suburban existence: two cars in the garage and a small boat docked at the Jersey Shore. When the agents met Hersing’s son from his first marriage, now college-age, they were impressed: “Obviously a boy who cared for his father, and who was well brought up,” Thompson says.

  During the two years they worked with Hersing, Thompson and Lash found out a lot of contradictory things about their informant. He could be maddeningly unreliable, untrustworthy, boastful, and stubborn, but he had a real talent for playing his undercover role and an extraordinarily precise memory. What’s more, they liked him. And he was damned effective.

  At their first meeting, however, this chain-smoking operator struck them as odd and unsavory. The story he told sounded typical. Their office already had information that Philadelphia police were extorting money from gay bars in the city. And there was a much more promising investigation soon to begin concerning information that certain police were taking money to allow petty gambling with video poker machines in city bars. Hersing’s case sounded to Thompson and Lash like an isolated instance, a maverick vice officer lining his pockets in a not-particularly-novel sort of way. And they were curious about Hersing’s motives. It didn’t make sense. The man seemed to be profiting from the arrangement he had with this Georgie Woods. Why was he offering to trap him?

  Hersing wasted no time in explaining his law enforcement credentials to Thompson and Lash. “Right from the start, he was sure he knew how to conduct this investigation better than we did,” Thompson says, chuckling at a memory that is comical only in retrospect. Hersing seemed eager to get started, which was unusual. The agents were more used to leaning on a source, coercing cooperation. “We had nothing to force him to help us,” says Thompson. “He came to us on his own. It was obvious that Don liked doing these sorts of things. He liked tape-recording people. He liked being part of an investigation. We took him at his word. He said he hated dirty cops. Whatever his reasoning was, as far as we were concerned he was a private citizen who was willing to help. And that was good enough for us.”

  So the agents got permission from their headquarters and from the U.S. attorney’s office to employ Hersing as an informant and to place a tape recorder on his telephone.

  It was the beginning of what would become one of the biggest police corruption scandals in any city’s history. Two years later, twenty-three Philadelphia police officers, including the second-highest-ranking member of the force, would be under indictment. Some of the toughest and most popular officers in the department would be in jail. The FBI would be opening doors that led down dark, greedy corridors of police power. They would uncover corruption so deeply rooted that it could only have evolved over decades, perhaps even generations. They would discover that many city police officers considered it their due to receive payoffs from petty criminals, that they regarded such money as the rightful spoils of the arrest powers they wielded on city streets.

  It was a system ripe for scandal. And it was about to be cut down because of one proud, unsavory man, a seedy bar and brothel owner, who—for his own reasons—got fed up.

  Don Hersing contacted someone else on or around May 4. After what he felt was the double-cross he got from the FBI on his smuggling charge (he had pleaded no contest in January and, in April, had been sentenced to three years’ probation) Hersing was taking no chances.

  When he had worked with Bristol Township police chief John Tegzes, Hersing got to know a reporter for the Trenton Times named Stryker Meyer. Meyer was in his early thirties, a blue-eyed man with a boyish mop of brown hair who went by the nickname “Tilt.” A Vietnam veteran, Tilt Meyer had been around a bit more than most reporters his age. He was the kind of reporter cops liked, not the effete college-boy type who usually wrote them up. Meyer had a hardbitten, cynical quality. He considered information wrong until proven otherwise. Hersing liked him. Meyer seemed like just the sort of guy whom Hersing might want to have write down some of his exploits someday.

  On a cold evening that month, Hersing was sitting in a car with Meyer outside Bristol Township police headquarters. Meyer was pumping Hersing for details about Cinnamon and the township cop she had tape-recorded. Suddenly Hersing said, “You want to hear a real story?”

  Meyer said yes, and Hersing started telling him about the work he had begun in Philadelphia.

  “I work for the Trenton Times,” Meyer told Hersing. “I couldn’t care less about a police corruption investigation in Philadelphia.”

  But the more Meyer insisted that he didn’t care to know, the more Hersing seemed intent on telling him the story.

  “He was worried the FBI wasn’t going to pa
y him, or that they would just drop the investigation and leave him hanging,” Meyer says. “He was worried he was going to be caught and killed. I told him if he was really afraid for his life, then he ought to have someone completely outside the government who knew what was going on. The original idea was that I would write a story about the Philadelphia thing only if something went wrong. At least that way he wouldn’t just vanish one day without anyone suspecting what happened. I even promised I would go to Washington with the guy and stand by him, if it came to that.”

  FBI Tape #1:

  “This is Special Agent Michael W. Thompson. The date is June 1, 1981. The time is 11:47 a.m. I have placed a recording device on telephone number 923-8660, extension 7527, located in room 527, Holiday Inn, Fourth and Arch Streets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for the purpose of monitoring calls between PH 721-OC [an FBI code number identifying Hersing] and Detective George Woods of the Philadelphia Police Department.”

  The phone rings.

  “Central police division, Officer Pezzano.”

  “Is George Woods there?” Hersing asks.

  “George Woods? Yes. He’s here. Hold on.”

  “Thank you.”

  Woods’s voice comes on. “Hello. Can I help you?”

  “Georgie!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Roger.” Hersing gives Woods the code name they used.

  “How are you?”

  “How are you, Georgie?”