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

by Mark Bowden

  At the table, Hersing said, Smith told him he was behind four months of payments. That would mean that he owed $2,000. But again, Hersing said, Smith explained that it would be pointless to make any payments until an arrangement was worked out with the morals squad.

  So Smith met Hersing at the Parkway Room again on April 1. It was at that meeting that Hersing was told a deal had been made with the morals squad. He would have to pay the $2,000 in arrears, and the new arrangement would be $500 monthly for the vice squad, another $500 monthly for the morals squad, and $300 monthly, on top of all that, for Hersing’s after-hours club, the Morning Glory. The payoffs would fall due the 15th of each month.

  The lieutenant was in a friendly mood—friendlier, in fact, than he had ever been. The agents watching the two men in the Parkway Room stayed for several hours. Hersing was ordering drinks for himself and Smith, and they were obviously loosening up. They seemed to be having a good time. So, finally, the agents left.

  According to Hersing, he and the lieutenant eventually left the Parkway Room and went to the Morning Glory, where they stayed until early the next morning. Just before dawn, Hersing drove Smith back to his car at division headquarters. Then Hersing drove home to Levittown.

  A few days later, Hersing got his instructions for making the arrears payoff. He was told to leave the money under a napkin at the Parkway Room on April 6. So he drove over that afternoon, ordered a cup of coffee, and slipped an envelope with $2,000 in it under a napkin. Then he left. After he had gone, Gene Console picked up the napkin with the envelope in it. He put it on the kitchen counter. When DeBenedetto and Smith came in, he retrieved it and put it on their table. Donald Hersing was back in business with the Philadelphia police.

  After the night they went out drinking together, Smith became more friendly with Hersing. The informant secretly despised Smith, but he played along. Even when he was on the lieutenant’s good side, Smith could be insulting and abusive. It was a bizarre relationship, wary on one side, entirely bogus on the other.

  But with whatever easing of tension this newfound camaraderie brought, Smith finally felt relaxed enough to come upstairs in the apartment at 707-A South St. Two weeks after Hersing had dropped off the $2,000 at the Parkway Room, the lieutenant stopped by to pick up the regular $1,300 monthly payment for April. Thompson and Lash watched the TV monitor downstairs with delight as Hersing handed over the money and the lieutenant counted it out. This, coupled with the Parkway Room recording of DeBenedetto, was what prosecutors liked to call “incontrovertible evidence.” Hersing and the lieutenant chatted on for about twenty minutes. Then Smith announced that he had to get going. It was late in the afternoon.

  “So you’re not allowed to go out with me anymore?” Hersing asked.

  “Afraid so,” Smith said. The inspector wasn’t happy about his lieutenant’s night on the town. He had told Smith that he shouldn’t be seen out drinking with Hersing.

  So Smith left. Thompson and Lash rewound the videotape and returned it to the safe at FBI headquarters in the courthouse on Market Street. Several days later, after prosecutors had seen the agents’ official written account of the meeting, the U.S. attorney’s office asked to see the recording. Thompson and Lash got out the tape, walked across the building to the prosecutors’ office, set it into a videotape recorder, and sat back to watch.

  In a moment the picture came on, but there was no sound! For some reason, the videotape had no sound for the first nineteen minutes, during the most crucial portion of the meeting. The agents had had a backup tape recorder in the closet, but they had never turned it on. Hearing the conversation through their earphones, they had assumed that the audio equipment was picking it up, too. It was a great disappointment.

  So they set up anxiously again a week later, when Smith came back to the apartment to pick up $1,300, this for the month of June. Again he came upstairs. Hersing gave him a beer, and the lieutenant tipped him that state liquor board agents were investigating the Morning Glory. Then, when Hersing handed over the envelope with “Insurance” written on it, Smith did something that flabbergasted the agents in the closet downstairs, something that even made up for the foul-up during the previous meeting. The man who had been so coy for months about even entering the apartment suddenly offered to spell things out for the informant (and, eventually, a jury) explicitly.

  “You know how this is broke down?” Smith asked Hersing.

  “No.”

  “That’s three for the club.”

  “Right.”

  “Which is what everybody pays.”

  “Oh yeah, you told me, go ahead.”

  “Okay? A nickel for us and a nickel for the other squad.”

  The lieutenant went on to explain that the vice squad had an advantage over the morals squad because the latter normally was busy following up on complaints. The vice squad had more latitude with its power.

  “We can go out and pinch anybody, anytime we want,” Smith said.

  “We don’t need no fucking paper. Just because I want to, right?”

  This brief explanation confirmed not only that Smith knew what he was doing, and what the money was for, but that Hersing’s payoffs were part of a larger pattern. The FBI couldn’t have gotten more if they had injected Smith with sodium pentathol.

  This time the agents didn’t wait a day before replaying the videotape to make sure that it worked. It was all there this time, sound and video. Right there in black and white.

  After that meeting, the FBI was through with Smith and DeBenedetto and their helpers. Hersing’s contacts had spread, opening up new, wider avenues to probe. Agents were following these new leads into a widespread system of police payoffs involving video poker machine gambling in city bars. An investigation into police extortion at gay bars had led another team of FBI agents to John DeBenedetto.

  So it came as no disappointment, though it was a surprise, when the central police division decided on its own to stop doing business with Donald Hersing.

  On July 27, Hersing called Smith to arrange a meeting. Smith came to the phone and said he would stop by 707-A South Street that afternoon.

  He stopped by about 8 p.m. This time, as in the past, he had Molloy with him and he refused to step inside. Hersing walked outside with him.

  “Look, we don’t do no more business with you,” he said, according to Hersing. “This is it. No hard feelings. Forget it.”

  And that was it. For whatever reason, the police officers had shut the door on Hersing for good. Thompson and Lash figured that they probably just got tired of dealing with someone they considered unreliable. Either that or word had gotten back to DeBenedetto and Smith about some of the undercover work Hersing had done in the past. He had, after all, worked with the FBI in Bucks County investigating police corruption. There was also the fact that, during the May 26 meeting, Hersing had told Smith about an electronic device that could be used to tell whether a phone was tapped. He had gone on and on, revealing a familiarity with electronic snooping devices that may have alarmed the lieutenant, who tended to be an extremely cautious man anyway. Whatever.

  “We don’t know,” Thompson says, “and Smith and DeBenedetto aren’t talking.”

  It didn’t matter. The inspector had closed the door too late.

  It was time to tell the commissioner. By September 1982, the FBI was thirteen months along in its probe of corruption in the Philadelphia Police Department. At least seven of Police Commissioner Morton Solomon’s men, including the commander of the city’s central police division, were certain to be indicted. John Hogan, the special agent in charge of the Philadelphia FBI office, felt it was time that his friend Solomon got the bad news.

  It was a task rued by the tall, gray FBI man. But despite concerns for secrecy expressed by William B. Lytton, the assistant U.S. attorney who was preparing the cases for prosecution, Hogan wanted to let Solomon know. His office depended heavily on the city police. The two law enforcement organizations worked together every day. Ho
gan and Solomon were professional and social friends. News that Hogan’s agents had uncovered a major scandal on the city force would disturb and embarrass his friend.

  Hogan himself found it disturbing. He didn’t like investigating cops. He had been a cop all his life, and knew what a hard and sometimes thankless job it could be. But for the same reason that the news he bore saddened him, it also sickened him. Corruption like the large-scale graft that his men had discovered in the Philadelphia Police Department tainted everyone in law enforcement. He wasn’t about to shy away from what had to be done.

  So on September 30 Hogan phoned the commissioner’s office and set up a meeting for that afternoon. Such sessions were not uncommon. Hogan and his associates often walked the few blocks north from their offices to the Police Administration Building, better known as the Roundhouse, a modern, curved concrete structure at Eighth and Race Streets. Hogan preferred discussing sensitive matters face-to-face, and in his line of work, most matters were sensitive. At about 1 p.m. Hogan and John Anderson, a younger man with broad shoulders and dark hair who had been supervising the agents conducting the probe, strode across the Roundhouse’s front plaza, past the giant statue of a cop holding a small boy, and checked in with the receptionist. They were given visitors’ badges. Then they took an elevator up three floors to Solomon’s office.

  The commissioner, a portly man with thin white hair, was seated behind his big desk just inside a set of wide double doors. He waved the FBI men in. Solomon had a spacious, green-carpeted chamber of an office. The windows just behind him looked out over Race Street. On the sill was a replica, almost four feet tall, of the statue outside. On the left was an arrangement of chairs and a table for more informal talks, and beyond that was a door that opened onto a conference room. Hogan and Anderson took two chairs, swung them over to the front of Solomon’s desk, and sat.

  Hogan came right to the point. Their whole conversation lasted only about a half hour. He and Anderson told the commissioner that the FBI had been investigating corruption in his police department, and explained that they were not going to be able to give him many details. Solomon listened gravely. He said he understood. They outlined the general nature of the evidence that their agents had assembled.

  “The commissioner showed no real outward emotion as we talked,” Hogan says. “I think he may have been surprised that our office had been investigating his department…. Commissioner Solomon had been a member of that department for many years. He was a reform-minded commissioner appointed by a reform mayor [William J. Green]. We got the impression that it was a problem he had long been concerned about, just as there are things that worry the commander of any large organization. I can’t emphasize enough how completely cooperative Commissioner Solomon was. He said he would help us in any way he could. What were his exact words? He said something like ‘If you can root out only one of the corrupt officers on this force, we would be grateful.’ That was how strongly he put it.”

  Hogan explained that there was a lot of work yet to be done. Solomon said he understood the need for secrecy. He told the FBI men again, as they were leaving, that he would cooperate in any way he could.

  What the FBI did not know was that someone else was privy to the secret details of its case.

  In 1981, when Hersing had first approached the Bureau, he had also begun telling the same story to his friend Tilt Meyer, the Trenton Times reporter. The arrangement was that Meyer would not write the story unless something happened to Hersing, or until the undercover operation was completed.

  But by the fall of 1982, Meyer and his editors were not just interested in the Philadelphia corruption story, they were impatient to print it. The reporter had been hearing about this big-time police corruption probe in Philadelphia for more than a year. Through all those months, Hersing had talked with him often. Sometimes they met. Mostly, Meyer would get phone calls at all hours of the day and night. Hersing was usually eager to fill him in on the latest. Sometimes he was full of bluster and brag. Sometimes he was angry. Sometimes Hersing went on and on complaining about the FBI; about how the Bureau couldn’t be trusted and how it was nickeling-and-diming him and his wife. Sometimes Meyer could see that Hersing was genuinely shaken and fearful. He would listen, ask a few questions, take notes. It was a shame this probe wasn’t under way in Trenton, his home turf. Then Meyer would have a scoop people would remember for a long time.

  As it was, the reporter was content to bide his time. At least the central figure, Hersing, was a Trenton native. That would give him a slight local angle. And there would be something delicious about scooping all the Philadelphia press with a major story right under their noses. Still, a police corruption probe in Philadelphia was of only marginal interest in this central New Jersey city. Meyer had little difficulty at first keeping his promise not to write until Hersing gave the go-ahead.

  But as the months went by, Meyer says, his editors grew more and more eager. News organizations can only sit on a story for so long before it hatches, and Meyer’s editors were afraid that this story would soon hatch, with or without them. At first, Meyer says, he resisted; he had promised Hersing. But then he found out that Hersing had also been talking to another reporter, a competitor from the Bucks County Courier Times named Karl Stark.

  Fearing he was about to be scooped, Meyer stopped by the FBI office in Philadelphia during the last week of October and talked to John Anderson. The FBI supervisor listened with mounting chagrin as the reporter explained all that he knew. Hersing had obviously been talking to Meyer all along. Although he was officially able to neither confirm nor deny Meyer’s story, Anderson says, he could see that Meyer wanted to do the right thing.

  Anderson says he told Meyer: “We aren’t using Hersing as much as we did in the beginning, but there are still things we want to do with him. We aren’t ready for this thing to break yet.”

  Meyer wanted something more concrete. He says he told Anderson that if going ahead with the story would jeopardize the investigation, he would wait until there were indictments—but he wanted to know early enough to be first with it. Anderson conferred with prosecutor Bill Lytton. Then he called Meyer back and said that he couldn’t offer any deals, but that he would prefer it if the newspaper would wait.

  For Meyer, with the imminent threat of the story breaking elsewhere, this was not enough.

  Over that weekend, Meyer phoned his source. Hersing was angry. The reporter said he knew Hersing had also been talking to Stark. Hersing denied it. Meyer said he had given the FBI a chance to call him off, but they wouldn’t. He and his editors feared the story would break anyway. He said he felt that he might lose his job if he didn’t write the story. His wife was about to have a baby. Hersing was not unsympathetic. But he also knew that the size of whatever reward he got at the end of the case would depend on how well the FBI felt that he had cooperated with them. Leaking the story to a reporter would hardly improve the Bureau’s estimation of his work. He reminded Meyer of the promise.

  Meyer said he was sorry, but the story was going to run. Later, he got a call from Hersing’s wife, Donna, who was crying. Didn’t he know that he could be jeopardizing her husband’s life? Meyer felt bad about the whole thing.

  Anderson got another call from Meyer on Sunday. The reporter could hold off no longer. He told Anderson that his editors were really pushing him. There was nothing he could do. The FBI supervisor could only repeat the standard line: he would neither confirm nor deny the story.

  The story ran under a big black headline the following morning, Monday, November 1, 1982: “FBI Probes Philly Cops; Sting Operation Big as Abscam.”

  Meyer did not mention Hersing by name in the story, referring to him only as “a Trenton native,” but the information had Hersing’s grandiose stamp. The story reported that two hundred FBI agents were being assembled to begin handing out subpoenas to the vast number of suspects in the probe.

  Karl Stark’s story ran the following day.

  First Assistant U.S.
Attorney Bill Lytton found out that the story was going to break the night before. He was at home in Chester County with his wife and two small children. He remembers that it was Halloween.

  Lytton is a bookish man who looks every inch the prosperous young liberal Republican lawyer—pin-striped, cotton-shirted, silk-tied, and straight-laced. Reared in St. Louis, Lytton went to Georgetown University and then to American University’s law school. He had worked for Senator Charles F. Percy (R., Ill.), monitoring legal issues before the Senate Judiciary Committee, prior to landing a job in the federal prosecutor’s office in Philadelphia in 1978.

  He looked younger than his thirty-three years, with a few stray strands of brown hair falling over a broad forehead, a soft, friendly gaze, and a slightly reticent smile. Lytton was an idealist, a man with an academic appetite and appreciation of the law and law enforcement. He would describe the FBI probe in a way that might make the FBI agents he worked with squint quizzically at each other—“It was essentially a proactive investigation,” Lytton says, “where you proceed by looking at objective facts, taking whatever other input you can get, and trying to develop some sort of hypothesis. It’s very scientific in a way; you set up a hypothesis and see whether you can prove it or not.”

  Agents Mike Thompson and Andy Lash worked closely on the case with Lytton and another assistant U.S. attorney named Bob Hickok. Lytton estimates that he talked to either Thompson or Lash daily for almost two and a half years. Although the U.S. attorney’s office and the FBI have different responsibilities—the Bureau collects information; the Justice Department, working with a federal grand jury, decides what to do with it—Lytton and Hickok and the agents followed the more typical current practice of working closely together through every step of the case. “We gave them some advice they took during the investigation,” Lytton says, “and they gave us some advice during the prosecution which we took.”