Barbara walked them through how to master street reporting, sometimes even writing out questions for them. She knew she did too much hand-holding, but she wanted the best story possible and enjoyed seeing inexperienced reporters learn and get better. But as time went on, she grew frustrated with reporters who returned to the office with little in their notebooks. She couldn’t understand how some reporters were satisfied with canned interviews that everyone else had. How could you be a reporter without any fire in your belly? Barbara wondered. She had to resist the urge to push them out of the way and just do the job herself.
Barbara was a sweetheart who, unlike me, never dropped the f-bomb or got crass about her sex life. Barbara was like no boss I’d had at the Inquirer. Inquirer editors came across as Ivy League intellectuals—cynical, self-important, stiff. The men resembled aging college professors, with disheveled, thinning hair, khaki pants, striped ties, and light blue or white dress shirts, usually with the sleeves rolled up. The women looked more like aging Flower Power hippies, with long flowing skirts, Birkenstock sandals, no makeup, and flat, graying hair that hadn’t seen a box of Clairol in years. So when I first laid eyes on Barbara, I thought, Who is this bimbo?
Barbara was oblivious to her ability to make men’s heads turn, even at our workplace cafeteria, where a horny Inquirer reporter once had the chutzpah to ask me if her boobs were real. At fifty, she was an avid runner, trim and shapely, with three marathons under her belt.
Barbara had long, wavy highlighted blond hair and a tangerine slice of a nose. Her big green eyes, flecked with caramel, reminded me of top-of-the-line granite kitchen counters. She rimmed them with dark olive eyeliner and a hint of grayish blue eye shadow. With her coral lip gloss, silver hoop earrings, snug skirts, and candy-colored blouses, Barbara came off all bubble-gum—wifty and gee-whiz. But that was just her facade. She was a master at getting people to talk, using her charm, smarts, and girlish warmth to get into houses and get the story. She truly got people. She knew just what to say to convince anyone from criminal to victim that she was friend, not foe, and that they could let their guard down, she could be trusted. When she stood to leave with her full notebook, they would invariably say, “I can’t believe I told you all this! I haven’t told anyone.”
Obsessive reporters often describe themselves with one phrase: “Journalism is in my blood.” And Barbara and I had the same blood.
I grew up in a family of newspaper readers. A newspaper landed on my front porch every morning. Each week, a delivery boy showed up at my door for his $3.50. At night, I’d walk by my parents’ bedroom and see them lying beside one another, each of their faces obscured by newsprint stretched between their hands. My parents loved newspapers. When I got busted in college for underage drinking and my arrest got written up in the local paper, my parents cut out the article and saved it in a scrapbook. They were thrilled to see my name in the paper, even for something criminal.
My dad, who grew up in Brooklyn and was short and balding, spent his entire career as an accountant for a car dealership. He dreamed of bigger things for himself and for me, my sister, and my brother. He took us as kids to Broadway shows, read us poems by A. E. Housman and Edwin Arlington Robinson, and recited—from memory—Ernest Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” from the top of the three steps leading from our kitchen to the living room. He took us to great restaurants every Friday night. “Eat slow. Eat slow,” he’d tell us, wanting us to savor the meal. He planned family vacations to historic landmarks, like Colonial Williamsburg, where we complained of boredom while watching actors in eighteenth-century costume churn butter in the scorching August heat.
My dad, who died of cancer when I was twenty-eight, thought I was a superstar. He believed I could do anything and do it better than anyone else. When I graduated from Columbia University with a master’s in journalism, he wanted to know why some other student—and not me—got an award at graduation: Didn’t the professors recognize how great I was? A lot of my ambition as a reporter was tied to my need to live up to my father’s galactic expectations.
Barbara came of age in journalism’s heyday. With a gaggle of other teenage know-it-all Baby Boomer idealists, she decided she wanted to be a reporter in the 1970s when Watergate broke. She was fascinated by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and how they, with the help of a then-mysterious source known only as Deep Throat, uncovered the most notorious political scandal in American history.
She wanted to know step by step how Woodward and Bernstein had unearthed a trove of secrets, including sabotage, spying, and bribery, that in the end would topple a president. She still remembered huddling around the boxy black-and-white TV with her family to hear Richard Nixon resign in August 1974.
That year, applications to journalism schools reached an all-time high. Barbara’s was among them. Since then, two of the five newspapers that Barbara worked for—the Clearwater Sun and the Dallas Times-Herald—have died. A third, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is now online only.
The afternoon when I first met Benny, I hoped that Barbara wanted in on his story. Truth be told, I was tired of being alone in the trenches battling police misdeeds. I’d already gained a reputation as the go-to reporter for people who had run-ins with cops. I’d written stories about a cop caught with a racist sticker in his locker, a cop who unleashed a testosterone-fueled beating on a group of women at a baby shower, and a swarm of cops who stomped on and kicked the heads of three shooting suspects while a TV news helicopter filmed overhead. I was sick of being called a “cop hater” and a “bitch” by anonymous callers. I needed reinforcements, someone to help steel up my backbone, an ally in the fight.
3
BARBARA JOINED US IN THE PENALTY BOX, AND BENNY STARTED FROM THE TOP. HE’D BEGUN WORKING WITH JEFF CUJDIK IN LATE 2001, AFTER JEFF caught him selling marijuana on a corner. Benny was thirty-five years old and on probation for a prior drug conviction. He didn’t want to go to prison, so he accepted Jeff’s offer to turn informant.
“I knew I was gonna do some time,” Benny told us. “So I said, ‘Well, I gotta do what I gotta do.’”
So Benny became Confidential Informant 103. Roughly three times a week, Jeff picked up Benny in an unmarked police car. They worked a list of suspected drug homes. Benny’s job was to knock on the door and make a drug buy, while Jeff and his partner watched from a hidden location. Benny used cash that Jeff had given him, called prerecorded buy money, for the drugs. Benny then handed over the drug packets to Jeff, who put them into evidence.
Once the deal was done, Jeff prepared an application for a search warrant, which he would need to enter a home. In the warrant, he typically included why he was targeting a certain house, what drugs he saw Informant 103 buy, where he bought them, and from whom. Sometimes Jeff had a first and last name of the suspect; other times only a physical description and a street name like “Macho” or “Blackie.”
A judge then issued a search warrant that Jeff would use when he and his squad members busted into the house.
The police department, through Jeff, paid Benny cash for the jobs. He usually got $20 for each drug buy and $150 to $250 for a big drug seizure, and if police found weapons, the department paid Benny an additional $100 for each gun. And Jeff nearly doubled his $55,400 salary in court overtime because each time he locked up a dealer, he had to testify in the case. More important, Jeff got attaboys from the “white shirts,” sergeants and captains who had earned enough stripes to hang up their uniform blues.
Over the years, Benny emerged as one of the city’s most prolific drug informants, and Jeff became one of the department’s golden boys, a favorite son who brought home the stats and made his bosses look good. Jeff, perhaps more than other cops, needed informants like Benny. With his clean-cut looks and his I-own-this-town swagger, Jeff’s appearance screamed cop. No dealer would be stupid enough to sell to him.
Benny told us that at first he and Jeff did things by the book, but then the lies began. If Benny cou
ldn’t score drugs from a house, Jeff sometimes told him to buy elsewhere. Then in the application for a search warrant, Jeff would say that the drugs came from the targeted house. Benny even set up some of his closest friends—people he considered family, people who trusted and loved him. But that wasn’t the only secret Benny and Jeff shared.
About four years after they started working together, Jeff rented a house he had purchased for $30,000 to Benny and his family. The rent was $300 a month—a steal in Philly’s rental market.
Some of the cash that Benny earned as a police informant flowed back to Jeff in the form of rent money. This was against police department rules, and Jeff knew he’d get in big trouble if internal affairs found out.
The beginning of the end of their friendship came in 2006, though Jeff and Benny didn’t know it at the time. In November of that year, Benny tipped Jeff off to a drug dealer named Raul Nieves. Benny knew Raul from an auto-detailing shop where he had worked. Raul knew Benny as Benny Blanco, a reference to a character in the 1993 movie Carlito’s Way. In the film, Al Pacino plays a Puerto Rican ex–drug dealer dogged by Benny Blanco, a pesky young gangster from the Bronx.
Benny got Raul’s cell number and arranged to buy $125 worth of weed, enough to roll about fifty joints. After that, Benny hounded Raul for more pot, but Raul brushed him off. Something didn’t feel right.
Jeff and his squad later tore apart Raul’s Ford Expedition and found fifty-six orange-tinted crack baggies stashed behind the dashboard. Another twenty baggies were hidden behind a driver’s-side door panel. They locked up Raul on felony drug charges.
Raul hired a meticulous, serious-minded veteran defense attorney named Stephen Patrizio. Right away, Raul suspected that Confidential Informant 103 was Benny. Patrizio hired a private investigator to tail Benny home from work.
Raul’s case lingered in criminal court. Again and again, hearing dates got scheduled, then postponed. Raul waited, coolly. Finally, on October 10, 2008—almost two years after Benny bought weed from Raul and two months before Benny came to the Daily News—the case leaped forward, exploding at Jeff’s feet.
Jeff sat in the witness stand. Patrizio stood before him. He was short and stocky, with a fuzz of hair on a mostly bald head, his pants pulled up perhaps a bit too high, and belted over his paunch. Those who wrote him off as a mild-mannered, harmless geek would soon be proven wrong.
Patrizio took out a copy of Police Directive 15, the rules that officers should follow when dealing with informants, and showed it to Jeff.
Patrizio began to read aloud: “‘Police personnel will maintain professional objectivity in dealing with informants. No personal relationships will jeopardize the objectivity of the informant or the integrity of the department.’”
Patrizio paused and looked up at Jeff. “Correct?”
“Correct,” Jeff replied.
Then Patrizio pounced. He stuck a photo under Jeff’s nose. It was a snapshot of Benny walking out of Jeff’s house.
“Without asking you anything about the person depicted in the picture, do you recognize that street?”
“Yes,” Jeff said.
“And not only do you recognize the street, but you recognize the house that the informant is coming out of, correct?”
“I don’t know exactly what house the individual came out of, but I can identify one house on that block,” Jeff said.
“You can identify the house of 1939 East Pacific Street?”
“I own that house,” Jeff said.
“That was my question. You can identify that house?”
“I answered the question,” Jeff said, icily.
Patrizio told the judge that he planned to subpoena Informant 103. Defense attorneys often filed motions seeking to drag informants into court. Ninety-nine percent of the time, prosecutors and judges laugh at the request. Confidential informants were just that—confidential. For good reason. Judges protected their identity to prevent drug dealers from killing them. But this case was different. Raul already knew Benny’s identity, and he hadn’t touched him.
“He has known who he is for long periods of time, and nothing has happened to him,” Patrizio argued.
The judge saw Patrizio’s point, and the court issued a subpoena for “Benny Blanco,” aka “Benny Martinez.”
Jeff panicked. With their relationship exposed, he moved to cut all ties with Benny. Jeff put the rental property up for sale and told Benny that he had to leave. Benny wouldn’t budge.
So in December 2008, Jeff filed a complaint in landlord-tenant court to evict Benny and Sonia, noting that he’d received no rent since October. Jeff then deactivated Benny as an informant.
By the time Benny came to Barbara and me, he was desperate. Benny, the woman he referred to as his wife, Sonia, and their two small children had nowhere to go.
He sat across from us, seemingly terrified, convinced that he’d soon be a dead man. Word had spread on the street that Benny was a snitch. He feared Raul wanted to kill him. If not Raul, some other drug dealer. He told us that he’d opened his door to find a chunk of cheese on the stoop. It was a street message: Benny was a rat.
He told us that, like prisoners, he, Sonia, and the kids spent nights in the upstairs middle bedroom, where his ten-month-old daughter Gianni slept. He pushed her crib against the wall and dragged a king-size mattress onto the pink carpet. He told his three-year-old son Giovanni to pretend they were camping. He figured they were safer there, holed away in a Benny-made bunker. But he still couldn’t sleep. He sat saucer-eyed, fixated on the bedroom door, convinced the knob would turn and he’d see the barrel of a gun.
Jeff no longer had his back. In fact, Benny told us he feared him, that Jeff could patiently lie in wait for the perfect moment to put a bullet in his head, which we later learned was Benny being overdramatic.
“I was dreaming the other night that Jeff shot me in my face,” Benny said. “Jeff is a hunter. He likes to hunt. . . . I could be sitting on my porch smoking a cigarette and I could get shot real easily.”
Benny stopped talking. Barbara and I looked at each other. We sat back in our chairs. Quiet. Dubious.
“Look, it’s true. I could call Jeff right now,” Benny said.
Benny flipped open his cell. Jeff answered immediately. Barbara and I practically laid our upper bodies across the table. I kneeled on my chair seat, propped myself up on my elbows, and shoved my head next to Benny’s cell phone. I was close enough to kiss his cheek. I could see every follicle of his scant pencil mustache and goatee and smell his cologne. Barbara did the same on the other side.
“You know I know a lot,” Benny was saying.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jeff said.
Benny tried to bait him, but Jeff gave up nothing. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he warned Benny.
The conversation was short, and Jeff sounded guarded, edgy. Could Jeff really kill Benny or find some street thug to do it for him? We didn’t know. What we did know was that Jeff wanted Benny out of his life.
Before long, I’d want the same thing.
4
BENNY WAS ALL ABOUT BENNY, AND HE KNEW HOW TO PLAY PEOPLE TO GET WHAT HE WANTED. AFTER COPS BUSTED HIM FOR SELLING COCAINE IN 1994, Benny summoned tears during his sentencing hearing. He told the judge that he started dealing only because he had no money to buy a birthday present for a daughter from his first marriage, that jobs and opportunities were scarce in the hood, especially for a high school dropout like him. Sure, he knew it was wrong, but the drug trade was all there was, often the only means of survival in Philly’s tar pit of hopelessness and poverty. Benny’s wife and kids, who sat behind him in the courtroom, began to sob, and the judge cut him a break, meting out house arrest instead of prison time.
“I had the whole courtroom in tears,” Benny boasted. “People came up to me afterwards and said, ‘Good luck to you.’”
When Benny needed money to buy cocaine and crack, he concocted tales of personal tragedy so people would feel so
rry for him and not be able to say no. He’d knock on doors of family friends and frantically recount how his wife, his father-in-law, whomever, had been in a serious car accident and he needed cash to get a cab to the hospital or to get the banged-up car out of the impound lot. He once weaseled money out of his oldest son’s high school friends by telling them that his son had been injured in a car wreck. The friends were shocked to see Benny Jr.—unscathed—at school the next day.
One day Benny showed up at the bodega that his oldest daughter managed with a tale of woe. He mumbled, through half-paralyzed lips, cradling a limp arm, that he’d suffered a stroke.
Another time, he told me that he felt weak and was bleeding profusely from his rectum. A few days later, he told me he had colon cancer and needed chemotherapy but didn’t have health insurance. Then he said doctors feared that the cancer had spread to his vocal cords because his voice sounded raspy. When I went to the store and told Benny’s daughter about his cancer, she looked at me and said, “Yeah, he told me the same thing. I’m waiting to see paperwork.”
Of course Barbara and I didn’t realize that Benny was still a drug addict, who often told lies to feed his habit, until long after he first came to the Daily News. He told us that he had given up drugs years ago and wanted to be an informant to make things right and clean up the hood.
He was convincing. He was good, real good.
Benny was instantly likable. There was something about him—people always wanted to help him; they wanted to trust him. He cracked jokes at his own expense and was an expert on salsa music. Pick any song and Benny could name the artist, the producer, and the label. He saw himself as a tough guy, but actually he was mushy at the core, quick to tear up and say he loved you—“Youse like family,” he’d say. He was a hard worker, known as one of the best auto detailers in Philadelphia. He won trophies in detailing competitions and specialized in exotics—Beamers, Mercedes, Escalades—the cars of drug dealers. He could hand-polish black cars without leaving a single swirl. Even after Benny stole chrome tire rims worth $2,200 from an auto-detail shop, the owner told Barbara that he liked Benny and would hire him back. Another shop owner swindled by Benny told me that he still loved Benny and would “cry at his funeral.” Again and again, people told us that Benny had a good heart, but drugs made him do evil things.
Busted Page 2
