Busted

by Wendy Ruderman

  Jeff, too, fell under his spell. Jeff, a decorated and seasoned cop who regularly dealt with some of Philly’s seediest characters, let his guard down with Benny. He allowed Benny into his life and routinely helped him out. When Benny told Jeff that he needed money for child support, Jeff gave him the cash. When Benny said he was stressed out, Jeff gave him money for a trip to the Jersey Shore. When Benny needed a job, Jeff got him a gig working for a cop friend who owned an air-duct cleaning business.

  And when Benny needed a place to live, Jeff told him that he could help him out. Jeff told Benny that he owned a house on Pacific Street, and Benny could rent it from him. This was something Barbara and I were able to confirm. We found court documents showing that Jeff did in fact own the house. And Benny gave us a copy of the rental agreement and other paperwork showing that Benny and Sonia lived there and paid rent to Jeff. This was just one part of Benny’s story that checked out. The thing about Benny was, buried underneath his lies, there was truth.

  Truth that Barbara and I would prove.

  Benny told us that because Jeff had moved to evict Benny, both of them would show up at landlord-tenant court for a hearing before a judge. As the plaintiff, Jeff was expected to tell the judge that Benny had failed to pay rent, and he wanted him out.

  Barbara and I knew one of us had to show up in court to see Jeff and witness the showdown between the two men. Benny assured us that Sonia would be there, too, so Barbara went to the house they had rented from Jeff to meet her a few days before the court hearing.

  Sonia greeted Barbara warmly, but she was visibly scared; she knew Benny was terrified. Sonia was not the shy or skittish type. She was a tough ghetto girl who grew up in the bloody Badlands, an embattled section of Philly held hostage by gun-packing drug dealers who lorded over corners.

  Sonia favored fake nails, long as daggers. She painted them hot pink or blood red. Her chubby body was inked with tattoos. One on her forearm read “Angel,” a tribute to her first son, a stillborn. Two days before her due date, the doctor couldn’t find a heartbeat. The umbilical cord had gotten tangled around Angel’s neck. Sonia, then only twenty years old, chose to give birth to him without an epidural or sedatives. She wanted to feel Angel come into this world.

  Sonia wasn’t afraid to feel or fight. Not girlie fighting, with hair pulling and clawing at her opponent, but full-throttle punches. She went straight for the face. She could lock it up. Benny liked that about Sonia.

  The day of the hearing, set to begin at 8:45 a.m., Barbara walked in the thirty-five-degree chill to municipal court on Eleventh Street in the shadow of City Hall. Her heart was pounding. She went through security, turned off her cell, and took the elevator to the fourth floor.

  A court clerk approached. “Ma’am, are you a landlord?”

  “No,” Barbara answered.

  “Are you a tenant?”

  “No.”

  Barbara wanted to give as little information as possible.

  “Then who are you?”

  Barbara knew she couldn’t lie. “I’m a reporter for the Daily News,” she replied.

  “Well, you can’t be here,” she said.

  “Yes, I can,” she said, trying to sound authoritative, not belligerent. “It’s open court. It’s not closed to the media.” Barbara showed the clerk her business card.

  The clerk ushered Barbara into an adjoining room. Barbara was panicked. She couldn’t miss this hearing. She explained as politely as possible that she was allowed to observe the court proceedings.

  “I’ll be back,” the clerk said, looking Barbara up and down, probably wondering why she seemed so desperate about a landlord-tenant dispute.

  Barbara waited, tapping her foot nervously and twirling her hair. Finally, after about ten minutes, the clerk returned.

  “Okay. I checked. You can go in,” the clerk said. “Just no tape recorder.”

  “Thank you,” Barbara said. “No tape. I promise.”

  When Jeff sauntered into the landlord-tenant courtroom, he had no idea that Barbara was seated, watching. Jeff plopped down next to his attorney near the front. He looked straight ahead and appeared calm as he propped his right ankle on top of his left knee.

  Benny and Sonia took seats far from Barbara, on the other side of the room. Barbara glanced over at Benny. His face and ears were beet-red.

  He leaned over and whispered in Sonia’s ear: “Jeff thinks he’s Mr. Big Shot. I wanna get up and smack him.”

  “Calm down,” Sonia said, patting him on the knee.

  Judge Bradley Moss called Jeff’s case, and Sonia and Benny approached the witness table. Moss pointed out that Benny and Sonia hadn’t paid rent for three months. Benny tried to explain that he’d stopped paying rent when Jeff put the house up for sale, but Moss, who couldn’t understand why that mattered, started to calculate how much they owed Jeff in rent and attorney fees.

  “May I say something?” Benny asked.

  “Absolutely,” Moss said.

  “The reason my lease was never renewed was because me and him are real good friends, all right. We are real good friends. Every time I paid him, he never gave me rent receipts because we were good friends. . . . Until the beginning of October, then I went through a little something with him because I worked for him as a CI. I’m his CI. Okay. I’m living in his property.”

  Benny’s voice started to shake. “I had a defendant named Raul Nieves,” he began. “When I told Jeff I had the subpoena right here, he automatically wanted me out of the house. That’s the reason why I’m here today. And I don’t think it’s right that after I put a lot of people away and took guns off the street, I’m getting treated like this. My life is in danger right now, and no one is helping me.”

  “Well, that’s a different issue,” Moss began.

  Benny’s voice became shrill. “Right now they are looking for me to kill me and my family and nobody is there to help me. And he’s supposed to be a good friend, Jeff!”

  He turned sideways to look at Jeff. But Jeff looked stone-faced, his eyes fixed on Moss.

  “You were a good friend to me, man. I do anything,” Benny quavered.

  Benny was on the verge of tears. It seemed as if every time Barbara and I saw Benny, he cried, spigot-like.

  “Sheriff! Sheriff! Sir, you’re in a court of law,” said Moss, summoning backup, sensing that things could turn ugly or, worse yet, explosive.

  “I’m getting treated . . . ,” Benny said, his voice trailing off.

  “You are in a court of law. I’m not Judge Judy. This is a real court,” Moss said sternly.

  Benny apologized. Moss told him to address him, not Jeff.

  Benny hung his head. He wiped his eyes and cheeks with his palms.

  “We’ll take a break,” Moss said.

  “Can I use your bathroom?” Benny asked, sounding like a little kid.

  Benny and Sonia looked beaten down as they walked to the hallway. Barbara saw Sonia slip into the ladies’ room and followed her in.

  “Benny’s doin’ bad. I hate to see him like this,” Sonia whispered, leaning against the sink.

  Sonia and Benny went way back. She’d fallen for him in the late 1990s. She was just seventeen when she saw him hanging on the corner of Howard and Cambria, the heart of Philly’s open-air drug market. She was walking to the corner store, a half block from the row house where she lived with her mom.

  “You have nice hair,” she told him in her coarse, seductive way. He smiled impishly and slowly stroked his right hand over coarse black hair that he swept back and gelled to a sticky sheen.

  Back then, Benny was thirty-four and living with Susette, his first love and mother of his three children. But Benny was smitten with Sonia, and he’d run around on Susette before. Benny was thick and chunky, yet saw himself as a sculpted stud. He said that he would have started messing around with Sonia that day, only she was too young. Never mind that he was with Susette.

  Then one night, Benny went to a bar alone and ran into Sonia.
He couldn’t help but notice her. She was in the middle of one of her vicious all-out cat fights. Some woman had made her mad, and Sonia went off, going for the woman’s hair and earrings.

  “I gripped her up because I had to break up the fight,” Benny told us. “She was like, ‘Get the fuck off.’ I was like, ‘Yo. It’s me.’ She couldn’t believe it. I dragged her outside. From then on, we just started messing around,” Benny recalled.

  The romance began. Susette found out and told Benny she was done with him once and for all.

  Barbara and I often wondered why Sonia stuck by Benny, putting up with all his drama and bullshit. Benny once pulled his shirt collar down in the newsroom to show us a tattoo on the left side of his chest. The tattoo was of a heart with the name “Sue” for Susette in the middle. He refused to remove it. “She’s my first love,” he’d tell Sonia. Benny called Susette his wife; he called Sonia his wife. He never married either. Now, convinced that he was going to get popped in the head, mob-style, he persuaded Sonia to stick with him, that they were a team.

  Sonia stood in the court bathroom and dried her hands, over and over, until the paper towel fell apart.

  “When he gets out the car, I always be watching him,” she told Barbara. “He knows all these people out to kill him.”

  Barbara told Sonia to go ahead of her back into the courtroom so nobody saw them together.

  Moss gave Benny time to compose himself, then tried to keep him on point. Moss explained that Benny and Sonia owed $1,200 in unpaid rent, $350 in attorney’s fees, and $62 in court costs. If they paid up, they could stay for twenty-one days. After that, Jeff could kick them out.

  Benny said he understood. Moss asked a clerk if the sheriff was around.

  “I don’t want any problems in the elevator, so I don’t care who leaves first. But I want the other party, the other side, to sit in the courtroom for five, ten minutes so that we don’t have any problems in the elevator or outside, okay?” Moss asked.

  “Okay. No problem,” Benny said.

  Benny volunteered to leave first. Barbara hung back as he and Sonia left the courtroom, then she followed Jeff to the elevator.

  “Hi, Officer Cujdik,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m Barbara Laker, a reporter for the Daily News, and I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”

  Jeff looked puzzled but smiled and shook her hand. “About what?”

  He wore blue jeans, brown work boots, and a blue T-shirt under a black North Face sweatshirt. At thirty-five, Jeff Cujdik (pronounced Chud-ick) stood six-foot-two with an athletic build, broad shoulders, and piercing blue eyes. His thick brown hair was neatly moussed into rows of tiny spikes. Jeff was practically groomed to be a cop. He grew up in the city’s northeast section, a mostly safe white working-class neighborhood—Philly’s version of Cop Land. Jeff’s dad, Louis Cujdik, was a near-legendary narcotics officer, a cop’s cop who mentored rookies. Drug dealers knew him by name, and some feared him. His older brother, Richard, was also a cop, married to a city assistant district attorney.

  Jeff’s younger brother, Gregory, was the splinter in this family of wooden lawmen. Gregory was twenty-nine when he pleaded guilty to felony drug charges after he sold pot to an undercover cop in a suburban town far from Philly.

  Jeff graduated from an all-boys Catholic high school, where he wasn’t a standout among his 215 classmates. He didn’t participate in a single club or sport, and few classmates, even those who had sat near him in homeroom, could remember much about him. After graduation in 1992, Jeff got a job in maintenance for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, or SEPTA, the city’s rail and bus system. He married Jeanette, an attractive and kindhearted woman who’d graduated from an all-girls Catholic high school and stayed at home with their two young daughters.

  Jeff joined the police force in 1997 and quickly landed a coveted spot on the narcotics field unit, where plainclothes officers cultivated tips on drug houses and used informants to bust them. Jeff’s dad and brother also worked in the same unit.

  Based on how Benny had described Jeff to us, Barbara thought he would look cold, be dismissive, and have an edge, an attitude. He wasn’t at all what Barbara expected. He seemed approachable, with no hint of a don’t-you-dare-come-near-me look.

  When Barbara introduced herself to Jeff near the elevator, he didn’t dismiss her curtly. Instead Jeff was polite, almost soft-spoken.

  Barbara asked him about renting his house to an informant.

  Jeff didn’t hesitate to answer. “I’m Jeff Cujdik, the landlord,” he said calmly. “I’m not here as a police officer.” He knew that it would be a mistake to tell Barbara that he, as an officer, was collecting rent from his informant.

  So he had to tell Barbara that he, like any other landlord, was renting a house to Benny and his family, and he was trying to evict them because they hadn’t paid rent. Nothing more.

  Barbara asked him for his phone number in case she had any more questions. Without hesitation, he gave her his cell number.

  Even though Jeff didn’t seem rattled, he was. He was desperate.

  He had to boot Benny out of his house for good, before he could make even more trouble. Trying to evict Benny and Sonia in landlord-tenant court hadn’t worked. Benny could still pay him to stay another twenty-one days, and Jeff couldn’t wait any longer.

  Jeff was going to try another tactic. Two weeks after the landlord-tenant court hearing, on a cold Friday afternoon, Jeff showed up at the rental house. Sonia opened the white aluminum screen door with an emblem of a black horse-drawn carriage on the front. Jeff handed her a letter: “I’m giving you $1,000.00 cash to vacate the property. . . . By accepting the $1,000.00 cash, you agree to vacate . . . by no later than January 31, 2009.”

  Sonia signed the letter and took the money.

  5

  BENNY HAD COME TO THE DAILY NEWS AND CONTINUED TO TALK TO US BECAUSE HE WANTED SOMETHING—TWO THINGS, REALLY. IN EXCHANGE FOR HIS story, he insisted on being anonymous. And he wanted us to put him up in a hotel or pay for housing, like some kind of witness protection program.

  Barbara and I said no to both. Benny didn’t get it—he was a convicted drug dealer with questionable credibility. And Benny wanted to be anonymous? This was a time of increasing public mistrust of the news media. Journalists had come under attack for using anonymous sources too liberally, à la Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who was criticized for her stories about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction based largely on unnamed “American officials” and “American intelligence experts.”

  Of course we weren’t the New York Times, the great gray lady. We were the bawdy broad, a tabloid that lived—or died—off street sales. We never apologized for showing a little leg, in the form of a salacious sex story or a rubberneck tragedy—“grief porn,” as some reporters called it—on our front page.

  Still, we had our standards. There was no way we would agree to allow Benny, a convicted drug dealer, to accuse a decorated cop of wrongdoing without using his name. Benny had to go on the record.

  When we told Benny this, he balked and left the newsroom. A few days later, he was back. “You’re all I got,” he told us.

  Benny had gone to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division, but he didn’t think investigators took him seriously, nor did he trust them. He also shopped his story to Fox 29, but he didn’t even get past the television station’s front lobby.

  We explained to Benny that the Daily News doesn’t have a witness protection program, and certainly doesn’t pay people for stories. We thought the FBI might be interested in Benny’s story. We also knew that once the FBI started digging around, they wouldn’t want Benny talking to us. So we milked Benny dry, talking to him for hours, with a tape recorder running.

  When we were done, we steered Benny to the feds. We gave him the name and telephone number of John Roberts, the supervisory special agent of the FBI’s Public Corruption Squad.

  Roberts had a
record of tackling police corruption. He was one of the FBI agents who investigated the Thirty-Ninth District police corruption scandal in the mid-1990s. In that probe, the feds charged five rogue narcotics cops with stealing money from drug suspects and covering up the thefts with phony arrests and search warrants.

  History had a way of repeating itself in Philadelphia. And Barbara and I suspected that what Benny was telling us could prove that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

  To tell Benny’s story, Barbara and I needed access to police search warrants.

  Each search warrant would be a road map: it would list the address of the drug dealer, the dealer’s name or street name, the amount and type of drugs purchased by the informant and how the deal went down, the badge number of every officer who participated in the raid, and what, if anything, police found in the house.

  The warrants would show us what Jeff said he and other officers had witnessed to persuade a judge to authorize a raid. The paperwork would tell us whether Jeff used Benny as an informant, and what Jeff said Benny had bought in each house. These warrants would give us Jeff’s version of events. Then we could ask Benny for his version of what happened. Finally, we could track down the arrested drug dealer or his relatives for their story.