Cops who worked narcotics were especially susceptible to corruption. For one thing, narcotics cops faced a Sisyphean task, an endless and hopeless battle to stem a tsunami of drugs. The dealers literally outgunned and outnumbered the cops, so why play fair? Why not cut some constitutional corners to gain the upper hand? Day in and day out, narcotics cops arrested gun-toting dealers who raked in thousands of dollars a week, drove luxury cars, and adorned themselves with fur coats, jewelry, and designer clothes, while the cops were risking their lives and slogging out a living on a $50,000-a-year cop’s salary. If they helped themselves to some drug money or pocketed a diamond ring or framed suspects to boost their overtime pay, what did it matter? Didn’t they deserve additional compensation? Corrupt cops were unapologetic.
After each scandal, police watchdogs and civil rights lawyers cited poor training, failure to discipline, and lax rules and oversight of cops who worked with drug informants. They made recommendations for reform—and the police department largely ignored their suggestions. The fact was, Benny didn’t trust internal affairs because its investigators had a history of failing to police their own.
If police brass and internal affairs wanted to blame Barbara and me for blowing their investigation, fine. But if they had cleaned their own house years back, we wouldn’t be here. That’s how we saw it.
The Defender Association of Philadelphia, which represents poor people in criminal cases, began to scrutinize scores of drug cases in which Jeff used Benny as an informant. In the wake of our first page-one story, civil rights attorneys clamored for more supervision of and better training for narcotics officers. The police inspector in charge of narcotics lamented that the allegations, if true, could free dozens of drug dealers, casting a black cloud over the entire narcotics field unit. And the city district attorney’s office launched an investigation into Benny’s allegations. A few days later, the mayor, the FBI, police internal affairs, and the Philadelphia Office of the Inspector General announced the formation of a joint task force. During an afternoon news conference, city mayor Michael Nutter, whose nasal voice reminded me of Kermit the Frog, especially when he was trying to sound firm, said he wouldn’t hesitate to come down hard on Jeff if the investigation revealed wrongdoing.
“We think that high ethical standards matter in the entire city, but especially in the Philadelphia Police Department,” said Nutter, grim-faced. “If any of these allegations are true, we will take, I’m sure, the swiftest action.”
“Obviously, ensuring the safety of individuals involved in this investigation will be paramount,” Janice Fedarcyk, FBI special agent in charge, said at the press conference when reporters asked about witness protection for Benny.
By now, the age-old Daily News–Inquirer rivalry was in full tilt. Inquirer editor Bill Marimow had won not one but two Pulitzer Prizes—in 1978 and 1985—for an investigative series that exposed police brutality and misconduct. This was his kind of story, and he wanted his paper to own it. The Inky reporters weren’t going to follow us, they were going to beat us. Within two weeks, the Inky had seven reporters on the story. The sleeping giant was wide awake.
When Inky deputy managing editor Vernon Loeb thought that his reporters did a better job than us on their follow-up story about the fallout from Benny’s allegations, he dashed off a congratulatory e-mail from his BlackBerry and copied all the top editors:
“While I never liked getting beat on a story (and I’m not saying it was you two guys who got beat on the original Daily News piece about [Jeff and Benny]), I knew it was an occupational hazard, and you could never break every story. But I always vowed to myself that I’d never get beaten on a follow, and I always loved to take over the stories I was beaten on and mercilessly pound my competitors once I was on the case. And this is why I absolutely loved—loved!—this scoop you guys had this morning, significantly advancing this important story and announcing to the Daily News, with data analysis they can’t possibly match, that we’re not going to be beaten again, and that we in fact intend to own this story from here on out. Great work. Best, Vernon.”
The e-mail became a running joke in our newsroom. Daily News columnist Howard Gensler, who wrote the paper’s celebrity gossip du jour, slipped the phrase “mercilessly pound” into a column about how Extra beat out Access Hollywood and Entertainment as the first to report that Nicollette Sheridan was leaving Desperate Housewives.
It was ridiculous that reporters at the two newspapers—owned by the same company, operating out of the same building—regarded one another as competition, even enemies. Ridiculous, that is, to everyone but us.
When the Daily News scooped the Inquirer on a story, Inky editors dressed down their reporters. “You got beat, don’t let it happen again.” When they scooped us, our editors minimized their victory. “Well, you know, they have more people, more resources.”
The Daily News harbored an inferiority complex, fueled by the fact that some of our reporters had applied for jobs at the Inquirer and didn’t get hired and that Inky staffers made more money. When I parachuted down to the Daily News to avoid being laid off in late 2006, I got to keep my $76,648 Inquirer salary, which meant I made more than some Daily News reporters who had been with the company longer. Barbara, who was my editor at the time, made only $4,316 more than me, even though she had worked at the company a decade longer. The Daily News was a second-class citizen, and that made our victories somehow sweeter. The Goliath Inquirer looked down at us from its perch as we bobbed and weaved, swinging hard. Occasionally, we got our jabs in.
Some Inky reporters viewed our mangy troupe as a pest, a persistent termite problem within their stately institution. They secretly wanted us to close, and whenever company number crunchers talked about folding the Daily News, the Inky reporters wished it so, though they’d never say the words aloud.
At the venerable and cultured 180-year-old Inquirer, I was like a kazoo in a symphony. “I’m your bitch,” I once told a reserved editor who asked me to help cover the deadly shooting of five Amish children at their Lancaster schoolhouse. There was silence on the other end of the phone. He didn’t know how to take my comment, which was just my quirky and profane way of telling him, “Look, I’ll do whatever you need.” Once, when Karl came down with epididymitis, a painful inflammation of the testicles, I told my editors that I had to leave early because “my husband’s balls are killing him.” They shook their heads as I shut down my computer.
The “mercilessly pound” e-mail egged us on, feeding our desire to kick some Inky ass.
Barbara’s will to win, the force within her that drove her to cross the finish line in three marathons, was the fuel that made her a tenacious reporter.
She wasn’t a natural athlete. Far from it. As a teen, she was klutzy, always among the last to be picked for a volleyball or basketball team. When she had to do a routine on the uneven bars in a high school gym class, she got stuck on the top bar, her feet and head dangling hopelessly as the bar cut into her stomach.
By the time she reached her twenties, she got out of breath walking up stairs and felt out of shape. She decided to start running. The first day she couldn’t make it three blocks. It took her a month to build up to a mile. She ran at such a slow pace, walkers passed her. She stuck with it and even ran during the first six months of being pregnant with her son, Josh.
To train for a marathon, she got up before dawn and, donning a reflector vest, headed outside, whatever the weather. Some days she ran the same hill eight times over. She seemed to get a sick pleasure out of pushing her body to its limit. She ran the New York City Marathon with an overtraining injury. At mile 20, her legs and feet had turned to lead. Every step felt like daggers piercing through her calves and thighs, but she knew she’d get to the finish line, even if she had to crawl. In every marathon, the last 6.2 miles are killers, the ones where the body checks out and the mind takes over.
Barbara fed off the human chain of 2 million spectators who lined the 26.2-mile course—men, women,
and children, three layers thick, who let out a deafening, thunderous roar for Barbara and other average joe runners as if they were Kenyans. They held out their hands for runners to high-five. Barbara slapped hand after hand, using that human connection to tell herself she would not, could not quit.
In the last mile, tears came to her eyes. She saw flashes of her life, but only the good parts, like the moments her children were born and she held them for the first time. All she heard was applause. “Keep going. I can’t do what you’re doing,” yelled one man who caught her eye.
Then she saw the packed bleachers, the blue banner, and the time clock. The finish line.
Barbara would go for a run on frigid mornings, the cold air burning her nose and eyes. She flexed her stiff fingers, wrapped in gloves emblazoned with the words I KNOW I RUN LIKE A GIRL. TRY TO KEEP UP.
Barbara approached her job like a marathoner. Stuck to her computer, she kept a Winston Churchill quote: “Never Never Never Give Up.”
We were the underdogs. The B team. The long shot. We weren’t expected to win. The thing was, Barbara and I both hated to lose.
11
LESS THAN TWO WEEKS AFTER OUR FIRST STORY RAN, BARBARA AND I CAME INTO WORK TO FIND AN AVALANCHE OF HATE E-MAILS.
“You fucking piece of shit!” one reader wrote. “You are a disgrace to yourself and your family and this city!” The reader continued, “It’s a shame that you have an ability to get the word out about the positives of this police department . . . and this is how you earn your money.”
We understood the root of their anger. A North Philadelphia drug dealer, Thomas Cooper, aka Thomas Smith, was poised to walk free because Jeff and Benny were tied to his case.
Jeff and Benny often targeted nickel-and-dime drug peddlers. This case was different. Thomas Cooper—twice convicted on felony drug charges—was big-time. When Jeff and his squad raided his house, they found a stash of drugs, including 155.6 grams of crack worth more than $12,000, an amount that bumped the case up to the federal level. This was Thomas’s third strike, and if convicted, he would spend the rest of his life in prison.
Federal prosecutors were preparing the case for trial when our first Tainted Justice story hit. The story prompted them to reexamine what had led up to Thomas’s arrest. The facts didn’t add up.
In an application for a search warrant, Jeff said Benny had tipped him off to a guy named Pooh Bear who stored guns and sold marijuana and crack from his mother’s row house. Jeff claimed that he and another cop watched Benny knock on the door and buy marijuana from Pooh Bear. Jeff described Pooh Bear as tall, about six-two, and thin, roughly 180 pounds.
“I never heard of a guy named Pooh Bear. I never made a buy at this place,” Benny told us.
Thomas Cooper never went by the nickname Pooh Bear and wasn’t exactly thin—he topped the scale at 350 pounds.
Federal prosecutors decided to drop the charges “in the interests of justice.” It was the first case to be dismissed since Barbara and I had started the Tainted Justice series.
I called Cooper’s public defender, Nina Carpinello Spizer, who told me she had always been troubled by the case because the warrant gave an inaccurate description and nickname for Cooper.
“We never suspected that this was all made up,” she told me. “We didn’t know until it came out in the newspaper,” she said, referring to our first Tainted Justice story.
Thomas Cooper was set to walk free at any time. We wanted to talk to him, or at least find his relatives and see his house.
When Barbara walked up to his three-story brick row house with smudged cream paint and brown trim, she had a gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach. The house, owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority, sat across the street from an elementary school for children pre-K through eighth grade.
It was around 2:30 in the afternoon, and school had just let out. Children clamored outside in their winter coats, and Barbara knew that to get home, these kids had to walk past corner drug boys with dark hoodies pulled tight over their heads to shade their hard-boiled eyes.
Barbara and I knew that nothing tore down a neighborhood faster or harder than drug houses. They attracted desperate addicts who were unpredictable when they couldn’t get a fix and potentially dangerous when they did. They took over abandoned houses and made them crack dens or shooting galleries. Many dealers were never far from a weapon and often shot each other over territory or nonsense—it didn’t matter. Children, some of them toddlers, had been gunned down in the crossfire, even outside a school. Neighbors feared telling cops about the drug trade on their block, believing their homes would be firebombed.
Barbara knocked on Thomas Cooper’s worn front door. Cooper’s mother, a woman we’ll call Helen, let Barbara into the gloomy, sparse living room, empty except for two chairs. Helen plopped down in one, and Barbara carefully perched herself on a wobbly metal folding chair with a bent, misshapen leg, knowing that with one wrong move, she would topple to the floor.
Helen was forty-nine but looked haggard and moved so precariously, she appeared more like a sickly sixty-year-old. A colostomy bag was attached to her hip. She blamed two recent surgeries on the stress of the raid and the “nasty” cops who threw her son in jail.
Barbara had no doubt that she was sitting in a drug house. While Helen said she was angry that the cop had set up her son, she made no apologies for Thomas or his lifestyle. Drugs were a cottage industry, the one and only economic engine in her section of town.
Thomas mostly hung out on the third floor, and Helen said she seldom climbed the stairs to see his bedroom or look at what he kept inside. Against the backdrop of a bedroom window that overlooked the elementary school, Thomas cut, weighed, and packaged a potpourri of drugs with studious precision.
Helen told Barbara she suspected that the search warrant was bogus because her son never ran a knock-and-buy operation.
“This is not like you could come to my house, knock on my door, and come in and buy drugs,” she said.
Barbara knew that Helen, without saying it, meant that her son didn’t roll that way—he gave the drugs to street corner dealers, probably so he wouldn’t risk getting his family booted out of public housing. This was home. The family had lived there ten years.
“I don’t understand why the cops were here,” Helen said with a shrug.
“Did you know your son was selling drugs?” Barbara asked flat-out.
“I kind of thought it, but I didn’t see it myself,” Helen said.
Some moms of drug dealers played dumb, telling us that they had no idea what cops had found in their homes. Not Helen. She told Barbara she knew cops had discovered crack cocaine, cocaine, and marijuana. She didn’t talk specifics or mention that inside her son’s bedroom, Jeff and his squad found marijuana in eighty-nine glass jars with pink lids and a digital scale.
Thomas didn’t have a job because of a bad knee, yet police found almost $2,000 in his pocket when he was arrested.
“They tore the whole house up. They didn’t find no guns,” she proclaimed, punctuating the end of her sentence with a slight smile and an expectant pause, as if waiting for Barbara to respond, “You go, girl! Those pesky cops are always making a big deal out of nothing.”
Helen cast herself in the role of victim. “It really makes me angry,” she said. “Cops are supposed to help us, not to lock people up for nothing so they can make themselves feel better. I think they get off on making themselves feel better.”
Barbara emerged from the house feeling like a hypocrite. She never intended to become a champion for the city’s drug dealers. It’s one thing to get all high and mighty about cops who piss all over the US Constitution, but she didn’t have to live here. Her children never had to go to school across the street from a drug dealer’s house.
Barbara could parachute into the city’s blood-splattered neighborhoods to report on the latest murder, then go home to comfy suburbia, where she never awoke to the sound of gunfire at midnight.
On the first morning of Thomas’s freedom, Barbara and I had a front-page story about how Pooh Bear was released from prison because the search warrant seemed to rely on fabricated evidence. The headline on the story: “Dismissed! People Paper Exposé Leads to Release of North Philly Man.”
Barbara and I groaned when we saw the photo and headline. We knew that the average reader would take one look at the headline and conclude that we were gleeful that we had helped free the neighborhood crack vendor. Most readers don’t know that reporters don’t write headlines. To further make us appear that we were empathetic to Cooper’s plight, the story featured a family photo of Thomas, this happy hulk of a man, grinning from ear to ear while holding his two small nephews, ages two and four months. The timing couldn’t be worse.
The day the story ran, yet one more slain police officer was buried. This time it was John Pawlowski, just twenty-five years old, the fifth officer killed in the line of duty in the past twelve months.
It was a hellish period for a police department that felt under siege. In a city where cops were heroes, the number of police deaths in such a short span was unprecedented. Soccer moms displayed photos of fallen officers in the back windows of their minivans. Cops fastened black ribbons over their badges, and working-class guys with grease under their nails wore T-shirts or buttons to memorialize the latest fallen cop.
For each funeral, the city came to a virtual standstill to allow for the motorcades that stretched for miles. Thousands of mourners, some waving American flags, lined the streets outside the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul. Cops from as far away as Canada came to pay their respects. The sound of sobs, the wail of bagpipes, and the tat-boom-tat of drums rose from the crowd as each flag-draped coffin was loaded into the hearse.
Pawlowski, whose father and brother were also cops, was shot to death by a revolving-door criminal, a parolee with a decade-long arrest record for theft, robbery, and gun crimes. When Pawlowski responded to a 911 call from a cabbie who said Scruggs was threatening him, Pawlowski ordered Scruggs to raise his hands. Instead, Scruggs squeezed the trigger of a .357 Magnum that had been tucked inside his coat pocket. A bullet tore into Pawlowski’s upper chest, just over the top of his bulletproof vest.
Busted Page 8
