“Why do you keep locking the door?” Karl asked after dropping Brody at school.
“I don’t know,” I said dumbly.
I wasn’t a door-locker by nature, and Karl knew that I rarely bothered to lock the door when we left to go grocery shopping or out to dinner.
During a morning run, on a winding road without sidewalks, Barbara jumped into the bushes when a speeding pickup truck veered toward her. This is it, she thought. The pickup rocketed by, disappearing around a curve, and she breathed puffs of relief, uncertain whether to laugh at herself or hurry home.
Barbara’s neighbor, Hutch, walked across the street to her house every night before she came home from work to flip on every overhead light and lamp. The past three years, Barbara and Hutch had had an on-again, off-again relationship. She’d met him three months after moving here with her teenage children, her divorce still raw. She gardened obsessively, thinking a manicured lawn, prettied up with flowers, could mask the chaos of an uprooted life. On a Saturday afternoon in May, Barbara kneeled in the dirt and planted yellow and purple pansies. She thought of her ex-husband, all the weekend afternoons, twenty-five years together, spent working on the lawn. She looked a mess in her mud-splotched running clothes, her eyes pink and puffy from crying, when Hutch yelled from across the street, “How about coming over for a get-to-know-your-neighbor drink?”
It took her three weeks to fall for him.
Hutch, a rugged, broad-shouldered, six-foot-tall man with a strong jaw, was like a teenager with a bad-boy edge. He had a bald spot and a nose that sported a bump and curved slightly to the right—the result of three bloody breaks sustained in ice hockey and wrestling dustups. He didn’t walk; he swaggered, exuding self-confidence.
After the divorce, Barbara probably needed someone like Hutch. They spent evenings in his basement, dancing to Led Zeppelin and the Cure like high-schoolers. He wasn’t guarded with his emotions and spoke without a filter. But over time, some of his raunchy, off-color remarks made Barbara cringe. They often had spats about race, politics, priorities, lifestyles, children. A gun lover, he kept a 9mm Glock in his bedroom dresser and stashed shotguns and hunting rifles in a locked safe. Barbara hated guns. The highs of the relationship were euphoric; the lows chipped away at her.
Barbara hadn’t dated in over twenty-five years, and Hutch was the opposite of her ex-husband, Matt. Matt was reserved, reliable, predictable, and so steady that his emotional pendulum rarely budged. Those were some reasons she fell in love with him. He grounded her. Matt was the “Whoooa, Nellie” to her exuberant “Giddy up! Woo-hoo!”
The problem was, Hutch was a little too “Woo-hoo” and that scared Barbara. She pictured herself with a man whose personality was a blend of Matt and Hutch’s. But dating was hell.
On one date, a guy pulled up his pant leg to show Barbara his tattoos. On his calf, he had tattooed the name of his then-wife inside a heart. When he started dating after his divorce, his new girlfriend hated the tattoo, so he covered up his ex-wife’s name with a rose and added the girlfriend’s name in bigger print underneath. Barbara imagined her name, in even larger letters, scrawled underneath the ex-girlfriend’s name, camouflaged with a giant pink chrysanthemum.
Another guy described himself as “athletic and toned” on his Match.com profile and looked about 180 pounds in his photo. Barbara didn’t recognize him when they met. Somewhere along the way, he’d packed on an extra hundred pounds. He confessed that he first called Barbara from the family station wagon because he was still living with his ex-wife. He assured Barbara that he wasn’t intimate with his ex and slept in the den on a broken La-Z-Boy chair.
Still another guy, who Barbara had really liked, turned out to be a pathological liar. He even spun a tale about making pot roast for his grown daughters, when he’d really ordered pizza.
“It was the pot roast,” Barbara told me incredulously. “Why would he lie about pot roast? I mean, pot roast, Wendy. As if I care that he didn’t cook.”
Barbara shared her dating horror stories with Hutch. He had a few of his own.
“I keep telling you. I’m the one for you,” said Hutch, who then smiled, threw his shoulders back, and swept his hands up and down his body, stopping at his crotch. “Look. I’m the full package.”
Hutch liked to parody the line from Jerry Maguire, in which Tom Cruise tells Renée Zellweger, “You complete me.”
“I,” Hutch said with a theatrical pause, “complete myself.”
Even when Barbara and Hutch weren’t dating, they stayed friends, and Hutch loved being her protector. After he lit up her house like the Griswold family’s Christmas, he would poke his head into every closet and under all three beds. During the nightly patrol, he had a Glock holstered on his hip, just in case. Years ago, he’d been a cop and had a license to carry.
“Hutch can be soooo sweet sometimes,” Barbara told me.
Around this time, George Bochetto, the hawkish attorney hired by Jeff, was readying a Laker-Ruderman smackdown. He assured Jeff that we were easy prey. He’d clobber us. On Jeff’s dime, Bochetto hired a private investigator to blast holes in Benny’s story and discredit our work.
The PI spent days interviewing Benny’s relatives and former bosses, who characterized Benny as an unredeemable liar, con artist, drug addict, and thief, disowned by his own father. He pulled Benny’s criminal record and interviewed cops who vouched for Jeff, casting him as the kind of cop they’d want beside them in a foxhole. Jeff’s former partner, Richard Eberhart, denied knowing that Jeff rented a house to Benny. He claimed Barbara had twisted his words. The PI pulled Jeff’s awards, commendations, and letters of praise from community leaders. He compiled the interviews and documents into a textbook-thick binder, which included exhibits A through K.
With the PI’s report in hand, Bochetto set about organizing a news conference with the Fraternal Order of Police. In Philly, politicians tiptoed around the FOP. Lawmakers and judges who dared to poke the 14,600-member beehive with a stick felt their collective sting. The FOP relentlessly bashed municipal court judge Craig Washington when he refused to allow a memorial photo of slain officer John Pawlowski to rest on the bench during court proceedings. The police union hung a huge banner reading “DUMP Judge Craig Washington” outside its headquarters.
Barbara and I had whacked the beehive with a baseball bat. We’d taken on one of their own, and the cops were about to unite in a swarm.
14
WE WALKED OVER TO FOP HEADQUARTERS ON A FRIGID, WIND-WHIPPED AFTERNOON IN LATE FEBRUARY. A UNION SECRETARY DIRECTED US TO A HALL, no fancier than a grade school gymnasium, where the FOP held parties and fund-raisers for families of fallen officers. Rows of folding chairs sat before a stage. Reporters from every news outlet in the city filed in. Barbara and I took seats up front. We exchanged polite, nervous chatter with the Inky reporter seated next to us. FOP president John McNesby took to the podium. A semicircle of fifteen plainclothes cops lined up behind McNesby. They stood shoulder to shoulder, arms crossed, glaring at us.
Bring it on, I thought.
“At a time when we’re burying police officers at an alarming rate,” McNesby began, “we have a newspaper that on the same day—the same day—we’re laying one of our fallen heroes to rest, is persecuting another officer for frivolous, mindless, baseless allegations.”
McNesby was a former narcotics cop who had worked with Jeff. With his square head, rotund body, and triple-thick turkey neck, McNesby was a city icon. He was famous for his inappropriate, politically incorrect rants, which reporters considered a gift, a pinch of hot sauce to spice up an otherwise bland story.
McNesby swore that the FOP would “go to the wall” to defend Jeff. The attack turned personal. “You have to remember, you’re dealing with a confidential informant here. A confidential informant in the city of Philadelphia is one step above a Daily News reporter.”
The snarky remark drew laughter and applause from the roomful of cops. I could feel my cheeks redden in anger.
I crossed my legs and began to furiously pump my foot. I was having a Napoleonic moment. I envisioned pulling all of McNesby’s search warrants. He better watch it, or we’ll investigate his fat ass, I thought.
Next came Bochetto’s turn on the podium. He handed out copies of the binder compiled by his private investigator. The binder, Bochetto promised, offered proof that Jeff had rented the house to Sonia, not Benny. How was Jeff to know that Benny had struck up a romantic relationship with Sonia? The argument was so stupid that I bit the inside of my cheek to stifle a snicker.
The supremely confident Bochetto was spooling out a barn burner. He began to pontificate: Naturally Benny was scared. The guy set up scores of dangerous drug dealers who wouldn’t hesitate to kill him. “His life was in danger and in order to save himself, he made up this fanciful story . . . that Jeff Cujdik made up all the facts in the affidavits and that it couldn’t possibly be him. Why? To save his own skin!”
Bellowing from the podium with the fire of a preacher, Bochetto claimed he had warned Barbara and me, weeks ago, that to print Jeff’s name would put the cop and his family in danger, and we’d responded, “That’s not our concern.” It was like pouring gasoline on a flame; a disapproving gasp rippled from one cop to the next. I wanted to jump out of my seat and scream, as if it were the Salem witch trials, “He’s lying!”
Bochetto said he’d been preparing a lawsuit against the Daily News when the company filed for bankruptcy protection. Now he wasn’t sure if a suit would be feasible. The press conference, he said, would serve to put an end to the hysteria generated by a newspaper desperate to stave off its extinction.
McNesby and Bochetto vilified us for almost fifty minutes. The moment they finished, TV news crews swung around and trained their video cameras on Barbara and me. They trailed us out of the building; they needed b-roll of our stricken faces for the evening newscast. Two radio reporters and the Inky’s Joseph Slobodzian, whom reporters called Joe Slo because they couldn’t pronounce his name, asked us for comment. Barbara and I didn’t know what to do.
“Maybe you should call Michael Days for comment,” I said.
Never before had the FOP orchestrated a press conference specifically to single out and intimidate individual reporters. The attack was unprecedented, and Michael Days, a journalist for more than thirty years, knew it. Looking back, he wished he’d sent another reporter, instead of Barbara and me, and fretted that he’d inadvertently subjected us to a public flogging.
Now he worried about our safety. Police officers were anguished and their emotions volatile over the deaths of so many of their brethren, and Michael feared they’d misplace their anger.
Philly cops and the Daily News had a long-standing adversarial relationship. To us, “the People Paper” wasn’t just a slogan; it was a journalistic doctrine. That meant we didn’t just regurgitate the police version of a controversial story, like a police shooting. We hit the streets to get the neighborhood’s account.
Michael knew the Tainted Justice series would forge an even wider divide between the newspaper and the police department. But he didn’t waver.
Michael, at fifty-five, had a glossy bald head and a compact, athletic build. He favored steel-gray suits, paired with a bold-colored tie and crisp shirt. He scanned the paper early every morning and tore out stories he liked, scribbling words of praise on Post-it notes. Denise Gallo trotted across the room in her sensible pumps and slipped the Mike-agrams into our mailboxes. Michael was so generous with accolades that sometimes we wanted to ask, Did you really like it? Or are you just being nice?
At news meetings he listened intently, his right palm pressed against his cheek, as editors describe the day’s top stories. He never raised his voice. He wasn’t the type of boss people feared. When he disapproved of something one of his editors said, he’d drop his chin to his chest and tilt his head to the side. He’d raise his brows and widen his eyes with a fixed stare.
“Oh reeeeally now,” he’d say slowly, probably thinking, C’mon, are you for real?
And when something tickled him, he let out a loud, contagious chuckle that made his body shake so hard that he gripped his tie to keep it from swaying back and forth.
Michael became the first black editor in Daily News history in 2005. He loved stories that thrust the bullhorn into the hands of the little guys, people on the fringes who felt neglected, even punted to the curb, by the city’s power elite. Michael understood the struggles of row-house people because he was one. He and his younger sister grew up in a hard-bitten part of North Philly with their mom, who didn’t have a high school diploma and worked long hours making salads at the stately and grand Ben Franklin Hotel.
His mom, a strict, no-nonsense woman who stressed education, wouldn’t allow Michael to use the word can’t. She enrolled him in Catholic school, even though they were Baptists, because she believed public schools weren’t good enough. They rarely ate in restaurants, didn’t have money for a car, and his mom didn’t have one credit card, but once a year, she took them to see Santa Claus at the Wanamaker Building, where they ate lunch in the elegant Crystal Tea Room with hand-carved columns, intricate crystal chandeliers, and crisp table linens.
Michael came of age when the civil rights movement was in full throttle. In 1967 Thurgood Marshall became the first black Supreme Court justice, but out on the streets, police were using tear gas, whips, and clubs to subdue civil rights marchers. Michael was a high school sophomore when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. He boiled with anger.
In 1991 Michael and his wife did something few couples would even consider: they adopted four brothers, between the ages of four and nine, who had bounced from foster home to foster home. The boys had deep emotional scars from being born to a drug-addicted mom and a father they didn’t know. Michael and his wife soon learned the youngest was autistic.
At home and at work, Michael dutifully played the role of quiet guardian. Barbara and I never doubted he would defend us. The quote he provided for the FOP story was so Michael—succinct and definitive:
“The stories are accurate and we will defend our reports and our reporters.”
15
A FEW DAYS AFTER THE FRATERNAL ORDER OF POLICE NEWS CONFERENCE, IN EARLY MARCH 2009, TIME MAGAZINE LISTED THE DAILY NEWS AS NUMBER one on its list of “The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America.”
But Barbara and I had a plan that had nothing to do with our newspaper’s predicted demise. We had to track down every drug informant who had ever worked with Jeff. High on our list was Tiffany, a hellcat and former stripper from the row-house-lined streets of Philly’s Kensington neighborhood, home to a hodgepodge of hustlers, from hookers and drug dealers to minimum-wage workers juggling two jobs and sorry souls eternally on the dole.
Tiffany’s ex-boyfriend claimed that she and Jeff had conspired to set him up in a lover’s revenge plot, and that Jeff lied on the search warrant used to raid his house.
We wanted to hear what Tiffany had to say about Jeff. We knew she wouldn’t be happy to see us. But it never—not for a minute—occurred to us that it could be dangerous for us to pursue Tiffany, even though a year earlier, cops had arrested her for bashing a man in the head with a glass bottle and stealing $250 and a necklace.
On a cold gray afternoon in early March, with a snowstorm looming, Barbara knocked on the door at Tiffany’s two-story redbrick row house. At twenty-eight, Tiffany was the mother of two kids by two different men and still lived with her parents. Her mom, Mickey, answered the door with a Marlboro Menthol wedged between two fingers. Mickey stood steely and stone-faced in the doorway. Barbara offered a sunny hello and thrust out her hand, which Mickey reluctantly shook. Still gripping Mickey’s palm, Barbara stepped closer and wormed her way into the living room.
Mickey was a stout and sturdy woman who favored baggy T-shirts and sweats. She was fifty-one years old and had had the same job as a machine operator at a ribbon factory for nearly two decades, working the overnight shift from 2:30 a.m. to 1
:00 p.m. On Fridays, she stopped by the liquor store to pick up her favorite—coconut vodka.
Barbara smiled as she plopped herself down on a velour couch the color of rotted red grapes and opened her notebook.
“I was just wondering,” said Barbara, trying to sound casual. “Have you ever seen Jeff? Has he ever been over to the house?”
Mickey proceeded to tell Barbara that Jeff had showed up on her doorstep after Tiffany got arrested for aggravated assault and robbery. He handed her $300 in cash to bail Tiffany out of jail. Wow, this is good stuff, Barbara thought as she felt the first pinpricks of adrenaline, the rush that reporters feel when they get a juicy nugget. Barbara instinctively knew that Jeff had crossed the line when he footed Tiffany’s bail. With her cheeks warm and head down, Barbara scribbled away. She flipped the blue-lined pages with her fingertips like paper somersaults as quickly as Mickey spoke. She was so focused and excited that she didn’t pay any attention to the loud stomps from the top of the staircase leading to the second floor. Tiffany barreled down the steps, a she-devil with a pierced nose and long, dirty blond hair flaring out behind her, and charged toward Barbara.
“I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you!”
When Barbara looked up, Tiffany loomed over her. The first strike came hard and fast, Tiffany’s open hand slamming into Barbara’s left cheek and knocking her head sideways. The second belt, to Barbara’s right cheek, had even more force. Barbara felt the sting of something hard, maybe Tiffany’s rings as they whacked into her cheekbone. Barbara let go of her notebook and crossed her arms over her head in an X shape to shield her face from more blows. Tiffany snatched the notebook and hurled it across the room. It landed near Mickey, who just sat there, on an adjacent couch, not saying a word, as Barbara cried out, “Please! No!”
Barbara stood up, the pen on her lap dropping to the floor, and quickly grabbed her brown leather purse. She crouched low, her back hunched, and darted across the room as if dodging gunfire. Her hand shook as she scooped up the notebook and sprinted out the front door.
Busted Page 10
