“The fact that many reluctant businesspeople have felt compelled to come forward with their complaints, risking their livelihoods and that of their families, indicates that the problem of police abuse has reached a boiling point,” Danilo and five other Hispanic leaders wrote.
Jose’s video forced Ramsey to do something that his predecessors had failed to do. He took a sledgehammer to the cliquish and chummy squads within the narcotics field unit, splitting up cops who had worked side by side for years.
Seven years earlier, a police watchdog had recommended regular reshuffling of narcotics officers and their supervisors to keep cops honest and prevent abuse. Police brass had ignored the recommendation—until now.
But Ramsey’s move to break up the ten narcotic squads did nothing to appease angry Hispanic leaders. “That’s just shuffling the deck. It’s just window dressing,” one said.
Ramsey’s style was to tackle thorny issues and criticism head-on. Before coming to Philadelphia in 2008, Ramsey had served as chief of police in Washington, D.C. As an outsider, Ramsey didn’t care whether he was popular among Philly’s rank and file. He agreed to address irate residents and merchants at a nighttime community meeting. The meeting was held at a church, not far from some of the bodegas raided by Jeff’s squad.
We didn’t both have to attend the meeting. One of us could have gone and written the story on deadline for the next day’s paper, but neither of us wanted to miss it. Ramsey had to appease an entire community because of our stories. Typically, Barbara and I wrestled with our own insecurities, fearing that we weren’t good enough or smart enough. For me, those doubts stemmed from grade school, when my teacher wanted me to repeat fourth grade and labeled me a “late bloomer,” which I thought meant I was destined for the tart cart, the short blue school bus that brought “slow” kids to special ed. Barbara’s doubtfulness, in part, came from her mom, an advertising sales rep who pushed herself to be No. 1, and set the bar high for Barbara. Her mom often started sentences, “The problem with you, Barbara, is . . .”
Now, at the community meeting, our insecurities were on hiatus, temporarily banished by our egos.
Ramsey stood up at the podium, looking weary, as usual. Whenever Barbara and I saw Ramsey, he looked as if he had fifty problems on his mind. The boyish freckles smattered across his face didn’t seem to mesh with his trademark stoicism. Ramsey had buried slain cops and fired dirty ones, each time finding just right the words to honor or scorn.
And here, before a contentious crowd of sixty or more, Ramsey again struck just the right note. “Corruption of any kind will not be tolerated in this department, period. And those who engage in it are going to face charges both from the department as well as criminal charges.”
Immediately, loud applause broke out in the church.
When the meeting ended, merchants and community leaders came over to Barbara and me. They grasped our hands in theirs and thanked us for exposing a wrong, for caring about them. I looked at Barbara and saw her green eyes moisten. We fed off their emotion and left the church feeling good about the Daily News and the power of journalism. At that moment, the death knell of our industry seemed remote.
23
BRIAN TIERNEY, AS CEO AND PUBLISHER OF THE DAILY NEWS AND THE INQUIRER, WAS IN THE FIGHT OF HIS LIFE. THE COMPANY WAS NEARLY $400 million in debt, with the economy, advertising sales, and newspaper circulation in a tailspin.
It wasn’t just Tierney’s money on the line. It was his reputation, his image. What Tierney had once visualized as a Hollywood script about a champion of a man who saved a dying business was turning into a story of doom. His dream was just that—a dream, almost a fantasy. Tierney loved the challenge of being the underdog in a business brawl, but this appeared insurmountable.
Tierney’s group failed to reach a deal with senior lenders, led by Citizens Bank, to restructure the debt load. And Tierney emerged as the protagonist in a Greek tragedy, playing out in US bankruptcy court, that would determine the fate of Philadelphia’s two largest newspapers.
He was also under fire for taking a 37 percent raise, which boosted his pay from $618,000 to $850,000 just two months before the bankruptcy filing. Leaders of the Philadelphia Newspaper Guild, the union that represented reporters, were furious because they had convinced union members to give up a $25-a-week raise to help stem the company’s financial hemorrhage. Tierney, who had put $10 million of his own money into buying the papers, argued he got the raise because he was doing two jobs—CEO and publisher—which effectively saved the company $1.25 million over two years. Still, Tierney rescinded the raise amid the outcry.
Barbara and I weren’t worked up over the whole Tierney raise controversy. Tierney had saved my job, and I was grateful. As long as our paychecks covered the bills and mortgages, Barbara and I were happy. We didn’t wish for Friday or watch the clock, willing it to 5:00 p.m. Journalism defined us. Our identities were so entwined with our work that when we were on a good story, everything else in our lives seemed rosy. My marriage was perfect, my kids were headed for Harvard, and Barbara went on dates with a confident zing and sang Rolling Stones tunes—off-key—while driving to work.
Even while home with the kids, I was still in work mode. I talked to Barbara so often that when my cell phone rang, Brody would say, “I hope that’s not Barbara wanting a playdate.” Each summer Karl and I took the kids to a weekend-long YMCA family camp on a lake dotted with cabins. When I told Brody that I wanted to be in the camp talent show, he said, “What’s your talent? Work? Are you going to get up there and work?”
For the first time in her journalism career, Barbara could work twelve-hour days whenever she wanted. When Josh and Anna were younger, she often had to race out at 6:00 p.m.—literally sprinting to her car—to shuttle Josh to hockey practice or Anna to dance class, and pick up the slack at home when her husband left for one of his many business trips. She had more freedom now that her kids were in college, but she felt alone. She missed the chatter and chaos of family life, and work filled a void.
As syrupy as this sounds, on most days Barbara and I saw the job as a privilege, and the Tainted Justice series affirmed it. A tidal wave was cascading over the newspaper business, with Tierney atop the peak in Philadelphia, yet Barbara and I were still on a journalism high.
Under Tierney, the Daily News was a favorite child. Even on Tierney’s darkest days, when his boyish, contagious enthusiasm was hard to muster, he walked through the Daily News newsroom, a flurry of energy, wisps of hair fluttering over his ears, to catch an elevator to his executive suite. He could have avoided reporters and taken the hallway to loop around the Daily News, but it seemed he needed to siphon the spirit, zeal, and zaniness of the newsroom. Barbara and I thought all the chatter about stories gave Tierney a daily reminder as to why the battle was worth it.
“Love that story today about . . . ,” he shouted to reporters. If not too rushed, he stopped to chat about the big story of the day.
From the jump, Tierney and the Daily News staff got each other. Tierney was a “bare-knuckles player in a bare-knuckles town and the Daily News was a bare-knuckles kind of newspaper.” That’s how Zack Stalberg, a Daily News editor for twenty years before Michael Days took the helm, summed up the relationship. Tierney also liked the fact that the Daily News was able to do a lot more with a lot less than the Inquirer. We were like a cheap date; we were low-maintenance—content to grab a Bud Light at a dive bar.
When creditors wanted to shutter the Daily News, not because we were bleeding money but because they thought our demise would help the Inquirer’s bottom line, Tierney refused. “As long as I’m running the place, the Daily News will never be closed.”
By spring 2009, media analysts were writing print journalism’s obituary. “It’s the end of the newspaper business right now, this point in time,” pronounced longtime media watcher Michael Wolff.
Tierney wouldn’t hear it.
“We,” he told CBS News, “are the originators of the investig
ative work that needs to be done.”
24
WE SPENT HOURS IN THE OFFICE, REPLAYING THE JOSE VIDEO. WE PAUSED IT ON A CLOSE-UP OF TOLSTOY’S FACE. WE ALREADY HAD HIS BADGE NUMBER; now we knew what he looked like.
Of all the cops in the video, Tolstoy came across as the biggest asshole, a caricature of a cop on a power trip, the self-important type who gleefully puts people in handcuffs, making them extra tight, and slams their heads against the cruiser to show who’s boss.
We wanted Lady Gonzalez to see Jose’s video, the version without the cops’ faces blurred. The cop who sexually assaulted her had told her to call him Tom. When Barbara and I first met Lady three months earlier, we hadn’t told her the cop’s full name. We wanted to play fair; we needed Lady to identify him without prompts from us.
Lady had grown to trust Barbara and me, so when we asked her to come to the office to see the raw video, she immediately agreed. We cued up the raw video on a computer in the newsroom and asked Lady to take a seat.
“Lady, we want you to look at this video and tell us if you recognize the cop who fondled you. I can’t tell you if he’s on here, and I can’t say anything while you watch it,” Barbara said.
She repeatedly said she was nervous and rubbed her palms up and down the front of her blue jeans.
“Okay. I’m ready,” Lady said softly before taking a deep heave of air.. Barbara pulled up a chair and sat next to Lady. I leaned over and pressed play.
There’s a few seconds of Jose talking on his cell phone, pacing back and forth in his store. Tolstoy hits the door first. He zooms in, gun drawn. “Hand me the phone. Gimme the phone,” Tolstoy orders.
Lady immediately stiffened, and her brown velvet eyes widened.
“Oh my God, that’s him,” Lady said. Tears spilled down her cheeks faster than she could wipe them away.
“Are you okay?” Barbara asked, putting her hand across Lady’s back.
“My heart is just racing right now,” Lady said, starting to tremble. “Just to see him come through that door like that makes me shake all over. It brings back a lot of bad memories.”
“Put your hands behind your back,” Tolstoy barks to Jose.
“That’s him talking right now. I know it,” Lady said. His loud and pompous voice was unmistakable.
“You’re sure?” Barbara asked. “You’re really sure?”
There was no doubt. Shortly after leaving the Daily News, Lady contacted internal affairs and the special victims unit to identify Tolstoy as her attacker. “He doesn’t deserve to wear the police badge. If he did it to me, he’ll strike again,” she said.
And yet Tolstoy remained on the street. Barbara and I thought this was mind boggling, indicative of a back-slapping good ol’ boys culture in which a cop’s word trumps a woman’s damning and convincing accusation. At the time, we didn’t know that internal affairs had a file on Tolstoy.
Barbara and I went back to the search warrant room. We had little to go on. No names or addresses, just a hunch that we’d find other victims.
We pulled search warrants for raids in which Tolstoy was present, combing through three years’ worth. Out of thousands, we set aside at least 150 warrants that listed Tolstoy’s badge number.
The warrants gave us the addresses and dates of the raids. To find people, Barbara and I typically used a database that culled information, like home mortgages, liens and bankruptcies, civil suits and voter records, creating thumbnail people profiles. All we had to do was type an address into the database, and names of occupants, both former and current, would pop up. But the women we were looking for lived off the grid. They didn’t have landlines, their cell phone numbers changed constantly, and they moved every few months.
Barbara and I would have to rely on old-fashioned shoe leather to find potential Tolstoy victims. The method was inefficient, tedious, and tiresome. We’d often arrive at a house to find the tenants long gone. Other times we’d find the house abandoned, the windows and doors boarded with graffiti-marred plywood. We kept in touch via cell phone, updating each other on our progress—or lack thereof.
Occasionally we went out together, and of course Barbara drove. One afternoon, we turned down a narrow street and found ourselves in the middle of a feud. Two men, each surrounded by their own posse, stood on opposite sides of the street, cursing at each other. One of the men walked over to a parked car and popped the trunk. “I’m gonna get my piece,” he said.
“Oh shit. Did he say he’s getting his piece?” I said.
“Yeah, we need to get out of here,” Barbara said.
That’s all we need, to get killed in the crossfire, I thought.
Barbara hit the gas, the car lurched forward, and she sped through the stop sign. “Whoa, Slicey,” I cautioned. Barbara stretched her right arm across my chest, like the protective bar on an amusement park ride, as I jammed my hands against the dashboard. We came to a dead stop, stuck behind an idling car parked in the middle of the one-way street. The driver was yapping to a guy on a stoop. This wasn’t a part of town where you wanted to beep your horn. We had two choices: wait, or reverse down the street. We waited.
When we finally tracked down people who got raided, they told us a slew of horror stories about the cops. Tolstoy and his squad members splintered doors with battering rams, urinated in bathtubs, poured bleach on family photos, upended couches, and sliced open cushions. The cops ordered pizza or made a McDonald’s run and then discarded empty boxes, Styrofoam containers, and food wrappers all over the house. They helped themselves to beer and vodka, drinking straight from the bottle. They spewed venom—“You people live like animals” and “This place stinks like shit.” They swiped whatever caught their eye—PlayStations, video games, CDs, jewelry. They always took money and even smashed kids’ piggy banks and pocketed coins.
Almost everyone Barbara and I talked to remembered Jeff, the cop they described as “the tall one with the blue eyes.” They mostly remembered his lunatic rants. “Get the fuck on the floor. Shut the fuck up!”
Jeff’s style was all gangbusters. “He started out with no respect,” a narcotics cop told us. “He’d say, ‘I have pictures of you, if you don’t tell me where the drugs are, you’ll lose your kids.’ He’d lose control. He started with chaos.”
But in Jose’s video, Barbara and I saw a softer side to Jeff. When the cops raided the store, a boy, roughly twelve years old, was inside.
The cops usher the boy to the front of the store and tell him to put his hands up. He stands with his back to the camera, his hands cupped to the back of his head, elbows out. Dressed in khaki shorts and a lime green shirt, the boy is a statue as an officer searches his pockets for a gun. Jeff approaches the boy and gingerly questions him. “Where do you live at? In the hood?” Jeff asks his name and age, then lightly pats the boy’s stomach and tells him to scram.
Barbara and I saw a tenderness there. It was like Jeff was two people.
We were getting a more complete picture of these cops. After each house we visited, Barbara and I made little notations on the search warrant:
This is a crack house. White girl (messed up) answered door. Didn’t want to talk; Mary Lou says the cops found small amount of pot in her house, stole two PlayStations and money; Fat short white guy choked me. I had kidney and pancreas transplant, threw me on the floor; Broke ceiling fans, asked me where cash box was, took $1,500, no woman there; Big guy put gun in my face and said what will happen if I pull the trigger.
Between my sleep-deprived mommy brain and Barbara’s early-onset senility, plus the sheer number of homes, we relied on these scribbled notes to keep track of which doors we’d knocked on and what people had to say about the raids.
At least a dozen women told us that Tolstoy and the other cops in his squad had degraded and demeaned them.
A forty-eight-year-old woman named Denise described Tolstoy’s modus operandi. The cop, whom she described as white and stocky with brown hair, took her alone to an upstairs bedroom. “What’s
your chest size?” the officer asked, eyeing up Denise’s generous breasts in her low-cut white summer dress. Denise gave him lip and more than a little attitude: “What has that got to do with anything?” With that, the cop backed down and didn’t touch her.
In another summertime raid, a thirty-year-old woman was asleep, naked, when the cops whooshed into her bedroom. She sat up, startled, gripping the bedcovers to her chest.
“I’m not dressed. I’m not dressed,” she shouted, but an officer, whom she described as white with a big belly, scruffy brown hair, and a small goatee, yanked the sheets from her fingers so viciously that she thought he was going to rape her. The woman reached for her clothes and turned to dress with her back to the cops, but the officer who pulled off the covers ordered her to face them. She stood naked before them. She was so terrified that she put her clothes on inside out. The cops sent her downstairs, and she heard them cackling in her bedroom. After they left, she found her personal items, including the couple’s sex toys, strewn around the room. They removed a black leather teddy from a drawer and laid it out on top of her dresser. The whole scene frightened her. The cops arrested her thirty-five-year-old husband for giving a few of his prescription painkillers to a friend. The couple lived in Cop Land, a term Barbara and I used to refer to the section of Philadelphia that many police officers, firefighters, and other city employees called home. The woman and her husband weren’t drug dealers; they were hardworking middle-class people, and the raid humiliated and wounded them. They felt such shame.
“I’ll never get that day out of my head,” the woman told me. “Ever since this happened, I don’t sleep. I’m not comfortable in my house. . . . I felt like all my dignity had been stripped from me.”
Busted Page 15
