Busted

by Wendy Ruderman

  This was a change in thinking for Tierney. Like a lot of publishers across the country, Tierney had believed that Internet advertising would save newspapers. He figured if he could drive up web traffic on Philly.com and increase the number of page views, he could charge more for online advertising. But even though the number of page views soared on Philly.com, the Internet became awash with competing websites, which drastically drove down the price of online advertising.

  “This aspect of the business really scares the crap out of me,” Tierney mused. “You look at it and you say to yourself, ‘Online maybe isn’t the future.’ . . . That was the killer for the model.”

  Tierney finally realized that newspapers as a for-profit venture were a thing of the past. But that didn’t stop him from fighting for his hometown papers, and he mounted a last stand against the lenders in the form of a “Keep It Local” advertising campaign that made them bristle.

  “You’re in Philadelphia, pal,” Tierney said. “This is my town. . . . If this was a box-manufacturing company in Akron, I wouldn’t be fighting like this. But I live here.”

  Tierney cast himself as the home-team backer, and the senior lenders, who included Angelo Gordon, a New York–based hedge fund that specialized in distressed debt, as vultures who would ruthlessly go after short-term dollars and erode the quality of journalism.

  Tierney’s sales pitch worked, and local investors—the very ones who had lost millions in the first 2006 go-around—once again agreed to put up money, this time sold on the notion that without their help, journalism in Philadelphia would die. The team assembled by Tierney also included new investors: benefactor David Haas, an heir to the Rohm & Haas chemical company fortune; Revlon chairman Ronald Perelman and his philanthropist father Raymond, who together threw in $27 million; and at the last minute, amid the heat of the auction, cable television mogul H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest, who went in for $10 million.

  The reality of the impending auction didn’t really hit Barbara and me. We were too focused on a fantasy. Barbara and I had already won two national awards for Tainted Justice. The Daily News had nominated Tainted Justice for a Pulitzer for investigative reporting, one of the hardest categories to win. Editors at big newspapers across the country nominate reporters every year. Being nominated was nothing more than a pat on the back by your colleagues. It had as much weight as a parent advocating that their kid deserved to be Student of the Year. The Daily News wasn’t exactly a heavy hitter in Pulitzer world.

  We couldn’t bring ourselves to say the word, even though there was buzz that we had a shot. Almost every other day, Barbara scooched over to my desk, crouched down until her Cheshire Cat face was at eye level with mine, and began to sway, hands clasped, as if praying or gripped by a stomach cramp. “Wendy,” she whispered, “can you imagine if we won the P? Imagine that?”

  Any chance of winning would require a little divine intervention. I took out an old photo of my dad. In the photo, I’m no more than fifteen, wearing a sea-green sundress, my long bangs feathered back à la Farrah Fawcett. I’m smiling at the camera, and my dad is gazing at me adoringly. I kissed the image of my dad’s face and tucked the photo under my pillow. While out for a jog, Barbara looked to the sky and talked to her mom. “Ma, please, please make this happen . . .”

  My dad died in 1997; Barbara’s mom died three years later, both of pancreatic cancer. Each was the parent who pushed us to achieve and understood what drove us. Barbara prayed to her mom when she was struggling and grieving over her divorce. I prayed to my dad for help when my three-year-old nephew developed a brain tumor. Barbara and I prayed to them when we wanted something really bad.

  At exactly 3:00 p.m. on Monday, April 12, 2010, the winners would be posted on the Pulitzer website, and Barbara and I would know if our break-glass-in-an-emergency parents came through.

  The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which administered the Pulitzers, tried to keep the winners a secret until the announcement. A committee of top-tiered editors and journalists from across the country judged the Pulitzers. Committee members often had friends or colleagues at newspapers that submitted Pulitzer entries. Once the committee had whittled down the entries to a few finalists, leaks happened, and winners and finalists got a heads-up.

  But on the Friday before the announcement, Barbara and I still hadn’t heard anything. We lingered around until about 7:00 p.m., when Michael Days stopped by Barbara’s desk on his way out. As the paper’s top editor, he’d be the one to get tipped off.

  “So I guess you haven’t heard anything,” Barbara said, looking at him, sullen, with her chin down and her head tilted to the side. Michael shook his head.

  “You would have heard something by now, wouldn’t you?” Barbara pressed.

  “Probably,” he said quietly. Michael promised to call her over the weekend if he got any news.

  All weekend, Barbara waited for Michael to call. Nothing. By Sunday night, I was depressed. I turned off my cell and went to bed.

  The next morning, I debated what to wear to work and whether to break out my contact lenses. I always felt more confident and less bookish without my eyeglasses. I settled on my beat-up ASICS sneakers, $2 black capris from Goodwill, a robin’s-egg-blue granny sweater, and saggy cotton undies. I slipped on my glasses. It was my no-win-Pulitzer look, insurance against getting my hopes up. I gave Karl a long squeeze and a kiss.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  “I know we didn’t win.”

  Driving to work, I could barely see out the windshield, which was splattered with purplish white bird droppings, and I couldn’t hear the radio over the rumble of my broken muffler. Barbara was just getting out of her car when I pulled into the parking lot. She wore fitted black slacks and a cotton-candy-pink sweater with a matching pink belt.

  “I’m sooooo depressed,” I said, as I hugged her.

  “Me too.”

  For weeks Barbara and I had nurtured a tiny sprout of hope, and we didn’t want that hope to die.

  By 2:30 p.m. Barbara had a migraine, and I was holed up in Gar’s office while he edited one of my stories. My phone rang.

  “Any word?” Karl asked.

  “Nope.”

  I hung up, releasing a puff of air through my lips. “Sorry, that was Karl. He wanted to know if we’d heard anything about the Pulitzer.”

  Gar seemed taken aback. The Daily News had won two Pulitzers in its eighty-five-year history—Richard Aregood won in 1985 for editorial writing, and Signe Wilkinson won for her editorial cartoons in 1992—and both times, Gar and the rest of the newsroom had gotten word ahead of time. Gar had plucked his sapling of hope and tossed it on the compost pile days ago. He had no intention of replanting any seeds until he checked with Michelle Bjork, the assistant managing editor who’d entered our series in the Pulitzer contest.

  Gar walked down the corridor to Michelle’s office and came back seconds later. “She hasn’t heard a thing.”

  Staring us in the face was Gar’s satirical poster, “Despair. It’s always darkest just before it goes pitch black.” At that moment, I didn’t see any humor in it.

  “It doesn’t matter. This was a great series. These prizes are all politics,” Gar said, waving his arm dismissively.

  At 2:55 p.m., Michael summoned Barbara and me to a computer in the middle of the newsroom.

  “Why does he want us to see that the New York Times or the Washington Post won?” Barbara muttered in my ear.

  “I’m not going over there,” I told her.

  “We have to. Michael wants us over there.”

  We walked over to the computer, feeling as if the entire newsroom was about to witness our heartbreak.

  31

  AT 2:59 P.M., I CHEWED MY NAILS AND LOOKED DOWN AT THE FLOOR. BARBARA STOOD LIKE A STATUE, ARMS FOLDED, HER LIPS DRAWN TIGHT. MICHAEL seemed anxious, too. He pressed his right palm to his cheek. Michelle Bjork sat at the computer, the Pulitzer website already on the screen. She repeatedly tapped the refresh
button, but the site had yet to be updated with the 2010 winners.

  Then at 3:04 p.m., we heard shouts from across the room. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” It was Kevin Bevan, the burly lumberjack-like news editor who’d coined the phrase “Tainted Justice.”

  “Yes? Yes?” Michelle called out.

  There it was on the computer screen. “2010 Pulitzer Prize winners: Investigative Reporting. Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News.”

  The newsroom went bonkers. Gasps exploded into joyful shrieks and raucous cheers. Barbara and I sprang into the air like spastic crickets. Barbara’s long, honey-colored hair flew upward into a tangled flame, and we bear-hugged Michael, who lifted us off the ground and spun us around. Much of the staff was crying.

  Barbara called Josh and Anna, her voice high-pitched in a Minnie Mouse squeak. “I won. We won the Pulitzer.”

  “I knew it, Mom. I knew you’d do it. I’m so proud of you,” Josh said.

  I called Karl at home. “We won!”

  “You won!”

  “Yeah, we won! Get your ass down here!”

  Bottles of champagne materialized, followed by the sound of popping corks. Someone handed me an opened bottle of champagne. I looked around for cups and didn’t see any, so in a moment of lunacy, I took off my smelly sneaker and poured bubbly into the insole. I gripped the sneaker by the heel, tilted it to my mouth and took a giant swig. It was my tribute to shoe-leather journalism—in a newsroom with no cups.

  When Karl arrived, gripping Brody’s hand and holding Sawyer on his hip, everyone applauded, and Karl’s eyes welled up. They were clapping for him. He had survived a year as a single dad, a year of feeding the kids dinner, giving them baths, putting them to bed, and waiting up for me—often past midnight. I couldn’t have won a Pulitzer without his help, and everyone knew it.

  Soon, Inquirer reporters and editors graciously came down to our newsroom to congratulate us. By then someone had found cups, and the champagne flowed.

  The crowd pressed Barbara and me to say a few words, and the room fell quiet. In halting, half-finished sentences, we told everyone that this wasn’t just our Pulitzer, it was theirs, too. They had picked up the slack, reporting and writing two or three stories a day so Barbara and I could chase Tainted Justice. “How many papers with thirty people . . . win a Pulitzer,” Barbara said shyly, shrinking from the attention.

  With that, Michael raised his glass. “It’s a great day at the Daily News.”

  Brian Tierney was at a Newspaper Association of America convention in Orlando when he got the call from Michael. He stood alone in an empty ballroom after a meeting had just broken up. He hung up the phone and stepped into the hallway, where bigwigs from the nation’s most prestigious newspapers milled about. He wore a high-wattage grin.

  “What’s up?” asked a Washington Post executive.

  “The Daily News just won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism,” Tierney blurted.

  They gathered around, patting him on the back, “Way to go, Bri. Way to go, Brian!”

  Tierney later laughed at himself when he realized that most of the newspaper executives congratulating him didn’t mention that they, too, had snagged a Pulitzer, though in a different category.

  But the Daily News was an underdog—the only paper in the country to win a Pulitzer while in bankruptcy. Tierney was on a roll.

  “A while back, I was saying that I had this dream we would win at the Third Circuit, then win a Pulitzer, and then we had a good outcome on the auction. . . . Two out of three ain’t bad, so, so far, so good,” Tierney told New York Times media writer David Carr.

  About two weeks after we won the Pulitzer, a tense, twenty-nine-hour auction of the newspapers played out at a midtown Manhattan law firm. Tierney and his investment team were holed up in one room, while the creditors were bunkered in another, each camp sleep-deprived, fueled by coffee and emotion, as the bidding war ratcheted up. Tierney’s group hit $129 million, and the creditors topped that bid by $10 million. It was soon clear that no matter how much Tierney’s group put in, the creditors were going to outbid them.

  In the end, the creditors won control of the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com for $139 million—roughly one quarter of the $515 million sale price four years earlier. Tierney couldn’t believe he’d lost. He turned to his group, his brown eyes and round face bewildered. “That’s it? It’s over? We’re done?”

  Tierney felt helpless, just like when he learned his parents had died. “When my mom and dad, both times, when I got a call that they had died, there’s that sense when you put the phone down, and you realize there’s not a darn thing I can do. There’s nobody I can call, there’s no, like, ‘Oh, let me run there and I can help you.’ There was nothing you could do, and this felt the same way.”

  Tierney boarded a train home from New York City and slumped into a seat. He stared out the window, nursing a Scotch. The train rolled into Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street Station, where Tierney was met by a throng of TV, radio, and print journalists—all looking for a quote to that rote reporter question, “How do you feel?”

  “It’s been a heck of a fight. . . . We didn’t make it. I think I’ll go home tonight and sleep like a baby, which means I’ll wake up every hour crying,” Tierney said, stealing John McCain’s line when he lost the 2008 presidential election to Barack Obama.

  On May 21, 2010, Tierney sat in his twelfth-floor office for the last time. Feeling spent, he removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He packed up his belongings and walked out of the ivory tower on Broad Street.

  Three days later, on a drizzling Monday morning, Barbara and I, along with Karl, walked through the gates leading into Columbia University’s majestic campus. We climbed the steps to the Low Library, an imposing neoclassical edifice, where the Pulitzers are awarded every year. We walked through the doors, greeted by bronze busts of Zeus and Apollo. Tables draped with white linen and adorned with china plates and wineglasses sat underneath the 106-foot ceiling of the library’s rotunda, surrounded by solid green marble columns.

  We sat at a table with Michael Days, Gar Joseph, Michelle Bjork—and Brian Tierney. After accepting the award at the podium, we came back to the table, and Tierney stood up. He hugged us and wiped tears from his eyes.

  “A beautiful and poetic ending,” he said.

  The Pulitzer committee cited Barbara and me for “resourceful reporting.”

  On the cab ride to the train station, I looked over at Barbara and smiled. “‘Resourceful.’ Resourceful—they got that right, Slime Sista,” referring to the nickname bestowed upon us by our cop detractors.

  “You think resourceful is another word for crazy?” Barbara asked.

  We laughed and playfully swatted each other on the arm.

  EPILOGUE

  AS OF JULY 2013, FOUR YEARS AND FIVE MONTHS AFTER OUR FIRST TAINTED JUSTICE STORY, THE FIVE OFFICERS AT THE CENTER OF THE INVESTIGATION, including Jeff Cujdik And Tom Tolstoy, have not been charged with a crime. All but one, who retired, are still Philadelphia police officers, although they remain on desk duty. They still earn paychecks, paid by taxpayers, and are building up healthy pensions.

  The city has paid out almost $2 million to settle thirty-three lawsuits filed by bodega owners and two women who claimed they were victimized by these officers. In settling the cases, the city did not admit any liability.

  The FBI has refused to divulge the status of the probe.

  John McNesby, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, continues to staunchly defend the officers. He is adamant that the officers did nothing wrong and will be back on the street soon. He wants the city to award the officers hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost overtime. In Philadelphia, cops can win back pay based on a hypothetical, arguing that they would have earned a certain amount of extra money had they not been placed on desk duty. In this case, the theoretical overtime owed to Jeff and the other officers could exceed $1 million.

  George Bochetto, the bull
dog attorney who defended Jeff and railed when we first met him, “What do you guys think you are going to do? Win a Pulitzer Prize?” still practices law in Philadelphia. About a month after winning the Pulitzer, Barbara and I bumped into him at a state awards banquet. He sheepishly congratulated us. He shook our hands while patting us on the back. He leaned in closer and in a half whisper, half mumble, said, “I didn’t realize . . .” That moment was almost as satisfying as winning the Pulitzer. Not really, but you get the point.

  Jose Duran, the bodega owner who captured the officers on video cutting surveillance camera wires in his store, lost his business shortly after the raid. He couldn’t afford his mortgage and had to sell his large South Jersey colonial. He now rents a smaller rancher on a busy street. He works as a butcher in the meat department at a Costco.

  Dagma Rodriguez and Lady Gonzalez struggle to get past what happened to them. They’re angry and incensed that Tom Tolstoy remains an officer. “If it would have been any other citizen on the street, he would be in jail already,” Lady said.

  Tolstoy, who never met with or talked to us, does have a dream though: He plans to open a charter school for teenagers who want a career in law enforcement.

  The feds stopped paying for Benny’s housing. He had become too much of a handful. They wanted him to stay out of Philly, but he kept returning to the very streets where he had set up drug dealers. He felt compelled to apologize to them for what he had done. But that only made them more vengeful. Barbara spent more than an hour on the phone with one drug dealer, convincing him not to kill Benny. Eventually, we lost touch with Benny.