Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts

by Mark Bowden

  There was pressure from above for arrests, Woods explained, but if Hersing cooperated, Woods could satisfy his inspector with a minimal disruption of business. When it was time for a bust, he would simply tip off 1245 Vine Street, and Hersing and Cinnamon could pick a prostitute to take the pinch. Woods would arrest the woman and see to it that she was booked and released as quickly as possible. That would cost a few dollars more. Later, the case would be dismissed. They always were. Hersing dubbed the system “Dial-a-Bust.”

  Woods took out a pen and scribbled something on a napkin. He pushed it across the table.

  “This is how much,” he said.

  It said $500. Hersing passed Woods $300 under the table. Outside in the Nova, on the way back to Vine, he reached into the other pocket and gave him the rest. Then Woods dropped him off in front of the studio.

  Such was Donald Hersing’s introduction to the City of Brotherly Love.

  It offended him. Didn’t they know who Donald Hersing was? Didn’t they know he wasn’t their average sucker pimp? Didn’t they know he was a man who took law enforcement seriously? That he was not the sort of man they ought to be pushing around?

  Even his best friends saw Donald Hersing as a peculiar, boastful character with shadowy connections. He had a new get-rich-quick scheme every week. The schemes usually involved other people’s money.

  Hersing was forty-six years old. At times, to look at him, he seemed much older than that, and at other times he seemed younger. It depended on his mood, or maybe on how many beers he had the night before. He was only of medium height, but he managed to look gangly. His arms and legs were long and thin, but his belly was wide. He walked balanced back on his heels, gut first, his long arms beating a wide cadence by his sides. Hersing favored casual knit pullover shirts and double-knit trousers with flared cuffs that he tended to wear too short, so that when he sat down his calves in black hose jutted up, as thin as table legs, from boots that reached just over his ankles. His head was small in proportion to the rest of his body. Hersing’s light brown hair was cut short and parted on the left side. His face angled in two deep furrows down his cheeks, ending in a narrow, receding chin. His skin was pink. It was lightly pocked from some childhood skin disease. Hersing still had exquisitely sensitive skin. Overnight an infection could blow up his hands or his feet with little bumps or deep red blotches. He was a chain smoker and an erratic eater. Most days, he looked unhealthy.

  Hersing grew up during World War II, which was not a happy time to be German-American in Trenton, New Jersey. The fourth of five children, he was born in 1934. His father, who kept his fluent German to himself, ran a restaurant. His mother worked as a dietitian at the state hospital in Skillman. Hersing attended Immaculate Conception grammar school and Trenton Catholic High, where he is remembered by classmates as a “cocky kid” who played football and basketball and seemed fascinated by gadgets and police work. He was addicted to “Dick Tracy,” and even sent away for a correspondence course on fingerprint identification. He would point to the space-age gizmos featured in the comic strip—the two-way wrist radios and so forth—and tell his friends that someday these things would exist.

  But what Hersing remembers most is not fitting in. Hardy homefront heroes in the township passed an ordinance restricting the liberties of German-Americans. They were not allowed, for instance, to own shortwave radios—nobody was going to beam to Berlin any delicate wartime secrets from the basements of Trenton, New Jersey. Hersing’s father didn’t own a shortwave radio anyway, but the ordinance worked its effect. Children at his school taunted him and his brothers and sisters, calling them “Nazis”—“You know, my father used to talk to Hitler every night, that kind of mentality.” He fought with the children who called him names.

  It was, perhaps, partly out of a desire to prove himself that Hersing forged his mother’s signature on documents to enter the Marine Corps when he was only sixteen. He stayed in for three years and liked it, he says, but was discharged when he began suffering migraine headaches. After leaving the Marines he married and went to work for a friend’s father who owned a car dealership in New Jersey. At the time, American dealers were making good money selling cars to GIs stationed in Germany. When he was offered a chance to go over as a salesman, Hersing jumped. The idea of foreign travel excited him. And he had extended family in that country, in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. His employer sent him to a Berlitz language school, where he picked up German quickly—partly, he figures, because his father had spoken the language around the house when Hersing was a small child. He stayed in Germany with his wife and young son for six years.

  Although he lacked college credentials, Hersing had accumulated his own odd international education by the time he returned to the Trenton area in the early 1960s. He prided himself on being smarter than most people suspected, which enabled him, he thought, to see through people, people who were cheating him or sneaking behind his back. He moved his family across the river to Levittown when he took a job in a dairy, and a few years later went to work for a tile factory. But these more conventional jobs bored him. His real fascination was still police work. He wanted to be a detective, a man who finds people and figures things out. But to be a detective, first he would have to wear a uniform and work his way through the ranks of a local police department. That held little appeal. And he wouldn’t make as much in uniform as he did in the tile factory.

  So he found his own way into police work. At the time, the Bucks County jail would issue “body receipts” for prisoners who had escaped or defendants who had skipped bail. If you could find those fugitives, the body receipts could be cashed in with local bonding companies, which were out a lot of money for every bail-jumper on their books. Hersing was good at it. He paid his own expenses, sometimes traveling to different states in search of his man. He says he found it easy to find people. “They don’t realize it, but people leave tracks,” he says. “Once you know where to look, it’s pretty easy to find them.” The hardest part was capturing a man once Hersing found him. He couldn’t enlist the help of local police. Usually the charges were too small and too distant for them to intervene; besides, Hersing would lose his commission. So he devised his own methods. He would send a telegram, and then wait for his target to show up at the Western Union office to pick it up. Hersing usually carried a gun. He didn’t mind describing himself to people as a bounty hunter. It sounded dangerous. And the work was occasionally lucrative. He cashed in some body receipts for as much as $6,000. Just for a few days’ work.

  Bounty hunting led to full-time private detective work. Hersing worked on accident investigations, divorce cases, and internal investigations for companies in the Levittown area. He even tracked down AWOL soldiers to collect commissions from the FBI. Hersing inhabited two worlds, one foot on either side of the law. He had a sweet tooth for the night life, for the bars and whores and pornography stores. He even opened a bar and lounge, which closed after he was arrested and subsequently convicted on bad check charges. But he also had friends on the other side of the law, in the courthouse and in the local Bucks County police departments. He kept odd personal hours, usually sleeping during the day, and seemed to work very little. He was not a person to be relied on for punctuality or for keeping small promises. He loved to tell stories about himself, and had a way of telling them that accented his own importance, or bravery, or intelligence, as if he were always trying to convince people. Those who knew him well recognized enough truth in the stories Hersing told not to dismiss them altogether. Seated in the corner of a seedy bar with his standard sixteen-ounce can of Pabst, Hersing might look like a drunk. At times he cultivated that image. But there was more to him than that. He could be savvy and articulate and when he talked one always sensed that he was sitting there beside himself watching himself, and quietly sizing up whomever he was talking to. The local police detectives and FBI agents considered Hersing a valuable contact, somebody who moved comfortably in places they could not easily go, who could find things
out that no one else knew.

  So Donald Hersing became the sort of man with whom everyone worked, but whom no one wanted, officially, to know. He saw himself as a freelance law enforcement expert. He took college courses in criminal investigation techniques and learned how to use sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment. Like most men given to self-aggrandizing talk, Hersing was full of self-aggrandizing notions. He read Soldier of Fortune, a magazine full of stories about mercenaries and spies, and—seeing himself as a sort of international figure—longed for international adventure.

  Hersing sought adventures of his own. In the early 1970s, through contacts at a company in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, named Criminal Research Products, Hersing was introduced to a whole network of American companies that manufacture sophisticated police equipment, things like fingerprinting kits, lie detectors, fluoroscopic investigating kits, and electronic eavesdropping equipment, all the stuff he had fantasized about as a kid. These firms published catalogues of the stuff, which read like Fascisti wish lists. Though it wasn’t always legal to export these things, arrangements could be made. With help from contacts he made in Philadelphia and New York through the Conshohocken company, Hersing began pursuing sales leads in the Caribbean and in Central and South America. His first trip was to San Juan in 1976, when the Puerto Rican government inquired about electronic beeping devices that attach to car bumpers, making a car easier to follow. Hersing flew down to demonstrate the equipment and teach them how to use it.

  His contacts spread rapidly. While he was in San Juan on one of his early trips, he was contacted by representatives of the rightist government of Dr. Joaquin Balaguer in the Dominican Republic, which was also interested in the bugging equipment he had brought down. His relationship with the Balaguer regime blossomed. For two years, Hersing maintained a home in Santo Domingo. He learned to speak Spanish, and enjoyed the advantages of living well in a poor country—he was able to rent a fine home and employ, for a pittance, a staff of servants. He taught the Dominican police how to use the equipment he sold. Through the late 1970s, Hersing felt that he had become the soldier of fortune he wanted to be. He traveled extensively, carrying his catalogues and trunks of equipment so prized by governments with strong enemies among their own people—to Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. As he was ushered hurriedly past customs officials in seedy alien airports, in his hushed meetings with generalissimos, Hersing was living a life he had only dreamed about back in Bucks County.

  Sometimes his wife and son lived with him in Santo Domingo, but they kept their home in Levittown. Hersing was often away for months at a time. When he was in Levittown, Hersing enjoyed the new aura of international mystery that surrounded him. A lot of people just assumed that he was working for the CIA, and Hersing, in so many words, encouraged the notion. He might have been. He was certainly in a position that the CIA would have found interesting. But, again, Hersing had one foot in each world. He had the contacts of an international spy, but he was working primarily for himself.

  When Balaguer lost power in 1978, Hersing’s exciting new life began to unravel. Investments he had arranged for financial backers at home soured. The more socialist government in the Dominican Republic refused to honor contracts made by the Balaguer regime. He made fewer and fewer tropical excursions. Soon he was back in Levittown permanently. Then his marriage fell apart. By 1979, Hersing was living alone, unemployed, bored, and in debt.

  But he stayed busy, in his own way. The subject of whorehouses first came up in the fall of 1980. During his Caribbean period, Hersing had met William Robertshaw, a construction contractor in Princeton, New Jersey. Robertshaw flew down to visit Hersing in Santo Domingo, and had invested in some of his friend’s projects there. When the deals fell through in 1978, Robertshaw lost a bundle—he estimates about $30,000. It was this loss that the two men were feeling when they decided to open the whorehouse in Philadelphia.

  The idea came, at least indirectly, from Cinnamon. Hersing had met Cinnamon, whose real name was Mary Angeli, in a Bristol Township pornographic bookstore, where she was managing a small prostitution business in the back room. Through her, he had become acquainted with Philadelphia’s flourishing underworld of strippers, pornographers, pimps, prostitutes, and swingers. One day that fall Hersing remembers showing Robertshaw an ad in The Philadelphia Journal for a “nude modeling studio,” a place where he says his friend Cinnamon had once worked. The ad featured a saucily smiling woman in a bikini and spiked heels. Both men were impressed by how openly the studio was advertising. And there were quite a few other ads like it in The Journal.

  It was Robertshaw who suggested getting into the whorehouse business, as Hersing recalls. “He said it must be very lucrative. Bill Robertshaw had a good brain when it comes to money. He said, ‘Look at the size of those ads! Can you imagine what they cost? They must cost about five hundred dollars each! They must make big money to do that. Why don’t you open one of them up.’”

  At first Hersing didn’t act on the suggestion. He had no experience running any kind of business, much less a nude modeling studio. But then, about a month later, Hersing says, Robertshaw asked him about it again. The man was serious. So—what the hell? Hersing was unemployed anyway. He and Cinnamon went down to Philadelphia and found a building. It was a three-story corner townhouse on the north side of Vine Street, within walking distance of the city’s commercial center but far enough away so that men could come and go inconspicuously.

  He and Robertshaw signed a lease and went to work. Robertshaw sent down a crew of carpenters to spruce up the place. They divided the first floor into seven rooms. There was a reception area in front, complete with Polaroid cameras—Cinnamon said there were always a few weirdos who really did want to take pictures. Behind that were six “session” rooms. Each room had a mattress on an elevated platform, a chair, a lamp, and a table. Upstairs were showers for the girls and a phone. They boarded up windows and painted the exterior of the house with an odd flesh tone Cinnamon had picked out. Gold carpeting went down. Fake wood paneling went up.

  Despite his reservations about managing whores, Hersing was impressed. The place was, he thought, no dump. It would cater to an above-average clientele, and should do a good business. But right away the negatives began to outweigh everything else. It was clear to him that Cinnamon was really in charge. She was, after all, better qualified. As soon as he had introduced her to Robertshaw, Cinnamon more or less took over. She talked Robertshaw into paying for fine details of furnishing that Hersing considered extravagant. Just days before the studio was to open, it occurred to Hersing that he didn’t even know where to find whores. Cinnamon told him not to worry, she would take care of that, too. Hersing felt unnecessary.

  Besides, he still had his law enforcement work. He was still a private detective. That was the kind of work that really excited him. One of his clients was Cinnamon. She had hired him in the summer of 1979 to help her deal with a local patrolman named Joseph Minnichbach who she felt was harassing her.

  Hersing placed a tape recorder under Cinnamon’s bed in a local hotel. As he tells it, Cinnamon then arranged for Patrolman Minnichbach to have a liaison there with a prostitute. The recorded evidence led Hersing’s friend, Bristol Township police chief John Tegzes, to fire the officer. The episode caused a scandal in the township that was still raging. Hersing had gotten a degree of satisfaction out of the case that was hard to explain.

  It was not the first time he had felt that way. He had been gratified in the same way eight years before, when he had helped the FBI and Tegzes, then a detective, with an internal probe that led, in 1976, to the indictment of three township detectives for illegal wiretapping—one man pleaded guilty, another pleaded no contest, and charges were eventually dropped against the third. Hersing liked catching bad cops. There was something especially pleasurable about it.

  Over the years, especially as his own unorthodox “law enforcement” experience grew, Donald Hersing had developed a peculiar love-hate r
elationship with police. Official law enforcement agencies, like the cliques of youths who had called him “Nazi” as a child, would never consider him one of their rank. It bothered him. He wanted to be recognized by them as at least an equal, if not for the expert he believed himself to be. Here was a man who spoke three languages fluently, who taught classes in other nations on how to use police equipment, whom the local police and the FBI had been coming to for years in his hometown when they needed help. Few things disturbed Hersing more than to be treated like an ignorant criminal, or to be taken for a sucker.

  So it had especially disturbed Hersing when he was notified, at about the time he returned from the Dominican Republic, that he was being investigated on smuggling charges. U.S. Customs officials were looking into some shipments of wiretap and polygraph equipment, semiautomatic rifles, and tear gas that Hersing had arranged while he was in Santo Domingo. To try to help himself, Hersing volunteered to assist with a federal investigation of the mob in Bucks County. That was dangerous work. Some of the people under investigation had been known to kill. Compared to this, the Bristol Township sting was a prank. Hersing hoped that if he helped the FBI enough, the Bureau would get the potential smuggling charges against him dropped.

  He tried hard. But in January 1981, a group of U.S. Customs agents knocked on his door in the dead of night and arrested him. He had been indicted by the U.S. attorney’s office and a federal grand jury in Philadelphia. Hersing was furious, but, more significantly, he was insulted. Didn’t they know who Donald Hersing was?

  “Those customs agents were asses, complete asses,” Hersing says.

  “They were totally incompetent—and I’m not saying that out of bitterness. I mean, they couldn’t use a camera, they didn’t know how to take fingerprints. The tape recorder wasn’t running for thirty-five minutes when they were interviewing me. And, then, the ability to separate people, see. If you’re an investigator, you know when you’re talking to a ‘strapper’—we call ’em a ‘strapper,’ an asshole—and when you’re talking to a guy who has technical knowledge, who really is experienced in the field of police work. You talk to him different than you talk to the average guy.