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

by Mark Bowden

  “All right.”

  Before he left, Hersing told Woods that he was going to be taking over an apartment down on South Street. Maybe they could meet there next. And Hersing asked if Woods would consider accepting less money during July and August. After all, as Woods had agreed, business fell off badly in the summer. Hersing said they might have to lower the price of a session to $20. Woods promised to talk it over with Ray Emery, his partner, and get back to him. He sounded sympathetic.

  “Okay, George. I appreciate you bringing up the beer.”

  “You take care of yourself,” Woods said, and then called Hersing “Roger.” He laughed, and said, “Why am I calling you Roger?” Roger was the old code name, back before things had grown more informal between them.

  “We’ll get together for a drink when you get back,” Hersing said.

  “Sounds good,” said Woods as he walked down the hallway toward the elevator. “Hope your legs work out all right.”

  “Thanks, George.”

  Downstairs, the FBI agents saw Woods leave an elevator, cross the lobby, and exit into the night. They waited a few minutes just to make sure he was gone. Alone upstairs, Hersing sat a few minutes and then, groaning, he pulled his feet from the cold tub and walked across the room to turn off the recorder.

  The meeting had lasted about forty-five minutes. They had at last gotten a payoff on tape. This meeting would prove to be the meat of their case against George Woods, but it had fallen short of their hopes. Woods hadn’t taken the bait when Hersing pressed him about meetings with higher-ups. Maybe they were on to just an isolated instance of corruption. But what was all this talk of the new inspector being so “hungry”?

  As Thompson and Lash returned this new scrap of electromagnetic evidence to their office safe that night, it was clear that Woods was not going to open any doors for them. Hersing would have to explore a new route, one that had opened up unexpectedly just a few weeks before.

  George Woods offered at best a paltry police protection service. Every time the plump little officer with the moustache called to arrange a “Dial-a-Bust” at one of Donald Hersing’s whorehouses, Hersing was out about $500 in legal fees, courthouse payoffs, and compensation to the prostitute who agreed to take the pinch. That was on top of the monthly payoffs of $500 for the 1245 Vine Street studio and $300 for the one at 2209 Walnut Street. The women hated it. It was a hassle.

  And Hersing could see that things weren’t getting better. Ever since the central police division got its new commanding officer, Woods seemed under even more pressure to make arrests. It was either because this new inspector, John DeBenedetto, was eager to make life difficult for the sleaze merchants in his division, or because Donald Hersing (and the FBI) were paying off at the wrong level.

  What would turn out to be Hersing’s last payoff to Woods took place early in August at Kelly’s Irish Pub, at Broad and Race Streets. An FBI agent with a tape recorder was positioned near the two men as they met and exchanged $500, but there had been so much noise in the bar that the tape was worthless. At that point both Hersing and the agents were through with Georgie Woods anyway. Hersing, in his role as a whorehouse owner, was getting fed up with Woods’s costly, almost comical Dial-a-Busts, and was eager to start doing business with someone who could offer him serious protection.

  Hersing’s ticket to the upper ranks was a police detective whom he had met through his accountant, Gene Botel. Botel had brought the detective along one March afternoon to meet Hersing for lunch at Fireman Jr.’s, a luncheonette directly across 13th Street from the Vine Street whorehouse. The detective’s name was Abe Schwartz.

  Botel and Schwartz were friends. Abe was everybody’s friend. He had served for forty-one years in the Philadelphia Police Department—one of the longest careers of anyone on the force. Technically, Schwartz was a detective in the east division, assigned to investigate applications for gun permits. But he counted among his good friends the highest-ranking members of the department. They told jokes about Schwartz’s popularity in the department, like the one about the pope: “Who’s that guy in white in this picture of Abe Schwartz at the Vatican?” East detectives had thrown a lavish banquet the year before to mark Schwartz’s fortieth anniversary on the force. About four hundred people crowded into Pinocchio Ristorante on Cottman Avenue, among them Commissioner Morton Solomon, former deputy commissioner Harry Fox, and Inspector James J. Martin, who was then Schwartz’s boss. It had been a big departmental social event, with the atmosphere of a retirement party. But Abe had no intention of retiring. He would have missed the work too much. For Abe, his work and his social life were closely intermingled.

  At sixty-one, Abe was bald as a rock on top, but his squat frame showed none of the encroaching softness or frailty of advancing age. He was built wider in the middle than at the ends, which made him look at first glance like someone with a paunch, but on closer inspection it was clear that Abe was in great physical condition. He still played tennis like a man thirty years younger, and his handshake was one your grip remembered. Over dark round eyes, his brows seemed fixed in a perpetually quizzical arch, curving up to a vertical crease where his forehead closed on the wide bridge of his nose. He was a vigorous, fun-loving man, a character. Abe called everybody “brother,” whether it was in the steam baths of the Philadelphia Athletic Club or the boardrooms of the Police Administration Building. It was just Abe’s jovial way of relating to the world. During World War II, Schwartz had served in North Africa, Italy, and France, assigned, of all things, to the Naval Combat Blimp Squadron; that was just the sort of odd detail that had added to his reputation as a delightful character. He had started with the police department as a clerk after the war, and worked his gregarious way quickly through the uniformed ranks. By the mid-fifties, he was already a dapper, respected detective, given to expensive suits and a dazzling variety of colorful hats. During the leisure-suit period, Abe’s wardrobe blossomed in bright pastels, checked shirts with huge white collars, and colorful ties as wide as a man’s hand. Abe didn’t mind drawing attention to himself; he reveled in it. Attention seemed at times to be for Abe almost an end in itself. Over the years, as his circle of friends grew to legendary proportions, Schwartz became a sort of unofficial supply sergeant for the department, and for anyone else he met. If you wanted to buy something, anything, Abe could find you a deal—if he didn’t just happen to have what you were looking for already in the trunk of his car, which was a veritable treasure chest of goodies, everything from discount clothes to cartons of fresh cookies. He was like a one-man “old boy” network, Abe was, always ready with a smile, a joke, a crunching handshake, and the right connection. Abe trafficked in connections. He saved photos of himself with Grace Kelly, with Golda Meir, with David Ben-Gurion. He had been assigned to help escort a few presidents of the United States through Philadelphia over the years. Abe’s job was bigger than its official description, just as his lifestyle was considerably grander than the average police detective’s. His salary was modest, about $25,000 a year, and his wife, a nurse, worked full-time in the city school system, but they and their three sons lived better than most two-public-servant families. They had a home and a boat on Long Beach Island, and in addition to their permanent residence in Northeast Philadelphia, they owned a condominium in Florida and valuable stocks and bonds. An official estimate of the Schwartzes’ worth, made the previous year, was $300,000. This was the memorable man with the year-round deep summer tan, with the round jowls and wide hooked nose, with the playful eyes and wiseacre smile, whom Donald Hersing met over lunch in April of 1981.

  At first, Hersing hadn’t mentioned his new friend to Mike Thompson or Andy Lash, the FBI agents working with him. Abe didn’t know Georgie Woods, and he didn’t seem to have anything to do with the central police division. But, gradually, Hersing and the FBI agents recognized this amiable detective for the unofficial mover and shaker he was.

  Right away there were deals. Knowing Abe Schwartz meant being in the process of d
elivering something to him or waiting for him to deliver something to you—though it wasn’t always clear what the precise terms of the trade-offs were. Sometimes Schwartz just enjoyed doing people favors, asking nothing in return but good feelings. In Hersing’s case, the whorehouse owner/informant understood right from the start that there would be advantages to making friends with the detective. Nothing explicit was offered in return, but Hersing had promised to find Schwartz a videocassette recorder. He also gave Cinnamon, the woman who managed his Vine Street whorehouse, the nod to arrange private parties with prostitutes for Schwartz and his friends at her apartment on South Street.

  This was the apartment that Hersing, in June, was preparing to take over. It was in a row of angular brick townhouses in a modern rowhouse development named Washington Square West. Located on the leading western edge of the thriving bohemian South Street retail district, the development was the vanguard of the affluent residential neighborhoods expanding south from the Center City enclave of Society Hill. Across the street, on the corner, was a men’s clothing outlet called Big-Hearted Jim’s. Down the rest of the block were the battered shells of empty old rowhouses, their boarded-up fronts laminated with posters. Cinnamon had fallen behind in the rent, which was about $525 a month. The FBI was eager for Hersing to establish a permanent base in Philadelphia, so they could wire it for both pictures and sound. Abscam had proved—just a few blocks west at the Barclay Hotel—that there is no better way to present evidence of payoffs than for the jury to actually see the money and goods change hands.

  But, so far, outside of Schwartz’s fraternal affection, it was not clear what Hersing could expect in return for the sexual liaisons. Thompson and Lash were eager to find out. Although no quid pro quo had been spelled out, there was something more than affability in Schwartz’s manner. It was obvious that the old detective expected favors from Hersing.

  In the weeks before the meeting with Woods at the Holiday Inn, Hersing had phoned Schwartz a number of times to make sure arrangements with whores had come off as planned, and to find out why the police seemed to be paying special attention to his studios. There had been a few days early in June when patrol cars were parked out in front of 1245 Vine Street for hours at a time. It had kept business away. Hersing had asked his friend why, and Schwartz had promised to look into it. When Hersing called him on June 17, Schwartz was annoyed that he had gone to a lot of trouble to find the information, and Hersing hadn’t bothered to return his calls. There was no how ya doin’, brother on the other end of the phone this time.

  “Where the hell you been?” Schwartz said. “Boy, you’re the most unreliable son of a bitch!”

  “Man, I called a couple of times for you.”

  Schwartz then came directly to the point. Hersing had promised to find a videocassette recorder several months ago. Schwartz was impatient. He asked peevishly, “Where’s that thing you told me you had for me previously?”

  “I have it for you,” Hersing lied.

  “Uh-huh,” Schwartz answered skeptically.

  “I have it for you,” Hersing insisted. Then Schwartz became quieter, more helpful. He told Hersing that the patrolmen had been watching a suspicious cargo container in the neighborhood; this was the reason for so many police cars near Hersing’s whorehouse.

  “Now, you asked me and then you never called me back,” Schwartz said. “That’s bullshit, ya know? I went to a lot of trouble to get that for you and that’s what the hell happened there.”

  Before hanging up, Hersing asked if Schwartz had wanted an automatic timer for the recorder.

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  “No. I just need a fucking machine like you promised me. I should have had it three weeks ago, Don.”

  “All right. Abe, next phone call I make to you I’ll be calling you to come and get it.”

  That conversation had piqued Thompson’s and Lash’s interest in Schwartz. Who was this guy? Neither of the young FBI agents knew Philadelphia well enough to have heard of Abe Schwartz before. They knew him only as this gun-permits investigator with an interest in prostitutes. Hersing kept telling them that Schwartz was well connected, but they had no way of finding out more about him without tipping off the police department to their investigation. Thompson and Lash had learned just enough about Abe Schwartz to be intrigued by him. He seemed to know exactly what Hersing was up to, yet was unfazed by it. And he seemed to want that videocassette recorder badly. The agents figured that they ought to take Schwartz for what he seemed to be: a good person to know. So they decided that it was time to buy Abe Schwartz a Betamax. Before they did, however, they wanted to wire the apartment at 707-A South Street. If something as large as a videocassette recorder was going to change hands, they wanted the transaction on tape.

  So in July, the FBI began renting the apartment. It was a sterile duplex, walls painted white. On the first floor was a living room, dining room, and kitchen. Upstairs was a bathroom and two bedrooms. Underneath the stairs was a closet with noisy air-conditioning equipment inside. This would serve as a surveillance hideaway for Thompson and Lash. FBI workers installed a door without a handle on the closet entrance. It could be opened only with a key. If anyone asked, Hersing was to tell them that behind the door was air-conditioning equipment and he did not have a key to open it. Inside was a small TV monitor, headphones, and a metal box containing audio recording equipment. They wired the front room upstairs for sound and picture. Small, sensitive microphones were set right into the walls. The television camera was hidden inside one of the stereo speakers. It peered out through the fine mesh of the speaker’s cloth front. The stereo faced an L-shaped couch ensemble with a coffee table set in the angle formed between its two parts. The stage was set.

  With the apartment wired and ready, the FBI bought Abe Schwartz a $900 present. Mike Thompson and Andy Lash shopped around a little to get a good buy, and settled on a Sony Betamax in the Radio 437 store in the 900 block of Chestnut Street.

  They wanted the sales receipt to be made out in Hersing’s name, just in case Schwartz bothered to check. Picking which agent to pose as Hersing was easy. Once, when the agents and their informant had been buying furniture for 707-A South Street, a salesman had asked slender, fair-haired Lash if he was Hersing’s son. Thompson and some of the other agents in the FBI office had had a good laugh over that, and never let Lash live it down. Another time, over lunch, someone told Lash he looked a little like the actor Don Knotts, and Hersing had quickly said, “No way, Andy’s more handsome than that!”

  So it was Lash who introduced himself as Don Hersing and asked for the Betamax. When the sales clerk brought the box out, he called across the store, “Don! Don!” But Lash, who was chatting with his partner, failed to respond until the man crossed the store and tapped him on the shoulder. It would be one of the small lapses the two agents would laugh about later.

  Soon afterward, Hersing phoned his friend Abe.

  “Abe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How you doing, brother?”

  “All right, brother. Who is this?”

  “Don.”

  “Who?”

  “Don.”

  “Holy Christ, a voice out of the fucking past. You son of a bitch.”

  “Hey, guess what?”

  “No, no. Don’t tell me.”

  “I got it.”

  “Naaah, I don’t believe it!”

  “I got it!”

  “You son of a gun.”

  “I got it, Abe.”

  “Yeah? Where’s it at?”

  “It’s in my apartment. I took over Cinnamon’s apartment on South Street.”

  The two men made arrangements to meet the next day.

  Wednesday, August 19, was the day Navy fighters shot down two Libyan jets over the Mediterranean Sea. Thompson, who had flown Air Force jets for six years before joining the FBI, would read the next day’s stories with interest. The Philadelphia Journal’s enthusiastic headline read: “U.S. Guns Down
Madman’s Warjets.” Nine games into the second half of the strike-broken baseball season, the Phillies had toppled to last place in their division, having lost their third game in a row to Cincinnati at the Vet the night before. The day was sunny and the humidity, which typically turns the air to broth in Philadelphia at that time of year, was taking a day off.

  When Abe Schwartz stopped by the South Street address shortly after 11 a.m. that morning, temperatures were in the middle seventies. FBI cameras would preserve him that day dandy as ever: straw hat with a dark band, lightweight suit over a cotton shirt with an open collar, dark handkerchief folded into the right breast pocket of his breezy suit coat.

  Hersing met him at the door and escorted him directly upstairs. Abe knew the apartment. He had stopped in with his friend, Inspector Jimmy Carlini, for a party that Cinnamon had arranged. He hardly glanced at the big open Sony box next to the coffee table. He stepped around the table, hat in hand, and flopped back on the portion of the L-shaped sofa that was against the wall, draping his left leg over his knee.

  “How ya feel?” he asked Hersing, who looked rumpled and pale. Hersing, as usual, had been up all night. He was tired. His sport shirt, a short-sleeve pullover with one thick stripe down the right side, dangled loosely out over the waist of his bell-bottom trousers. He knew the most important things about the meeting with Abe were, first, to give him the Betamax, and, second, to see whether Abe could fix him up with somebody more influential in the department than George Woods.

  “Pretty good,” Hersing said. “I had this problem with my legs.” Hersing sat on the other part of the sofa, at a right angle to Schwartz, and hiked up one trouser leg to show off the remnants of his rash.