by Mark Bowden
According to Hersing, the inspector told him that he had been recommended by two people DeBenedetto respected very much. Then he made it easier for Hersing to answer. He asked, “Is it the little fat guy with the moustache?” Hersing said yes. DeBenedetto wanted to know how much he had been paying. Hersing told him five hundred a month. Hersing recalls that the inspector’s face grew flushed. He said that he hadn’t known anything about the payoffs and that he wasn’t getting a dime out of it.
Hersing remembers that DeBenedetto then told him how he had gathered all of his people together the previous June for a “soul-searching” session.
“He said he gave them time for soul-searching and they could confess all their sins and tell him anything they had to tell him, and that they had their opportunity and they didn’t,” Hersing recalled later. DeBenedetto explained that all the money was supposed to be passed up to him. He passed about $50 of each payoff back to each member of the vice squad—it was easy to see why Georgie hadn’t been eager to play along.
So Hersing and the inspector struck a new deal. He would still pay the $500 per month. At first Hersing did not mention his Walnut Street studio or the Morning Glory, the private after-hours club he owned on Vine Street, for which he had been paying extra. DeBenedetto said he would call him back later with the details of the arrangement. He wasn’t sure whom he wanted to have picking up the money. Hersing told DeBenedetto how Woods’s system had worked. He explained the Dial-a-Busts. He recalls that the inspector scoffed—when you pay, he said, you don’t take hits. That’s why you pay! He told Hersing that if he knew of anyone else who was paying off people in his department, it would be like throwing money to the wind. Then DeBenedetto also made arrangements to begin collecting for the Walnut Street whorehouse and for a video poker machine at the club.
As for the fat officer with the moustache, well, DeBenedetto said, he would take care of him. His officer had been disloyal. It was curtains for the freelance empire of Georgie Woods.
More than most large urban institutions, a police department is deeply rooted in the community it serves. While a 7,000-member force like Philadelphia’s has its share of college-educated officers, some even from other places, most city cops are educated on city streets. As in most occupations, real experience counts for more than academic degrees. They don’t give doctorates in street smarts.
If they did, John DeBenedetto would be among the first in line. His formal education had ended with a high school diploma from a correspondence course he took years after joining the force. One of eleven children, he had grown up in the tight-knit old neighborhoods of South Philadelphia. The characters who ran the bars and the numbers and the whores grew up with John DeBenedetto, played with him in the alleys, went to grade school with him, just as the people who ran the police force and the fire department and City Hall did. Some of the better-educated, smoother officers in the department’s upper echelons regarded DeBenedetto as a crude man. But to those who came to police work up from the street, DeBenedetto was recognized as a force to be reckoned with. He was not a fancy talker, and there was nary a philosophical bone in his body, but DeBenedetto was a shrewd, tough man. One high-ranking city policeman who came up through the ranks with DeBenedetto described him as “one of the finest policemen this city ever had.” He was known, primarily, as a detective. And he had quite a reputation. “If John was looking for you, you were caught,” says one of his men. He was talented. Some detectives work best the way Abe Schwartz worked, by cultivating people, earning their confidence and picking their brains. That was not DeBenedetto’s style. He had that special intuition, that serendipitous sixth sense it takes to assemble and interpret the miscellany of objects and information that constitute evidence in a criminal investigation—a recovered bullet, a piece of cloth, a scrap of conversation, a number hastily scrawled on a sheet of paper. DeBenedetto had a patient, methodical, analytical approach to detective work that set him apart.
His most famous case was the Judy Lopinson murder, back in 1964. She was a pretty young artist married to a bar owner with mob ties. One day in June she was found murdered, executed, shot through the head at close range in the basement room of her husband’s Chestnut Street place, Dante’s Inferno. Dead with her, killed in the same manner, was her husband’s partner. Her husband, Jack, had been shot through the thigh. Lopinson told police a dramatic story of gunmen who had first executed his wife and his partner, then wounded him in a wild gun battle before fleeing. Months later, it was John DeBenedetto who fished a missing revolver from deep Delaware River waters with a powerful electromagnet, and who was instrumental in piecing together the case that convicted Jack Lopinson and sent him away for life. In the news photographs DeBenedetto is a slender young fellow in street clothes with curly hair and hard eyes and a tight, cynical grin, one big pinky-ringed hand holding up the recovered pistol for the cameras, with a look that says, Hey, this guy didn’t fool me.
There were lots of less glamorous cases, too, the kind of day-in, day-out work that earned DeBenedetto a reputation inside the police department to match the more ephemeral praise outside. As a captain in Southwest Philadelphia during the early seventies, DeBenedetto supervised fifty-man police escorts for schoolchildren through racially charged neighborhoods, and managed to contain potential violence. He had been honored in 1977 by the city’s Commission on Human Relations for this work. Later, as a staff inspector in the internal affairs division, his reputation for dogged pursuit, combined with his stiff, silent personality, had made him unpopular to many on the force. Many interpreted his gruff style as arrogance, so they resented him all the more when he dragged some cop in for a petty scam and took away his badge.
They would have resented DeBenedetto even more if they had known that even while DeBenedetto was busting cops for breaking departmental rules, he himself was collecting money on the side. In 1978, in addition to his salary, which was approaching $40,000 a year, DeBenedetto had made about $10,500 just by collecting payoffs from two charity bingo operations. In 1979, he made $15,900. In 1980, it was $22,050. And in 1981, the year DeBenedetto took over the central police division and began expanding his network of graft, he earned $27,775 from the bingo games alone. Evidence would later show that he was collecting $100 per month for vending machines owned by Penn Regal Vending all over the city, and $50 per month for the machines owned by D & G Amusements. During that year and also in 1982, men working for DeBenedetto were also collecting monthly payoffs of $50 for machines owned by a vending machine company named Mr. Music, and $75 per month for machines owned by Appel Vending. This, along with the whorehouses and bars and gay clubs that paid anywhere from $100 to $500 monthly, added up to more than $120,000 of graft over his first year and a half as commander of central division.
According to those who knew him during these years, it is unlikely that such payments greatly troubled his conscience. Better than most people, cops recognize that there is a wide gulf between the ideal world—spelled out in laws and oaths of office and departmental guidelines—and what really goes on out there. Perhaps it was easier for someone who came to law enforcement with a fancy education and a head full of ideals to march through his career on the straight and narrow higher road, in step with the departmental motto, “Honor, Service, Integrity.” But for someone who grew up on the streets, there were certain realities that spoke a lot louder than even the most eloquent rhetoric. Power has an unspoken vocabulary.
Something Inspector John DeBenedetto understood, for instance, was that Philadelphia’s beleaguered prosecutors have more work than they can handle trying to convict those charged with violent crimes or theft. As a matter of policy, petty gambling, prostitution, and blue law offenses (such as serving alcohol after the state-mandated closing time) are simply not prosecuted. For gambling, the district attorney had an arbitrary standard of 1,000 bets per year. Anyone arrested and charged with fewer gambling offenses than that was set free. As for prostitution, it had been a longstanding informal policy that
as long as it went on behind closed doors and there was no community outcry, the city left it alone. The same criterion went for blue law violations. Cracking down on these things makes more enemies in the community than friends. So, in the big city, gambling and prostitution and after-hours clubs flourished. Most brothels in Philadelphia maintained only the most thinly veiled pretense of being a “massage parlor” or “photo studio.” In magazines like Philadelphia Scene, their actual services were openly and lewdly advertised.
These policies put police officers like DeBenedetto in the middle. They had the power, even the obligation, to arrest prostitutes and gamblers. But if those who were arrested were simply set free, then what was the point? The arrests amounted to little more than harassment. For the bar owner or pimp, getting busted was bad for business. To a bar owner who wanted to pay customers who won on his electronic poker machine, or wanted to stay open two hours after the law said he must close, or to a massage parlor manager who wanted to avoid being shut down for a day or two because of a police raid—to these people, paying off the police was simply a business expense. People like Donald Hersing sought out John DeBenedetto.
And even the straightest of cops could be tempted by the kind of money being offered. People offered John DeBenedetto money not to do something he may not have particularly wanted to do anyway. Why the hell not? The payoffs even injected a little logic into an otherwise illogical enterprise. You harass the people who don’t pay. You leave the people who do pay alone. After all, society loves its vice. Most of these places are owned by legitimate businessmen. The public likes it, patronizes it. Nobody complains. Even if you do bust them, nothing happens. After a while, the money offered so eagerly had the look of found cash. You might as well be picking it up off the sidewalk. It even gave those in command positions like DeBenedetto a certain discretion over the bars and whorehouses. One could almost see it as quality control. If a place was too sleazy, or if it bothered a community, John DeBenedetto would be the first one to close it down.
Playing the game this way was lucrative. The money on the side was tax-free-the-drinks-are-on-me-boys! money. And DeBenedetto’s expenses had gone up. He had separated from his wife and was embroiled in divorce proceedings. He was living in a nice apartment on Twenty-third Street in the Fairmount section, within walking distance of his office. His kids were approaching college age. And DeBenedetto had a daughter with cerebral palsy, which entailed expenses for doctors, therapists, special schools, and equipment. The extra money went a long way toward meeting the heavy demands on John DeBenedetto.
He had long ago faced a choice that, at some point, almost every police officer faces. From the police academy right on up, the department spells out its policy and responsibility on such matters explicitly. No one blunders into graft blindly. As one high-ranking officer explained:
“It’s not organized. It’s not institutionalized. Corruption is an individual choice. When a cop decides to take money, that’s an individual decision that he makes. He doesn’t discuss it with his commanding officer. He doesn’t even discuss it with his wife.”
Inside the police department, estimates of those who take money range from as many as two thirds of the force to as few as 1 percent. Even if only 1 percent had made the same decision as John DeBenedetto, it would have meant that there were seventy armed men in the community extorting money from petty criminals. Seventy men in blue, feeding off their city’s sleaze. Seventy cops who were, on the one hand, taking paychecks from society to harass bookies and pimps and petty gambling impresarios and, on the other hand, taking payoffs to leave them alone.
This was the hypocritical subworld Mike Thompson and Andy Lash of the FBI had been guided into by their eccentric, chain-smoking, brothel-keeping, and otherwise strange and maddening source: Donald Hersing, private eye. In George Woods and his partner, Ray Emery, they had snared a couple of small-time operators. In Abe Schwartz, they had reached for someone almost too slippery to grasp. But in John DeBenedetto, the new man, the boss, the inspector, they had happened on a great old tree with roots spread deeply through the city of Philadelphia. When and if they brought down DeBenedetto, the crash was going to rustle a few leaves in the forest.
Catching the inspector was not going to be easy. Because he was afraid of being searched, Donald Hersing had not worn a hidden tape recorder for his first meeting with DeBenedetto at the Parkway Room. FBI agents positioned at tables nearby could see the two men in conversation, but they could not hear them. DeBenedetto had taken no money from the whorehouse owner that day. He was obviously too cagey for that. He had cut his deal with Hersing, explained his terms, and said he would send one of his lieutenants to pick up the money. Mike Thompson and Andy Lash knew that it would take more than just the word of their disreputable informant to convince a judge or jury of DeBenedetto’s guilt.
On August 30, three days after the meeting, Hersing called the inspector. DeBenedetto was friendly but abrupt. He said he would send a vice squad lieutenant, John Smith, over to Hersing’s apartment on South Street to pick up the first monthly payoff.
Hersing drove in from his home in Bucks County that afternoon at three, but Smith didn’t show. Thompson and Lash had geared up the video and audio recording equipment. It was uncomfortable in the apartment. The air conditioner hadn’t been working right all summer, and the place had not been built to encourage airflow. As the afternoon passed, it grew stifling. The three men were impatient. After about two hours Hersing dialed the inspector again. A receptionist answered the phone and asked for Hersing’s name. Then Hersing was put on hold for a moment.
“Don?” DeBenedetto said.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, howya doin’!” DeBenedetto spoke heavy nasal Philadelphia-ese.
“All right, John. What happened? He didn’t show up yet.”
“Did he call ya?”
“No.”
“I told him to…. He said he would call ya. I just spoke to him a little while ago. He said he’d call you from his house. You gonna be there for a while?”
“Yeah, I was, but I was getting ready to leave because I was—”
“Ah, well, wait a while. I’ll tell him. Let me call him at home, tell him that you’re waitin’ for his call. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“What I think he wanted to do was kinda meet you on the outside, you know? Everybody is afraid of everybody. Ya know what I mean?”
“All right. Well, tell him I don’t care, you know.”
DeBenedetto said he should wait a few minutes because Smith was probably on his way home from work. Hersing said he would meet with the lieutenant anywhere he wanted to meet.
“It’ll make him feel more comfortable,” the inspector said.
“It’s all right with me, John.”
“All right. Okay. I told him, I said, ‘Look,’ I said that, you know, I mentioned a couple of friends”—Hersing understood DeBenedetto to mean Detective Abe Schwartz and Inspector Jimmy Carlini—“I said, ‘If they’ll go in his house, I’m sure you can go in.’ You know what I mean?”
Hersing asked whether Detective George Woods was going to be with the lieutenant. He wasn’t eager to see Woods again, after having snitched on him during his first meeting with the inspector.
“No. Georgie is now a uniformed policeman”—and he emphasized the word “po-lice-man”—“in the Twenty-fifth District.” The 25th was a North Philly beat. If Woods was back in uniform, it meant that he had been demoted. He had been demoted and assigned to patrol city streets. “He’s no longer with us,” DeBenedetto said. “We decided he should go back because he did something very disloyal.” Hersing gathered from the inspector’s tone that he had relished busting Woods. DeBenedetto had also demoted and transferred Woods’s partner, Ray Emery. Hersing thought, Boy, no wonder everybody is afraid of this guy.
“He ain’t gonna give me any repercussions, is he?” Hersing asked, referring to Woods.
“Fuck no. No. He went away. You know what he told
the lieutenant?
‘I got caught.’ That’s all, you know what I mean?…I don’t see any problems with him. Let me get you Smitty.”
Smith never did call that day. The vice squad lieutenant had been Woods’s supervisor, and it was Hersing’s impression that Smith had been in on the payoffs all along. But he wasn’t certain. If Hersing was right, then this new arrangement placed Smith in an awkward spot. If Woods and Emery had kept silent to protect the lieutenant, Hersing was the one remaining threat. Under those circumstances, dealing with this odd, talkative whorehouse owner would make Smith mighty uneasy. Hersing and the FBI suspected that this was why Smith kept putting off the meetings DeBenedetto arranged. One meeting after another was postponed. Three more weeks would pass before the lieutenant came by.
Finally, on September 17, Smith rang the doorbell at the South Street apartment. As usual, Thompson and Lash were hidden in the closet with the air-conditioning equipment on the first floor, under the stairway. They had turned on their camera and microphones to record the anticipated payoff. But, to the agents’ chagrin, Smith asked Hersing to step outside. Hersing ran back in and got a jacket. The mild summer was quickly turning to fall.
The lieutenant was rotund. He had a great, thick hawk nose that protruded down to the tip of his upper lip. Smith’s graying hair was in crisp regulation trim at all times, as it had been during his years of uniformed service, but the lieutenant had acquired a trendy flair since joining the detective squad. He had let his sideburns grow down almost to his earlobes, and wore a pair of wide, steel-framed aviator-style glasses. He was fifty-three years old. Eight years earlier, an admiring reporter had written that Smith looked like George C. Scott, but he lacked the actor’s voluptuous facial features. Smith’s eyes and mouth were small. His neck plunged straight from chin tip to tie knot, making his head seem, from the correct angle, almost perfectly round. This gruff man had spent twenty years of night work in uniform, policing the poverty-blighted, crime-ridden neighborhoods of West Philadelphia, and returning at daybreak to his wife and three kids in a quiet Catholic neighborhood in the Northeast. His wife had worried about him desperately during those years. A phone call in the night when he was gone was enough to turn her blood cold. She knew that her husband was proud of his reputation for physical courage, and no matter how much she begged him to be careful, she knew that he never hesitated, when the situation called for it, to mix it up with the “bugs,” as he called the hoodlums he chased in those days. In a long newspaper interview eleven years ago, Smith had called his West Philadelphia beat a “jungle district.” And like many police officers who spent violent years patrolling hostile communities, even then Smith was cynical about the system he fought to uphold. He had glimpsed its shortcomings firsthand while at the same time getting kicked around and insulted by those who despised him for working to uphold it. Compared to that life, his job on the vice squad was a breeze. If you knew how to handle it. And lucrative. If you were careful.
