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

by Mark Bowden

  And Smith was careful. For his first meeting with Hersing, Smith had brought along a young vice investigator named Larry Molloy, a big plainclothes officer. As Smith motioned Hersing into the back seat of a tan station wagon, Molloy strolled out to the corner of Seventh and South Streets to keep an eye on things.

  In the car, Smith was surly. He accepted the $500 payoff, and explained that this money was just for the whorehouse at 1245 Vine Street. There would be more due for Hersing’s other businesses, the Morning Glory after-hours club on Vine Street and the “modeling studio” at 2209 Walnut Street. As soon as he had taken the money, Smith laid into the whorehouse owner. According to Hersing, Smith said he had heard that Hersing was spreading around a story that Woods had been sharing his payoffs with “an Irish lieutenant.” Hersing was a notorious talker, a man who loved to tell stories about himself. Smith wanted the talk to stop. After learning of Woodsie’s fate, Hersing understood why. He was flustered. He swore that he hadn’t told a soul, and, moments later, promised not to do it again.

  The lieutenant spelled out arrangements for future payoffs. If he was unable to stop by and pick up cash, he said, Hersing could give the money to Molloy. Thompson and Lash remember that Hersing came back from the meeting shaken. He didn’t like Smith.

  But through the rest of September and October, Hersing’s businesses ran smoothly. Gone was the almost comic “Dial-a-Bust” system. Paying off higher-ups promised to end these busts altogether. But even though, for the time being, Hersing’s police hassles seemed to be over, Smith’s bullying bothered him.

  The FBI, of course, shared Hersing’s eagerness to stop dealing through Smith. They were far more interested in getting the inspector himself on tape. They knew that DeBenedetto was manipulating the payoff system, but if the inspector kept dealing through Smith, the charge would be harder to prove.

  In his efforts to get Smith out of the way, Hersing turned to his buddy Abe Schwartz. If anybody could get this surly lieutenant off his back, Schwartz could. But when Hersing approached him, Schwartz turned out to be no help at all. He just wanted to borrow some X-rated tapes for his new Betamax. He told Hersing he would have to work out his problems with the top man.

  By now, Hersing was perturbed by the whole investigation. Thompson and Lash were exasperated. They knew they were into a big case. DeBenedetto had mentioned something to Hersing about paying off for video poker machines. This touched upon a separate—perhaps even bigger—investigation under way in the FBI office, one that would eventually implicate police officers citywide. But just as Thompson and Lash’s supervisors and the U.S. attorney’s office were getting hot for this Hersing case, their eccentric source seemed to be backing off. Hersing kept canceling meetings. He didn’t return phone calls. He kept no regular hours anywhere. When they could find him, they would arrange for Hersing to set up another meeting with DeBenedetto. He would agree to wear a body recorder and get some of the inspector’s machinations on tape. Hersing would phone DeBenedetto and set up the meeting. Then, on the appointed day, he would decide, on his own, to call the inspector and cancel it.

  Hersing was feeling put upon. He was still worried about how much the FBI would eventually pay him for all this work. Working with easygoing Georgie Woods had been one thing. Working with men as menacing as DeBenedetto and Smith was something else. Thompson and Lash kept trying to talk Hersing into wearing a body recorder for meetings, especially because Smith kept refusing to come inside the wired apartment, but Hersing was afraid. Before almost every meeting he suspected that he would be searched. Smith was usually abusive and threatening. Furthermore, he had recently gotten into an argument with Hersing’s brother at the Morning Glory.

  On top of these investigative hassles, Hersing’s prostitution business was giving him trouble. His prime competitor, a swank whorehouse called Chic, was pressuring him. Chic’s owners were making noises about buying 1245 Vine Street, right out from under him. Hersing and his partner, Robertshaw, were just renting the place, and Robertshaw didn’t want to buy it.

  Hersing felt himself edging farther and farther out on a limb. He wasn’t at all convinced, after all this time, that the FBI wouldn’t just suddenly decide to drop their investigation and leave him hanging. And if they did follow through on it, indict these Philadelphia police officers, convict them and lock them away, what was going to happen to Donald Hersing? He couldn’t very well expect to stay in Philadelphia. What would he do? There were going to be a lot of powerful people mad at him. When he first went to the FBI, Hersing had hoped he would be able to limit his involvement in the case to just making some undercover tape recordings—as he had done for smaller FBI operations in the past, up in Bucks County. But it soon became clear that this case was different. Hersing was the linchpin in an ever-expanding FBI probe. The agents had explained the federal witness protection program to Don and his new wife, Donna, but the idea of changing their names and going off to live someplace where no one knew them was hardly appealing. They would have to leave friends and family behind. One of the requirements of the witness protection plan was that you could leave no forwarding address, and you were not allowed to contact people from your past life. It was not a happy prospect. Hersing’s businesses would fold. What would he do for a living? There were weeks when Hersing just wanted to pretend that none of this had ever happened.

  But extricating himself from the situation was harder than going along with it.

  Smith and Molloy stopped by the apartment again on October 21 to collect that month’s payoff. Thompson and Lash waited in the closet with their monitors, but again the wary lieutenant refused to come inside. Instead, Molloy came to the door and said Smith wanted to talk to him in the car. Hersing climbed into the front seat of a white Thunderbird, and Smith chewed him out again. As they talked in the car, Molloy again spent the half hour standing on the corner, looking around.

  Thompson and Lash were feeling discouraged. The investigation seemed stuck. Then, in November, things got worse. Hersing’s Vine Street studio was raided. Some of the women were arrested, and he had to close the place down for a day. When he called DeBenedetto to complain, the inspector didn’t want to talk about it. At first DeBenedetto said that the morals squad had made the bust, and that he had no control over them. “They usually only go around one time this winter,” he told Hersing. Later, after checking into it, the inspector told Hersing that the raid had occurred because of a complaint from Roman Catholic High School up the street, at the corner of Vine and Broad. It seemed that one of the students had wandered into the studio, bought a session with one of Hersing’s prostitutes, and contracted the clap. His mother had complained to the school, the school had complained to the district attorney, and the district attorney had leaned on the force. Hersing said he didn’t believe it. He suspected that the complaint was a hoax, cooked up by his competitors.

  Despite DeBenedetto’s reassurances, there were more raids. By the time Smith was due to stop by 707-A South Street again for the November payoff, there had been two raids at Vine Street and one at Walnut.

  For this meeting, Thompson and Lash had talked Hersing into wearing a body recorder. He wore it strapped in an elastic holster in the small of his back. As the agents wired him up, Hersing eyed the equipment with disdain. Citing his experience as a private detective and his work selling electronic surveillance equipment to governments in the Caribbean, Hersing told the agents about equipment he had worked with that was much smaller and more powerful. The agents had never heard of the super-snooping devices their informant described. They figured that they would have, if such things existed. As Hersing had become more and more difficult to work with, their patience with his self-importance and his supposed expertise in law enforcement was wearing thin. While Hersing lectured, the young agents would look at each other and roll their eyes.

  This time Smith didn’t insist that Hersing step outside the apartment. After three months of dealing with him, Smith was more relaxed with Hersing. He stepped
into the dining room to take the payoff, and the two men launched into a long, rambling conversation about whores and whorehouses. Hersing was surprised by how knowledgeable Smith was. The lieutenant described with glowing appreciation an Asian whore he had encountered working at a different studio. He offered to give Hersing her name and address. Hersing allowed as how a “well-built Jap” would do wonders for his business. Then he complained to the lieutenant about the three raids. Smith would only say that it was the work of the morals squad, not the vice squad, and that he didn’t have anything to do with the other group.

  As this conversation wound on, Thompson and Lash listened from just a few feet away inside the closet under the stairway. With the air-conditioning unit running, it made quite a racket in their enclosure, so they couldn’t hear much of what was being said outside. Since one of their functions was to protect Hersing, Thompson felt obliged to try to keep track of what was going on. The solid, dark-haired agent crawled down to the floor and peered through the crack at the bottom of the door. All he could see were feet. Then, abruptly, the air conditioner kicked off. Alarmed by the sudden silence, just an arm’s length or two from Smith and Hersing through the thin door, the two agents were afraid to breathe. They could suddenly hear Smith’s and Hersing’s voices clearly on the other side of the door. Thompson was still contorted on the floor, trying to look out of the crack. They felt trapped and ridiculous. They would laugh about it often, later. Thompson would joke that their FBI training had enabled them to hold their breaths for the entire time. But, at the time, it was a long, harrowing ten minutes before the air-conditioning equipment kicked on again.

  Smith collected the money and left.

  The next week, Vine Street was raided again. The morals squad arrested a prostitute who had been the toast of the whorehouse all that week after her pinup appeared in the “Winner’s Circle,” a daily feature in The Philadelphia Journal that displayed a seductively posed young woman in a bikini. The raid occurred on a Saturday night. On Monday morning Hersing phoned DeBenedetto to complain.

  The inspector asked if it was the same group that had made the earlier pinches.

  “Yeah, same guys,” Hersing said.

  “Oh, boy. I don’t know. I’ll have to see. I’ll have to find out who they were and you’ll have to get together with them.”

  “Yeah, you can make that so I can get together with them so it won’t happen again.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m gonna set something up.”

  “’Cause I tell you what, John, my girls are ready to walk out on me.”

  A few days later, Hersing called DeBenedetto again.

  The inspector said, “I talked to that fellow and he is gonna talk it over with his, ya know, friends, and he is going to get back to me. And I’ll set up a meet, for you to meet him.”

  And again, a few days later, DeBenedetto told Hersing on the phone that Hersing’s original suspicion about what had sparked the morals squad raids may have been correct. The inspector had heard a rumor that Tracy Summers, the manager of Chic, had paid the morals squad to make trouble for Hersing. DeBenedetto said his boys would be paying Summers a visit in return. He had already spoken to Chic’s lawyer.

  “I put it on him,” the inspector said. “I put it right on him about that. And I says, ‘I want this stopped. I don’t want no wars starting.’ I says, ‘If you’re going to start, we’re going to start.’ He swears, no. He swears, no. But, ah, we’re paying her a visit today anyhow.”

  “Tracy?”

  “Yup.”

  “Good.”

  Thompson and Lash couldn’t get over how much the inspector of the city’s central police division sounded like a mob boss. They were more determined than ever to complete their case on him. After the November meeting with Smith, the agents had had a long talk with Hersing. They had decided that Hersing should stop making payoffs.

  “We felt that was the only way that we could get to DeBenedetto, because it looked like he was going to continue dealing through Smith,” says Thompson, who nevertheless felt, at the time, that the tape-recorded phone calls and Hersing’s testimony alone might have been enough to convict the inspector. “We wanted him to be more active in the taking of the money. We knew he was corrupt, we knew he was taking the money—he was getting it through Lieutenant Smith—but we wanted him to come after the money or say something stronger than what he had said already. So we felt stopping the money would maybe generate something.”

  There was another reason. It was increasingly difficult to set up these meetings with Hersing. The agents recognized that their informant’s interest in the case had fallen off. He was impatient. To the agents, his every move—every call he made on the bugged telephone, every payoff he made—added to their growing store of evidence, but, to Hersing, the agents were just intruding on his life. He was less and less willing to do things that seemed uncomfortable or unnatural to him just because the FBI thought it would be a good idea. And besides, Hersing was beginning to know his way around Philadelphia, and the business wasn’t bad. He had gotten rid of Woods—DeBenedetto had taken care of that for him—and he genuinely liked Abe Schwartz. And then the inspector had sort of taken up for him in the battle with Chic. Knowing that when Hersing’s role in the investigation became public his satisfying lifestyle would end, Thompson and Lash couldn’t help wondering if, down deep, Don Hersing was no longer as determined as they were to send these men to jail.

  So the decision to take a break would be mutually advantageous. Hersing would make no payoffs during December, January, or February. The investigators would wait to see what happened.

  During December, the first month that Hersing made no payments to the police, he traveled to Florida for his son’s college graduation. On his return, in the first month of 1982, his competitor, Chic, bought the building on the corner of Vine and Thirteenth Streets, the location Hersing had so carefully selected more than a year before. His competition put a small red awning over the doorway with the name “Chic II.”

  In response, Hersing and his partner Robertshaw simply moved over two doors, to 1241 Vine, and signed a five-year lease for the first floor of the townhouse on the other side of Frank’s Place. The bar was now sandwiched between warring brothels.

  Into the second month of the payoff moratorium, Hersing noticed a change in the attitude of his contacts in the police department. He continued to complain to Abe Schwartz about the three busts at Vine Street., but Schwartz had turned suddenly cool. Where the ebullient detective had once carried on long, rambling conversations with the brothel owner, now Hersing could hardly shake a word out of him. It was like Schwartz was trying, without actually coming out and saying anything, to give Hersing a message. The detective would answer the phone:

  “Hello, can I help you?”

  And Hersing would say warmly, “Yeah, Abraham!”

  The detective would answer again, flatly, as if he hadn’t recognized the voice, “Abe Schwartz.”

  “How you doing, Abe?” Hersing would persist with the friendly tone.

  “All right,” Schwartz would answer.

  “You don’t recognize my voice again,” Hersing would complain.

  “Yes I do, brother,” Schwartz would say.

  Whenever he phoned DeBenedetto, the inspector seemed to be out. If he got Lieutenant Smith on the phone, Smith would complain that he was too busy to talk. He would tell Hersing to call back later, and when Hersing did, the lieutenant would be out. He told Hersing that he kept “erratic” hours.

  On January 29, Hersing paid Schwartz a visit at the detective’s office on the second floor of east division headquarters at Front and Westmoreland Streets. He had two X-rated tapes to deliver, Debbie Does Dallas and Blondie. Schwartz had a friend who was going to make copies for him. Thompson and Lash again wanted Hersing to wear a body recorder for the meeting, but Hersing wasn’t about to walk into a police station wired.

  Schwartz didn’t have much time for his “brother” Don. They discussed th
e lack of payments during the previous two months. Schwartz told Hersing that the inspector had been going easy on him because of the three morals squad hits and because Hersing had had to clear out of 1245. When Hersing complained about the detective’s abrupt change in manner toward him on the telephone, Schwartz said that they suspected their phones were being tapped. He told Hersing that two FBI agents had been spotted across town. No one knew what they were doing, but people had become more careful about talking on the phone.

  Another month went by. On February 26, Hersing phoned DeBenedetto.

  “How you doing, John?”

  “Okay. What, what did you do, go to Europe or something?” The inspector sounded distinctly unfriendly.