by Mark Bowden
Lytton asked if DeBenedetto was still willing to take the lie detector test. At that point, according to Lytton, the inspector said:
“I came down here to help myself, but I can see I can’t help myself here. I’m leaving.”
According to the FBI report of the meeting, DeBenedetto also said, “I thought this was an investigation, but if I’m a target, there is nothing that I can provide that would help me.” He said he would tell his bosses that he had attended the meeting, that “there is a ton of evidence, and that the FBI has me on tape.” Then he got up to go.
Lytton said, “We’ll be in touch.”
And Inspector DeBenedetto was gone.
The next day John DeBenedetto retired from the force. So did John Smith and Abe Schwartz. A week later, George Woods retired.
After that hectic first day of November, it was time for Bill Lytton to begin presenting the case to a federal grand jury. The U.S. attorney cannot indict anyone without grand jury approval, so Lytton approached the jury with two things in mind: winning the indictments, and using the jury’s subpoena and contempt powers to gather more evidence.
To Lytton’s surprise, the Trenton Times story, and the subsequent storm of publicity in Philadelphia, actually helped his case. Over the next few weeks Lytton, Thompson, and Lash began getting anonymous tips—a lot of them—that pointed to people all over town. There were evidently quite a few citizens who were fed up, as Hersing had been, with police officers who played both sides of the law.
Hersing’s conversations with DeBenedetto and Smith had already led the FBI to other bar and whorehouse owners who were buying police protection. The inspector had even mentioned the name of a vending machine company operator who was in league with him. These leads, along with the tips that now came flowing in unsolicited, spun the prosecutor and FBI agents on a four-month tour of Philadelphia’s underground. By this time, too, a team of other FBI agents was busy following up new leads, tracing what seemed to be a labyrinthine web of police corruption extending throughout the city.
To bolster their cases against the first seven men they were preparing to indict, Lytton, Thompson, and Lash assembled a cast of characters rich enough for a nineteenth-century novel—pimps, bookies, well-heeled lawyers, homosexuals, bar owners, prostitutes, and madams. Unlike Hersing, most of these people were at first unwilling to cooperate. No one wanted to testify against a criminal conspiracy in which all the participants were turning a profit. That had been the problem with cracking this kind of graft all along. The bar and vending machine and brothel owners were making a lot more money by buying police protection, and the police weren’t about to blow the whistle on themselves. That’s why Hersing had been so remarkable.
To obtain the cooperation of new witnesses, the agents would often pretend to know a lot more than they did, and they knew enough to be convincing. One advantage the agents had was that the people making money in vice were easy to lean on. The FBI needed only to subpoena them to testify before the grand jury. If they wouldn’t talk, Lytton could threaten them with a contempt citation, which meant they could be held in jail for many months—or possibly up to three years—until they agreed to talk. If they lied, as two vending machine company officials later did, they could be charged with perjury. With jail looming as a likely prospect, it usually didn’t take long to persuade a potential witness to take the stand.
One of the first to be persuaded was Tracy Summers. Summers ran Chic II, Hersing’s aggressive competitor, a lavishly appointed brothel at the corner of Thirteenth and Vine Streets. The place was decorated with red chintz carpeting and wallpaper and gilded picture frames with mirrors and pop art prints. It had a heart-shaped whirlpool bath on the first floor and session rooms upstairs—each room equipped with a TV monitor showing explicit pornographic films. There was even an elaborate torture chamber upstairs, complete with a rack, chains, whips, and assorted other sadomasochistic treats.
Summers’s name had come up often enough in the tape recordings for Thompson and Lash to know that she was also making payoffs. She was a plump woman with enormous breasts who often dressed in a baggy blue sweatshirt and bell-bottom blue jeans. Her skin color was smoky brown, and she often wore an extravagant, curly black wig. Her smile and manner were warm and soft, but the long scar down her left cheek spoke of a harder side.
To Summers, prostitution was strictly business—lucrative business. Basically, Summers believed that men are animals. Sex is not a drive, but a need. She was proud to provide the service. All society could ask is that the girls be clean, and that they not peddle drugs or shake down customers. Her business belonged underneath a rock, where she would just as soon people left it. She was mortified when the FBI agents came by and suggested she testify against the police. Whatever for? The last thing Tracy Summers wanted was to draw attention to herself. As for paying off the cops, hey, that was life! She didn’t mind. How are you going to change that?
Thompson and Lash found Summers to be cool and articulate when they served her with a subpoena.
“The FBI agents said that I had two choices,” she recalls. “Either to testify, because they already knew what was happening—that is to say, they knew about the payoffs—or I would go to jail. I called my attorneys when they first approached me, and I did what my attorneys told me to do.”
Testifying under immunity at the trial, Summers would acknowledge that she had been arrested many times for prostitution, that she lived in an $80,000 penthouse condominium in Center City, that she drove a Corvette, that she employed seven or eight girls, and that, yes, she still turned tricks herself from time to time. Summers testified that she had been making payoffs to the police for several years, and pointed to the officers in the courtroom who had received them.
Another witness was smooth and friendly Gene Console, from the Parkway Room restaurant. He was mortified to be incriminating his good friend John DeBenedetto, but he really had little choice. Console would testify that he had picked up an envelope Hersing dropped off at his restaurant and delivered it to DeBenedetto. He would say, reluctantly, that, yes, he often did that sort of thing for his friend the inspector.
There was also Bert Spennato, a 300-pound full-time pimp who wore a long black leather overcoat. Spennato swore that he was getting out of the business for good after testifying about the payoffs he had made, first to Officer Woods, then to DeBenedetto’s men. He would tell how DeBenedetto had hurled an ashtray across the room in anger when he found out that the pimp had been paying off Woods without his knowledge.
When Thompson and Lash went looking for Spennato at his whorehouse, the Gallery, at 2132 Market Street, they were accosted in an extremely friendly way by two nearly naked women. The agents asked to speak to the manager, and pulled out their FBI identification.
“And immediately, wraps start coming on,” Thompson says. “We’re talking to these girls, you know, they won’t give you their names. You say, ‘What’s your name?’ and they say, ‘Monica.’ And you say, ‘Monica what?’ And they answer, ‘No, just Monica.’ So while we’re standing there talking, this guy, a customer, comes up the stairs, and walks up right behind us. He just stands there. I guess he figures he’s just going to wait in line. He’s after us. He’s just looking around quietly, and then he obviously overhears something about the FBI or a subpoena, and he just sorta slowly—he doesn’t run or anything—he just sorta slowly turns around and starts heading back down the stairs. Well, the girls see him leaving, and they realize that’s a customer leaving, and they chase him! The two girls run out from behind the desk yelling, ‘No, come back! They’ll be gone in a minute!’ and all. But once that guy got to the bottom of the steps he must have broken into a run. He was outta there. He must have thought we were raiding the place or something.”
And then there was Joseph Weiss, a Center City lawyer. Lytton had gotten a phone call about Weiss. The tipster had said that Weiss would be a good person to talk to about payoffs to police. He mentioned a “massage parlor” call
ed Ozzie-Oz at Nineteenth and Market Streets. Lytton just put the name on a stack of other leads and forgot about it until, by chance, he happened to spot Weiss’s name one day while flipping through his legal directory.
“So I thought, I’ll just call this guy,” he says. “You know, ‘Hello, Mr. Weiss, this is Bill Lytton with the U.S. attorney’s office. I wonder if you could come down and see me.’ And he said, ‘What’s this about?’ and I said ‘I’d prefer to talk to you in person, but I’d like to talk to you about the current investigation into police corruption.’ And he said, ‘Do I need to bring a lawyer?’ And I said, ‘If you want. It’s up to you.’ I said, ‘You’re not a suspect or anything, I just want to talk to you.’ He said, ‘I’ll be there tomorrow.’ And he stopped by the next day.”
Andy Lash wasn’t there that day to recognize the dark-haired man in the fine suit. But Weiss turned out to be the man Lash had seen on a previous occasion, meeting DeBenedetto and Smith at the Parkway Room immediately after those two officers had met with Hersing and browbeaten him about falling behind on his payoffs.
Anderson and Thompson were with Lytton on the day Weiss came in for questioning. Lytton asked Weiss about Ozzie-Oz, and the lawyer said, yes, he had represented that place. He had met DeBenedetto once, he said, but had never paid him off. Lytton asked him if he would mind sitting outside his office for a moment. When the lawyer stepped out, Lytton conferred with Thompson and Anderson. They didn’t believe Weiss. So they decided to try to bluff. They called him back in.
“I said, ‘Mr. Weiss, this investigation has been going on for a year and a half. We have used almost every type of investigative technique available, including videotapes, audiotapes, surveillance photographs, informants. We’ve issued subpoenas and, as a result of all that, we believe you’ve not been fully candid with us.’ All of that was true. It was just the juxtaposition of everything that led him to believe that he had been taped. And he said, ‘Well, you’re right, I haven’t been fully candid with you.’ Apparently sitting outside my office for that five minutes had really shaken him up.”
When Weiss started telling them the truth, Lytton was flabbergasted.
“I couldn’t believe it worked!” he says.
Weiss would later tell the jury that he had paid off DeBenedetto several times, that he had met with the inspector in the central division office and DeBenedetto had outlined to him how, for $500 a month, Ozzie-Oz would have no police problems. Weiss was the first witness they found who would testify that he had actually put money in John DeBenedetto’s hand.
Meanwhile, many of the seemingly unconnected leads chased by different FBI investigations were ending in the same place. An informant led the FBI to a numbers runner named Alfredo Morales. They began watching Morales, and observed two of DeBenedetto’s men, Vincent McBride and Larry Molloy, stopping by Morales’s house on a regular basis. Morales would reluctantly testify, through an interpreter, that he had been making payoffs. A city schoolteacher named Diane Lusk would testify that she ran a club called Rainbows on Walnut Street that had a substantial gay clientele, and that DeBenedetto and Molloy had bullied their way in one evening to demand regular payoffs.
By February 1983, Lytton and the FBI had assembled enough information to indict John DeBenedetto, John Smith, Abe Schwartz, George Woods, and three officers who had played relatively minor roles, McBride, Molloy, and Ray Emery. They were all accused of extorting and conspiring to extort money from businesses. The government also named former inspector James Carlini and John Delvecchio, a plainclothesman, as unindicted coconspirators, which meant that the FBI had evidence of their involvement, but not enough to accuse them of a crime.
Seven men in blue went on trial. Each had spent years putting criminals behind bars; now each faced that prospect himself. Thompson and Lash saw them as the kind of cops who wouldn’t hesitate to risk their lives in a more traditional law enforcement role, to jump in to stop a fight, to save someone being attacked or apprehend an armed man. But they were men who, upon entering the alluring netherworld of vice, had lost their moral bearings; they no longer had as clear an idea what their role was, whether the crimes they were assigned to prevent were really crimes, or whether the criminals they were assigned to apprehend were really criminals.
“Any of these guys, taken out of the vice area and put in a regular police line of work, they’d do an excellent job,” says Lash.
Of all the men indicted, Thompson and Lash felt the least sympathy for John DeBenedetto, the man who had headed the central police division. After their encounter with the inspector at Lytton’s office, after hearing his repeated denials of things they knew to be true, after hearing him boast about the thirty-four “badges” he had taken as a staff inspector in the internal affairs division, it was hard for the agents to summon any pity or respect for the man. He was by far their most important catch. They had pieced together a frightening portrait of the man known to some on the police department as a “supercop,” the man who had been such a cocky, effective young detective twenty years before. The new picture was of an ambitious, hypocritical street Caesar, using his considerable powers of arrest not to enforce the law but for personal profit. The prosecutors’ estimated total of payoffs to DeBenedetto during a year-and-a-half period was $120,000—and that was only what they had been able to document. Evidence indicated that the actual total was a lot higher. A small part of what DeBenedetto collected—about 20 percent—was distributed down through the ranks, but the great bulk of it had stayed in the inspector’s hands. And he had just gotten started! DeBenedetto had only taken over the vice-rich central division in June 1981. The agents felt good about having cut short his career. To them, there was nothing sad about it.
But for some of the others, there were mixed emotions. Before any of them were officially indicted, Thompson and Lash drove out to their houses to deliver “target letters,” letters informing the men that they were targets of the investigation and offering them an opportunity to cooperate with the probe.
When they drove out to Larry Molloy’s house in the northeast on December 14, 1982, they were greeted at the door by a little girl, one of Molloy’s three small daughters. She ran inside yelling, “Daddy! Daddy!” Molloy’s wife, Janet, peeked out the door at the agents. Then her husband came to the door. The agents gave him the letter and talked to him out in the yard. Molloy acted dumbfounded. “He says, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’” Lash recalls. “‘I’m a driver for Smith at times, but, me? Nah, you got the wrong guy.’” A week later, Molloy called the U.S. attorney’s office and came in to hear firsthand what evidence they had on him. He listened in silence as Bill Lytton explained the case. Then he got up and said, “Thank you.” As he walked out the door, Molloy turned back to Lytton and said, facetiously, “And you and your family have a nice Christmas, too, prosecutor.”
“I knew then what it felt like to be hated,” Lytton recalls, “and, believe me, it was not a pleasant feeling.”
Thompson and Lash said they took pains to offer the men a chance to avoid discussing the case in front of their families. On the visit to Smith’s home on February 1, 1983, the lieutenant’s son, a pleasant young man, opened the door. He invited the agents inside. Thompson and Lash asked Smith if he preferred to talk with them alone, but the lieutenant said no. As the agents explained what they had against Smith, his wife and son sat alongside him. It was a polite, but difficult, encounter.
When they stopped by Vincent McBride’s house two days later, they were again greeted at the door by children. One of the little ones was wearing cute new pajamas, the kind with feet on them.
Lash turned to his partner and complained, “Why do these guys have to have kids?”
The jury trial of John DeBenedetto, John Smith, Abe Schwartz, Larry Molloy, and Vincent McBride took place in early May of 1983. It lasted nine days. George Woods and Ray Emery were tried separately the following month. During the first trial alone, Bill Lytton lost twenty pounds to work and worry
.
Donald Hersing monopolized testimony at both trials. His account of the long investigation was punctuated by the playing of tape recordings, audio and video. As Lytton had hoped, the tapes spoke mostly for themselves.
Hersing held up well under cross-examination. He bristled when the defense attorneys called him a “pimp.” The first question from Robert Madden, counsel for DeBenedetto, was: “Mr. Hersing, when did you first begin selling flesh?” But Hersing knew that the tapes formed an unshakable buttress to his credibility, and he rarely slipped. He adopted a punctilious formality for the courtroom—for his long-awaited moment of revenge—often addressing the defense attorneys as “counselor.”
Still, the informant had one surprise in store. Hersing had taken a liking to Abe Schwartz, the man with so many friends, over the last year and a half. Under cross-examination by Schwartz’s attorney, Jeffrey Miller (the same lawyer who had once defended Hersing against smuggling charges), he testified that Schwartz had had nothing to do with the conspiracy. Thompson and Lash did their best to listen impassively to the testimony. They were familiar with Hersing’s feelings about Schwartz, so it didn’t surprise them too much when he took up for the veteran detective on the stand. They were confident that the tape recordings would make Schwartz’s role obvious to the jury, regardless of Hersing’s testimony.
On the third day of Hersing’s testimony during the first trial, Miller asked: “The indictment alleges here police officers were paid some one hundred twenty-five to one hundred thirty thousand dollars. Isn’t it a fact that if monies were paid, not a nickel to your knowledge was paid to Abe Schwartz?”
