by Mark Bowden
“Yes, it would be safe to say that,” Hersing said.
“Did you ever pay, Mr. Hersing, any money in the form of a bribe or a kickback or a premium or a gratuity to Abe Schwartz?”
“No, sir.”
“Now, Mr. Schwartz is charged with conspiring, plotting—whatever—to extort money from you. Did he ever extort any money from you?”
“No.”
Of course, Miller had not asked about the sessions with prostitutes, which Hersing had arranged for Schwartz at the detective’s request. But he did ask about the $900 Betamax videocassette recorder Schwartz had asked for, and received, from Hersing.
“When you met with him about the Betamax, that had nothing to do with any illegal conspiracy, did it?” Miller asked.
“No,” Hersing said.
Thompson and Lash could only look at each other and wonder.
Following Hersing to the stand was the parade of characters the FBI had rounded up in the months after the story broke. About all the defense attorneys could do was try to discredit these witnesses by emphasizing how unsavory many of them were, how untrustworthy and crooked. None of the defendants at either trial took the stand in their own defense. Instead, they presented their own parade of witnesses—fine, upstanding people, family members and friends—each of whom convincingly showed the jury that there was another, human, honorable side to the men they had heard and watched on the tapes.
The most stirring defense came when A. Charles Peruto Sr., the pugnacious trial lawyer representing John Smith, addressed the jurors on the seventh day, just as they were about to retire to deliberate. Peruto and the others knew that they had not accomplished much with their stinging cross-examinations or their character witnesses. Instead of trying to argue away what the jury had seen and heard, Peruto, at least, was going out in a blaze of oratory. He acknowledged that his client and the others had taken money. It was the character of the crime he wanted the jury to weigh against the character of the men charged. Wasn’t losing their careers and reputations enough punishment for such a commonplace crime? How can these cops be guilty of extorting money from people who were delighted to pay them off? “Who made the phone calls?” the defense attorney asked. “Who wanted the meetings? Who was it that was dying to get connected?…Poor little Mr. Hersing, poor little Mr. Hersing, the cockroach…
“Let me tell you something. They are a special breed of men. Philadelphia isn’t the safest of the ten major cities in the United States (it would come out, years later, that the department faked its crime statistics) because these fellows were sleeping on the rest of their jobs. Sure, it’s irrelevant. It’s irrelevant that they had outstanding performance ratings. It’s irrelevant that John Smith was commended over and over. It’s irrelevant that they put their lives on the line.”
Peruto denounced the FBI for hiring a “pimp” to bring down these men. He invoked the Boston Tea Party, urging the jury, as ultimate judge of the law, to acquit the men in a protest against the federal government’s tactics in the case.
“One juror, one juror that says Enough! I am not going to go along with this garbage! is all that stands between an injustice and justice. Don’t concern yourselves. No way is John Smith ever going to patrol our streets again or command policemen. No way can he or Mrs. Smith or his sons and daughters hold their heads up. You can’t give that back to them, but you can sure stop this nonsense…. One of you stand up and say…We are not going to stand for this anymore! We are people! If that is flag-waving, I’ll wrap myself in it.
“We forget all about John Smith, don’t we? Don’t we, because it was almost forty years ago that he was on the battle lines for our country. If this very trial were taking place in 1946 and I put up his service record, you would walk him out. Are we so callous that we forget? Do we forget those guys who fought on Bunker Hill? Do we forget those people who put down their lives constantly to give us those principles instead of headlines?”
Each day during the trial, outside the courtroom, the agents had small interactions with the men whom they had stalked for so long. Inspector DeBenedetto had, in their estimation, changed utterly. He looked as if he had lost weight, and seemed pale. His lawyers described him as a shattered man. The once-commanding figure sat meekly through the trial with his hands folded in his lap.
Lieutenant Smith, they said, treated them with great politeness. His wife came over and spoke to them several times. The Smiths both wanted to let the FBI men know that there were no hard feelings. “It was like they wanted us to know that they understood we had just been doing our jobs, and that they thought we had acted professionally,” Thompson says. “Whatever was happening, they didn’t hold it against us personally.” Once, Mrs. Smith actually hugged them.
Abe Schwartz was, true to form, dapper, cheerful, and pleasant. It was hard not to like the guy. Of all the men on trial, Schwartz seemed the most confident. Despite the embarrassing conversations on the videotapes, the thread linking Schwartz to DeBenedetto and the others was tentative at best. Schwartz had been extremely circumspect most times. Lytton was hoping the jury would be able to see Abe Schwartz as part of the larger context. But Hersing’s surprisingly friendly testimony had to have given the detective a boost. Right up to the end, the detective thought that there was at least a very good chance that he, of all those on trial, would be acquitted.
Mostly, the agents took a liking to Georgie Woods. The chubby, moustachioed officer had simply resigned himself to his situation. His attitude, according to Thompson and Lash, was the same as the one DeBenedetto had described on the tape after he had found out that Woods was collecting payoffs on his own. His attitude was, simply, “I got caught.”
Woods even retained his irrepressible sense of humor. One day during the trial, the agents happened to get on the same elevator with the former vice squad officer. The doors closed on the three men.
They were riding upstairs in awkward silence, avoiding each other’s eyes, when Woods suddenly turned to Thompson and Lash and said:
“Hey, guys, how ’bout we just forget all of this?”
They were all found guilty, Schwartz and Emery of conspiracy, the others of extortion and conspiracy. John Smith, who had collected so many bribes for his boss, DeBenedetto, was sentenced by Judge John B. Fullam to serve six years in Eglin Federal Prison Camp, a minimum-security facility at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Vincent McBride was sentenced to three years at Montgomery Federal Prison Camp at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. Larry Molloy was sentenced to three years at Eglin; after nine months he was put in a program that enabled him to work at a catering business in Philadelphia and return to a local jail facility each night.
George Woods was sentenced by Judge Louis L. Pollak to four years at Eglin. Ray Emery, Woods’s former partner, was sentenced to three years at Montgomery. Lytton had recommended that partners be separated. That way, he thought it more likely that one of the men might relent and agree to cooperate with the continuing investigation.
Abe Schwartz was stunned by the verdict against him, according to his lawyer, Jeffrey Miller. All along, Lytton had been confident that the tape-recorded evidence made Schwartz’s role in the conspiracy too obvious to deny.
Prior to sentencing on August 1, Miller urged Judge Fullam to treat his client leniently. He pointed out that the prosecutors had not shown that Schwartz had taken any money, and that his client, of everyone, had been the least culpable. He cited the testimony to Schwartz’s fine character, and reviewed briefly the detective’s forty-year career in the force.
“We have submitted photographs to Your Honor showing Mr. Schwartz with Grace Kelly, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and David Ben-Gurion,” Miller said, “and Mr. Schwartz was involved and secured numerous presidential visits.”
“Not to be cynical,” Judge Fullam interrupted, “but it could also be interpreted that Mr. Schwartz had good connections and was able to line up soft and cushy jobs as opposed to hard beat work.”
“I think that
is true,” Miller said, “but I think those who have worked those kind of jobs know they are not cushy. They are generally around-the-clock things, sitting outside hotel rooms.”
“There is a feature of this pro-sentence report which I think requires some comment,” Fullam said. “That is the remarkable accumulation of assets which Mr. Schwartz has succeeded in achieving.”
Miller explained that Schwartz’s $42,000 home in the northeast was originally purchased twenty-eight years ago for $13,000, that the $80,000 Long Beach Island home was purchased years before for only $7,800, and that Schwartz had put down only $22,000 to buy the $57,000 Florida condominium. Miller backed away from the subject matter quickly. He spoke at some length about Schwartz’s military record and charitable work. Then the defense attorney returned to what had been proved against his client.
“Basically, what the evidence showed about Mr. Schwartz…was that he told Mr. Hersing if he wanted to pay somebody he should go see Mr. DeBenedetto, and Schwartz would try to connect him with Mr. DeBenedetto.”
“No, it went a little further than that,” Fullam said. “The plain implication was: Mr. Schwartz viewed it as a matter of course that police would be paid off, and that any businessman who needed a favor and didn’t pay off the police was an idiot.”
When Miller had finished, Lytton added a few points about Schwartz’s considerable assets. Living off a detective’s annual salary of about $25,000, Schwartz owned, in addition to his three homes, $60,000 in stocks and bonds, and had about $15,000 cash on hand.
“Plus the ability to have educated all his children,” the judge said. Then, addressing Schwartz, “Those of us who have done it find it remarkable that you have any money left over.” Pointing out that an officer of Schwartz’s stature had more responsibility to set an example to younger men, Fullam then sentenced Schwartz to four years at Eglin, and fined him $10,000.
On the same day that Schwartz was sentenced, John DeBenedetto appeared in court again. In addition to the charges for which he had already been convicted, the inspector had also been charged with filing false income tax statements for the previous two years. He had originally pleaded not guilty to these charges, but had since decided not to contest them.
To Lytton, on this day, the proud, commanding figure seemed thoroughly beaten. Robert Madden, DeBenedetto’s attorney, told the court that his client had written out a letter expressing his feelings and his position. “We have discussed it at length and he felt he would be unable to address the court at the time of sentencing,” Madden said. “He feels emotionally drained.”
Madden reviewed the other side of DeBenedetto’s twenty-nine-year service record, the “supercop” side.
“He was a good cop,” Madden said. “He cared about the citizens of Philadelphia. He cared about cleaning up crime…. I met Mr. DeBenedettoprior to initiation of this investigation and he talked proudly about what he was doing in Center City to prevent muggers…. He was proud then. Today he is no longer proud.” Madden asked the judge to put himself in the inspector’s place. “Think about the fact that you are a judge. You have served your community for years. If you were disgraced in front of all your friends and family in the manner Mr. DeBenedetto was, what could be more devastating to you as an individual? He is humiliated. He is crushed. He is broken…. He can’t go out in public. He can’t hold his head up in front of his family. He is just beaten.”
But DeBenedetto was not beaten completely. He had refused to cooperate with the continuing federal probe into the widespread departmental corruption his case had revealed.
“This case, as presented, was enough to cause many of us to become ill,” Judge Fullam told DeBenedetto. “It exhibited police officers as parasites. Unfortunately, the evidence leaves little doubt that what we have seen here is the tip of the iceberg. And the real tragedy, again, is that so many other officers who are totally honest, who are doing their job, who are risking their lives, are placed under a shadow. I note that none of the defendants have been forthcoming with the government with respect to their obviously extensive knowledge of other instances of corruption in the department. That is their choice. But it is a choice they must accept the consequences of.”
Fullam sentenced DeBenedetto to serve eight years at the Montgomery Federal Prison Camp.
The day after he sentenced DeBenedetto, Judge Fullam was criticized publicly by the Fraternal Order of Police. Robert S. Hurst, president of FOP Lodge 5, demanded that the judge apologize for his “slanderous remarks.” There were also those in the department who, while deploring the crimes for which DeBenedetto and the others were convicted, were nevertheless alarmed at the severity of Fullam’s sentences. These sentences struck them as inappropriately harsh, compared with what perpetrators of major crimes of violence sometimes receive. Federal prosecutors, on the other hand, credit the stern sentences with helping them get further cooperation from police sources as they continued to look for corruption in the department.
During the following year, sixteen more police officers would be indicted, and would plead not guilty to charges of racketeering and extortion in connection with the alleged systematic shakedown of vice operators. Those indicted would include men in places of high authority. Five were lieutenants. One was a captain. One, Joseph DePeri, was a chief inspector. And one, Deputy Commissioner James J. Martin, was, at the time of his April 10 resignation, the second-highest-ranking officer of the force.
This later set of federal indictments would portray corruption so endemic that the department itself had been turned into a “criminal enterprise.” According to the indictments, beat cops were collecting money citywide from bar owners and bookies, and were being rewarded with small portions of the take after passing the money up the ranks.
With the $25,000 he was paid by the FBI for his undercover work, Donald Hersing moved to Florida, where he leased a lovely suburban home with a swimming pool in back. Hersing opened an after-hours club catering to the same kind of randy, late-night, no-holds-barred customers as those who had patronized the Morning Glory, his after-hours club in Philadelphia.
Within months after his arrival in Florida, he was having problems with the local government, feuding over the club’s hours of operation, over whether customers were really bringing their own booze or the club was selling it, and over the whores who plied their trade among the club’s early-morning clientele. Hersing again felt harried and out of sync with his true self. He insisted that the club was just a temporary thing. What he really wanted was something closer to law enforcement, something like supervising hotel security. He wondered if maybe he could get a reference from the FBI.
The Bureau had offered to include Hersing in its federal witness protection program, but that would have meant changing his name and not being able to stay in touch with his family or friends. He didn’t want any part of it. Besides, this had been Hersing’s biggest caper. He had gotten his revenge. Who could give up the chance to gloat a little bit? To pull out the newspaper clippings and tell the story of Georgie Woods and Abe Schwartz and John DeBenedetto, and the whorehouses he had owned in Philadelphia, and how the local police had tried to lean on him?
Him! Donald Hersing! A veteran private investigator. A man so expert in electronic surveillance equipment and techniques that he had traveled the Third World as a salesman and teacher. A man who spoke three languages fluently. A man who had been nabbing crooked cops for years.
Him! Did they think he was just some pimp they could push around?
Didn’t they know who Donald Hersing was?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe thanks to a platoon of editors for helping me make these stories presentable enough for publication. The ones who come readily to mind are Toby Lester, Yvonne Rolzhausen, Robert Vare, Bill Eddins, Carolyn White, Charles Layton, and David Boldt. I’m grateful.
Thanks also to Terrence Henry, whose research was a big help in the articles that originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.
Mark Bowden, Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts
