Busted (10 page)

The Internal Affairs Division was equally rankled. Police commissioner Charles Ramsey railed that we'd blown their
cover, forcing investigators to abandon their undercover operation. Ramsey had no choice but to strip Jeff of his gun and police powers and put him on desk duty. Ramsey transferred Jeff to the Roundhouse—the hatbox-shaped police headquarters building, where Jeff spent all day taking fender-bender accident reports over the phone. Without the opportunity to use a wiretap, the probe would take months as investigators painstakingly dissected every job Jeff did with Benny.

As vexed as internal affairs was by us, they were even more furious at Benny for going over their heads.

When Benny went to the feds before giving the police department time to investigate, he might as well have flipped all of internal affairs the bird. But that was Benny. He worked all the angles until he got what he wanted, or in his mind, what he needed. His alliances were on spin cycle.

When Jeff told him that he had to get out of his house, Benny went to internal affairs. When internal affairs didn't whisk him into witness protection, he went to Wellington Stubbs at the Philadelphia Police Advisory Commission. When Barbara and I told him that we couldn't write his story without using his name, he went to Fox 29. When the FBI asked him why he went to the
Daily News
, he rolled Wellington under the bus.

“I only did what Wellington told me to do,” Benny shrugged, as if he had no clue that the FBI and internal affairs wouldn't be happy with Wellington. When the city's deputy mayor learned that Benny got my name from Wellington, he scolded Wellington for exercising poor judgment. The city later forced Wellington to resign. Wellington believed the city fired him in retaliation for sending Benny my way, but the city claimed Wellington had violated a rule requiring city employees to live within Philadelphia.

Benny was good at playing victim. Once, after FBI or internal affairs investigators picked him up in a car without tinted windows, Benny bitched to us that they didn't give a shit about his safety.

“Jeff might have been an asshole with me and jammed me up, but he always picked me up in a tinted car. He was protecting me,” Benny complained to me.

When the FBI wouldn't help him out with money or housing, Benny claimed they were punishing him for talking to us. The guilt ate at us because we cared about Benny and his family. His kids were close in age to mine, and I agonized that the story had put them at more risk. For me, telling Benny's story came at a price—I would forever feel responsible for his safety, despite all his faults. I often found myself caring about people I wrote about, but usually they were sympathetic characters. Benny was not.

It didn't bother me and Barbara when FBI and police heaped blame on us. They had their job; we had ours. Our job was to shine a white-hot light on wrongdoing.

In the early 1980s, there was the One Squad scandal—a small circle of narcotics officers were convicted of selling drugs they stole from dealers. Then, in the late 1980s, came the Five Squad Scandal—four officers in an elite narcotics squad went to prison on federal racketeering charges for taking bribes from drug dealers. In the 1990s, there was the Thirty-Ninth District scandal—a half dozen narcotics cops pleaded guilty to framing and beating suspects, lying under oath, and robbing drug dealers. The Thirty-Ninth District scandal was an iceberg that ripped open the hull of the criminal justice system and sank the public's trust in narcotics cops. Hundreds of cases got tossed or overturned, and the city paid millions of dollars to settle federal civil rights lawsuits filed by people wrongly arrested and jailed.

Cops who worked narcotics were especially susceptible to corruption. For one thing, narcotics cops faced a Sisyphean task, an endless and hopeless battle to stem a tsunami of drugs. The dealers literally outgunned and outnumbered the cops, so why play fair? Why not cut some constitutional corners to gain the upper hand? Day in and day out, narcotics cops arrested gun-toting dealers who raked in thousands of dollars a week, drove luxury cars, and adorned themselves with fur coats, jewelry, and designer clothes, while the cops were risking their lives and slogging out a living on a $50,000-a-year cop's salary. If they helped themselves to some drug money or pocketed a diamond ring or framed suspects to boost their overtime pay, what did it matter? Didn't they deserve additional compensation? Corrupt cops were unapologetic.

After each scandal, police watchdogs and civil rights lawyers cited poor training, failure to discipline, and lax rules and oversight of cops who worked with drug informants. They made recommendations for reform—and the police department largely ignored their suggestions. The fact was, Benny didn't trust internal affairs because its investigators had a history of failing to police their own.

If police brass and internal affairs wanted to blame Barbara and me for blowing their investigation, fine. But if they had cleaned their own house years back, we wouldn't be here. That's how we saw it.

The Defender Association of Philadelphia, which represents poor people in criminal cases, began to scrutinize scores of drug cases in which Jeff used Benny as an informant. In the wake of our first page-one story, civil rights attorneys clamored for more supervision of and better training for narcotics officers. The police inspector in charge of narcotics lamented that the allegations, if true, could free dozens of drug dealers,
casting a black cloud over the entire narcotics field unit. And the city district attorney's office launched an investigation into Benny's allegations. A few days later, the mayor, the FBI, police internal affairs, and the Philadelphia Office of the Inspector General announced the formation of a joint task force. During an afternoon news conference, city mayor Michael Nutter, whose nasal voice reminded me of Kermit the Frog, especially when he was trying to sound firm, said he wouldn't hesitate to come down hard on Jeff if the investigation revealed wrongdoing.

“We think that high ethical standards matter in the entire city, but especially in the Philadelphia Police Department,” said Nutter, grim-faced. “If any of these allegations are true, we will take, I'm sure, the swiftest action.”

“Obviously, ensuring the safety of individuals involved in this investigation will be paramount,” Janice Fedarcyk, FBI special agent in charge, said at the press conference when reporters asked about witness protection for Benny.

By now, the age-old
Daily News
–
Inquirer
rivalry was in full tilt.
Inquirer
editor Bill Marimow had won not one but two Pulitzer Prizes—in 1978 and 1985—for an investigative series that exposed police brutality and misconduct. This was his kind of story, and he wanted his paper to own it. The
Inky
reporters weren't going to follow us, they were going to beat us. Within two weeks, the
Inky
had seven reporters on the story. The sleeping giant was wide awake.

When
Inky
deputy managing editor Vernon Loeb thought that his reporters did a better job than us on their follow-up story about the fallout from Benny's allegations, he dashed off a congratulatory e-mail from his BlackBerry and copied all the top editors:

“While I never liked getting beat on a story (and I'm not saying it was you two guys who got beat on the original
Daily
News
piece about [Jeff and Benny]), I knew it was an occupational hazard, and you could never break every story. But I always vowed to myself that I'd never get beaten on a follow, and I always loved to take over the stories I was beaten on and mercilessly pound my competitors once I was on the case. And this is why I absolutely loved—loved!—this scoop you guys had this morning, significantly advancing this important story and announcing to the
Daily News
, with data analysis they can't possibly match, that we're not going to be beaten again, and that we in fact intend to own this story from here on out. Great work. Best, Vernon.”

The e-mail became a running joke in our newsroom.
Daily News
columnist Howard Gensler, who wrote the paper's celebrity gossip du jour, slipped the phrase “mercilessly pound” into a column about how
Extra
beat out
Access Hollywood
and
Entertainment
as the first to report that Nicollette Sheridan was leaving
Desperate Housewives
.

It was ridiculous that reporters at the two newspapers—owned by the same company, operating out of the same building—regarded one another as competition, even enemies. Ridiculous, that is, to everyone but us.

When the
Daily News
scooped the
Inquirer
on a story,
Inky
editors dressed down their reporters. “You got beat, don't let it happen again.” When they scooped us, our editors minimized their victory. “Well, you know, they have more people, more resources.”

The
Daily News
harbored an inferiority complex, fueled by the fact that some of our reporters had applied for jobs at the
Inquirer
and didn't get hired and that
Inky
staffers made more money. When I parachuted down to the
Daily News
to avoid being laid off in late 2006, I got to keep my $76,648
Inquirer
salary, which meant I made more than some
Daily News
re
porters who had been with the company longer. Barbara, who was my editor at the time, made only $4,316 more than me, even though she had worked at the company a decade longer. The
Daily News
was a second-class citizen, and that made our victories somehow sweeter. The Goliath
Inquirer
looked down at us from its perch as we bobbed and weaved, swinging hard. Occasionally, we got our jabs in.

Some
Inky
reporters viewed our mangy troupe as a pest, a persistent termite problem within their stately institution. They secretly wanted us to close, and whenever company number crunchers talked about folding the
Daily News
, the
Inky
reporters wished it so, though they'd never say the words aloud.

At the venerable and cultured 180-year-old
Inquirer
, I was like a kazoo in a symphony. “I'm your bitch,” I once told a reserved editor who asked me to help cover the deadly shooting of five Amish children at their Lancaster schoolhouse. There was silence on the other end of the phone. He didn't know how to take my comment, which was just my quirky and profane way of telling him, “Look, I'll do whatever you need.” Once, when Karl came down with epididymitis, a painful inflammation of the testicles, I told my editors that I had to leave early because “my husband's balls are killing him.” They shook their heads as I shut down my computer.

The “mercilessly pound” e-mail egged us on, feeding our desire to kick some
Inky
ass.

Barbara's will to win, the force within her that drove her to cross the finish line in three marathons, was the fuel that made her a tenacious reporter.

She wasn't a natural athlete. Far from it. As a teen, she was klutzy, always among the last to be picked for a volleyball or basketball team. When she had to do a routine on the uneven bars in a high school gym class, she got stuck on the
top bar, her feet and head dangling hopelessly as the bar cut into her stomach.

By the time she reached her twenties, she got out of breath walking up stairs and felt out of shape. She decided to start running. The first day she couldn't make it three blocks. It took her a month to build up to a mile. She ran at such a slow pace, walkers passed her. She stuck with it and even ran during the first six months of being pregnant with her son, Josh.

To train for a marathon, she got up before dawn and, donning a reflector vest, headed outside, whatever the weather. Some days she ran the same hill eight times over. She seemed to get a sick pleasure out of pushing her body to its limit. She ran the New York City Marathon with an overtraining injury. At mile 20, her legs and feet had turned to lead. Every step felt like daggers piercing through her calves and thighs, but she knew she'd get to the finish line, even if she had to crawl. In every marathon, the last 6.2 miles are killers, the ones where the body checks out and the mind takes over.

Barbara fed off the human chain of 2 million spectators who lined the 26.2-mile course—men, women, and children, three layers thick, who let out a deafening, thunderous roar for Barbara and other average joe runners as if they were Kenyans. They held out their hands for runners to high-five. Barbara slapped hand after hand, using that human connection to tell herself she would not, could not quit.

In the last mile, tears came to her eyes. She saw flashes of her life, but only the good parts, like the moments her children were born and she held them for the first time. All she heard was applause. “Keep going. I can't do what you're doing,” yelled one man who caught her eye.

Then she saw the packed bleachers, the blue banner, and the time clock. The finish line.

Barbara would go for a run on frigid mornings, the cold air burning her nose and eyes. She flexed her stiff fingers, wrapped in gloves emblazoned with the words
I KNOW I RUN LIKE A GIRL. TRY TO KEEP UP.

Barbara approached her job like a marathoner. Stuck to her computer, she kept a Winston Churchill quote: “Never Never Never Give Up.”

We were the underdogs. The B team. The long shot. We weren't expected to win. The thing was, Barbara and I both hated to lose.

LESS THAN TWO WEEKS AFTER OUR FIRST STORY RAN, BARBARA AND I CAME INTO WORK TO FIND AN AVALANCHE OF HATE E-MAILS
.

“You fucking piece of shit!” one reader wrote. “You are a disgrace to yourself and your family and this city!” The reader continued, “It's a shame that you have an ability to get the word out about the positives of this police department . . . and this is how you earn your money.”

We understood the root of their anger. A North Philadelphia drug dealer, Thomas Cooper, aka Thomas Smith, was poised to walk free because Jeff and Benny were tied to his case.