Busted (16 page)

In broken English, the Nams recounted the sweltering July afternoon in 2007 when Jeff and four squad members raided their shop.

“I so scared,” Eunice told Barbara.

Eunice was fifty-six years old, just under five-two, and didn't weigh more than a hundred pounds. She had a tiny sliver of a nose and smooth skin, with a few faint lines around her deep-set eyes and thin lips. She didn't wear a smidge of makeup. With short, thin, curly black hair and brown-framed eyeglasses, she favored loose-fitting black pants, simple, nondescript T-shirts, and sensible flats. She was all business, just like her sixty-two-year-old husband, who was only five-seven, had a receding hairline, and hiked his pants high above his waist with a thin black belt, making his 120-pound frame appear even smaller.

Jeff and his squad blazed into the shop, screaming words the Nams didn't understand. The cops weren't wearing their dress blues, and the terrified couple thought they were being robbed.

“They put us on floor,” Eunice told Barbara, pointing to the square vinyl tiles. “Handcuffs on me,” she said, clasping her spindly fingers behind her back.

“They had guns. Gun on my head,” she said. “Me on floor. Stand over with gun.” Eunice curled her three fingers into her palm and used her index finger and thumb to form the shape of a gun.

“Then I, how do you say?” she said as she swept her right hand toward her crotch and moved it down her thigh. “I all wet.”

Barbara looked to David, who spoke a bit more English. “She wet her pants?” Barbara asked.

“Yes. Yes!” he answered, nodding his head up and down frantically, his dark eyes widening.

“I so, so scared, I wet my pants,” Eunice said, shaking her head in embarrassment.

The cops smashed their two surveillance cameras with a metal rod and yanked camera wires from the ceiling. David, who stood in front of a small radio playing Korean music, showed Barbara; he pulled his hands back as if he held a golf club and then took hard, ferocious swings into the air, toward his new surveillance camera.

“Over and over, they hit. They broke it,” David said.

The officers rifled through drawers, dumped dozens of cigarette cartons on the floor, and swiped cash from the registers. Then they hauled the Nams to jail for selling the baggies. When David and Eunice later unlocked the store, they discovered that a case of lighter fluid and handfuls of Zippo lighters were missing. Cops wrote in paperwork that they seized $2,573 in the raid, but the Nams said they actually had between $3,800 and $4,000 in the store. Most of their cash came in lottery sales to customers who hoped they were one lucky number away from a Powerball jackpot in the millions.

No matter the language—Korean, Arabic, Spanish, Cantonese—the merchants' stories translated the same: the cops barreled into the stores, guns drawn, spewing curse words and slurs like
mama-san
, a derogatory term typically used for a woman who runs a brothel. They sometimes shoved or struck the merchants, tying their hands behind their backs in plasticuffs—plastic handcuffs that bit into their skin. They smashed video surveillance cameras with sledgehammers or metal rods, or cut camera wires with knives they took from the store deli.

When the cameras went dark, the cops stole thousands of dollars in cash and pillaged the stores, guzzling energy drinks and scarfing down Cheez-Its and Little Debbie fudge brownies. They inhaled bags of sunflower seeds, spitting the salty shells on the floor, and helped themselves to fresh turkey hoagies, not bothering to close the refrigerated deli case, leaving the meat and cheese to spoil. They left deep fryers filled with hot vegetable oil simmering on high, not caring if the store burned to the ground. Hopped up on power, the cops swiped the shelves bare, carting off brown boxes filled with cigarettes, batteries, and canned goods. A Hispanic woman who worked at a Dominican-owned store put it simply: “It was like they was shopping.”

The merchants were financially ruined—robbed with a badge—but somehow they were the criminals. The cops arrested them on either misdemeanor charges or felony charges that the court then knocked down to misdemeanors. Immigrants with no criminal records—all living here legally—found themselves being dragged through Philly's archaic justice system. They shelled out thousands of dollars in bail and attorneys' fees. They lost thousands more because their stores were shuttered for days or weeks after the raids. Some were so shaken that they closed their stores for good. Their cases took months to weave through an overburdened criminal court, costing taxpayers money. In the end, a judge sentenced them to probation and fines or lesser penalties.

The drug paraphernalia laws in Pennsylvania were open to dubious interpretation. It was only a crime to sell the baggies if the merchant knew, or should have known, that the buyer intended to use them to package drugs. The merchant had to figure out whether the customer wanted to use the bags for drugs or for some legitimate reason, like preserving rare coins or jewelry. Cops were supposed to target stores, like tire or electronics shops, which would have no reason to sell baggies. Jeff's squad should have never raided merchants like the Nams and Samir, because they had smoke shops and they sold baggies to customers who bought loose tobacco.

To make their case, cops or informants had to walk into the store and specifically ask for “weed bags” or “rock bags.” That's assuming merchants, particularly those who struggled with English, were schooled in drug lingo.

Granted, most baggie buyers weren't little old ladies who wanted to store sweater buttons, earrings, or high-blood-pressure medication. They were corner drug dealers who used the baggies to peddle street-size quantities of drugs. Tiny empty baggies were discarded everywhere—playgrounds, empty lots, alleys, sidewalks. Baggies were the conduit of the drug trade. “It's like selling bullets and saying, ‘We're not selling the guns, we're only selling the bullets,'” a police detective explained to Barbara and me. Some shop owners disagreed: “It's the equivalent of getting locked up for selling knives, and police saying it's murder paraphernalia,” countered one merchant.

Most store owners knew that the baggies were being used to package drugs. But this was Philly. It wasn't the kind of town where you chirpily asked, “What exactly do you need those little bags for?” That could get your head blown off.

These weren't the mom-and-pop stores of yesteryear, when merchants knew their customers by name and didn't worry if they were short on cash or left their wallets at home. Back then, they'd say, “No problem, we'll settle up next time.”

Many merchants bought or rented corner stores in drug-sick neighborhoods devoid of big-chain supermarkets, and of law and order. They were often afraid of their clientele, barricading themselves behind thick, scratched-up walls of bulletproof plastic and exchanging money and goods through a small slit. At least once or twice a year, a merchant got gunned down during a robbery. They invested in video-surveillance systems with multiple cameras pointed at every corner of the store. It wasn't unusual for police to show the store's grainy footage at news conferences when asking the public for help identifying armed perps.

The stores were vulnerable to robberies because the merchants typically dealt in all cash. In one day, they'd take in thousands of dollars in lottery, cigarette, and phone card sales. They used cash to pay wholesale grocery vendors and store rent or mortgages.

Jenny Lu, a fifty-one-year-old Chinese immigrant who arrived here via Vietnam, where she and her husband were fishermen, was a prisoner in her own store. Though she owned a home in South Philadelphia, she rarely slept there. Most nights, she'd lock up the shop and head upstairs to a small apartment with a bed. Jenny's store had been burglarized six times. Break-ins usually happened when the building was empty. Jenny sat sentry over her store—and her money, which she stashed under the bed mattress—like a little hamster, Jenny's daughter, Anh, liked to say.

For Jenny, it seemed safer to keep the money hidden above her store. Walking to the bank with wads of cash in her purse was dangerous. When Jeff, his brother Richard, and three other cops raided Jenny's store, she had more than $10,000, mostly in small bills, stuffed in a plastic bag under the bed. The cops upended the mattress and took it all.

Jenny, like all the other merchants we'd found, never reported the theft to police. Why would they? They came from countries where cops were notoriously corrupt. “Back home, police get away with everything, including murder,” explained Danilo Burgos, president of the city's Dominican Grocers Association. Besides, what if criminals without badges robbed their stores, and they called 911? They couldn't risk being blacklisted by district cops.

AT FIRST THE MERCHANTS WERE RELUCTANT TO TRUST BARBARA AND ME. THEY DIDN'T WANT THEIR NAMES, STORE LOCATIONS, OR FACES PRINTED
in the newspaper. They were scared of retaliation. They were willing to eat the loss, chalking up the cop robberies as a Philly street tax.

But little by little, as the merchants realized they weren't alone, the tide shifted. Every time Barbara got another merchant on board, she euphorically zipped through the newsroom looking for me, even hunting me down in the bathroom. She looked under each stall until she spotted my kid-size sneakers.

“Wendy, I just got another one!” Barbara whooped.

We'd have entire strategy meetings in the bathroom with Barbara yelling ideas at me over the stall door.

I decided to try to circle around to Samir, the Jordanian smoke shop owner who was a no-show at his lawyer's office. I knew his name and the location of his store, and I thought maybe I could persuade him to add his voice to our story.

I found Samir's son, Moe, at the store, and he agreed to meet me with his dad at his house later that day. Just from a brief conversation with Moe, I could tell the father and son were close and Moe was protective of his father.

That night Samir greeted me at the door, where I slipped off my sneakers before entering the living room. As soon as I sat down, his wife served me homemade Middle Eastern sweets and hot mint tea. Moe translated.

“We have other store owners who told us the same story,” I said. “They are going to go on the record and let us use their names in the paper.”

Samir and his wife looked at each other and nodded. Moe would speak on behalf of the family.

Though Samir had lived in America for about seven years, he struggled with English. Samir was a massive man, at least six feet tall, with a hulking frame, big droopy eyes, black as olives, and long ears on either side of a meaty bald head. He was taciturn and shy and kept within the half-mile between his tobacco and cigar shop and his South Philadelphia row house, where he and his family spoke mostly Arabic. He politely nodded and smiled at neighbors and customers, who by all accounts saw him as a gentle giant.

Samir spent all day and most of the night ringing up lottery and cigarette sales, crammed in the narrow aisle between the counter cash register and a wall of white shelves, lined with sea-green cartons of Newports and mahogany boxes of Mavericks. He sold loose tobacco, coffee, and trail mix. He also sold tiny ziplock bags—$5 for 100.

Two years ago, on a late December afternoon, Samir had just finished tallying about $14,000 in cash from the day's sales when Jeff and six other cops burst into the store. Samir's son, Moe, arrived a few minutes later. Samir had been waiting for his twenty-one-year-old son, who manned the register while Samir walked the half-block to the bank to deposit the money.

“What's going on?” Moe asked, as a cop blocked him from going inside.

“We'll tell ya later,” the cop said gruffly.

Moe panicked when he looked through the store window and saw his dad in handcuffs.

“I would like to know why you guys are locking up my dad for no reason,” he said. “I'm his son.”

A cop shoved Moe away from the window, and another plainclothes cop came over and said, “We're arresting your dad because he's selling drug supplies.”

“What kind of drug supplies are you talking about?”

“Little baggies,” the cop said.

“Those baggies that we got, we got those bags from the cigarette wholesaler, they sell them. People came in and asked for them and we got them, we started selling them,” Moe said, the words pouring out.

The cops tore apart the store, while Moe watched through the window. He grew angry and suspicious when he saw one narcotics cop with a pair of pliers in his hand. The cop reached up to a surveillance camera mounted high on the wall and clipped the wires. The cop, who wore a navy blue jacket and a baseball cap, was careful to keep his head down as he cut the wires; he didn't want the camera lens to capture his face. One by one, he sliced the wires to all four security cameras.

Samir had never been arrested before, and he sat in the jail cell, feeling like a scared child.

When Moe opened the shop a few days later, he couldn't see the floor because of the mounds of dumped coffee grinds, candy wrappers, and crushed cigarette cartons. Nearly 40 cartons of Newports were missing. A cigar box, which contained about $900 from the day's lottery ticket sales, was bare, tossed to the floor. The cash register drawer sat ajar and empty, except for a few quarters, pennies, and dimes. Fourteen thousand dollars. Gone.

Jeff left a property receipt on the store counter. Moe looked at the receipt and wanted to pound the wall with his fist: $7,888. That was the amount Jeff claimed police had seized in the raid.

Samir shook his head and looked at Moe with those dark, soulful eyes. In Arabic, Samir said, “There is no way, because I know how much money I had that day. I counted it all up so I could take it to the bank and pay the wholesaler.”

Samir lost more than money in the raid. He lost his dignity. Moe, who moved to the United States from Jordan a decade earlier, had to give up his job as a satellite-dish technician to take over his dad's store. After the raid, Samir was too scared to be in the store. Moe was twenty-three, with thick black hair, slightly gelled back. He had dark eyes and long lashes and a swagger and confidence not inherited from his dad.