Busted (23 page)

“Where are the drugs?” one cop yelled.

“We don't have any drugs,” Naomi replied.

“Where's this guy Beamer?” a cop asked.

“I don't know. We're just renting a room from him,” she explained.

Naomi noticed Tolstoy eyeing her up and down. There was something sinister about him.

“I need to talk to you upstairs,” Tolstoy told her.

Tolstoy directed her to the steps and she complied, with him following closely behind. Raheem, who stayed downstairs with the other cops, lost sight of her.

“Look. We're not doing anything wrong,” she warily told Tolstoy, her hands restrained behind her back, as she treaded upstairs. “Really. We don't have any drugs.”

“Be quiet,” he said. She sensed frustration in his tone. “I just want to talk to you. I'm just going to ask you more questions, and then I'll take off the handcuffs.”

They reached the landing, and Tolstoy freed her hands. They stood in the doorway of her apartment.

“You know anyone in the area who sells crack cocaine?”

“No, Officer.”

“You sure you have nothing in your room?”

“I have nothing, Officer. I'm sure.”

“Well, I have to see for myself.”

She told him he could look all over the apartment; she had nothing to hide. She expected Tolstoy to ransack her room, but he didn't.

“I'm gonna need to see under your shirt.”

“But I have no bra on.”

“That's OK,” Tolstoy said.

She asked if he could send up a female officer. Tolstoy ignored her request.

“You know I could lock you up for the drugs we found downstairs.”

Naomi knew that made no sense, but she was too scared to argue. Her hands quivered as she slowly lifted up her pink and white top. Not saying a word, Tolstoy's meaty hands clasped her breasts with his fingers moving in a caressing squeeze.

“Lift up your skirt,” he told her.

Naomi again asked for a female officer, and Tolstoy again threatened to lock her up for drugs that weren't hers.

Naomi gripped the denim and slowly lifted the skirt up.

“I have to see in your underwear.”

Naomi tugged her panties down just slightly, just enough to show him she had nothing hidden there. Tolstoy lurched forward and yanked her panties down further.

“Please. I don't feel comfortable with that,” she begged.

“Be quiet.”

Tolstoy jammed his index and middle fingers into her vagina. He thrust them inside her with a violent jab. Naomi turned her head to the side, avoiding his face. If I don't look at him, I won't feel anything, she thought.

Naomi winced at the pain. She could feel the burn, the sting as she began to bleed.

She backed up, trying to pull away from him. She reached down and tried to pull up her panties with one hand and push down her skirt with the other.

“I don't want you touching me like that,” she whimpered.

“I'll have to put you back in handcuffs.”

“Stop,” she cried. “Stop.”

He grabbed her shoulders with such force that the spaghetti strap of her shirt broke off.

Tolstoy's expression changed instantly. His eyes became saucer-like. He looked flustered, almost fearful.

“If they ask you how your strap broke,” he told her, “you tell them you always tie it, and it just came loose.”

After the cops left, Raheem went upstairs to find Naomi. The first thing he noticed was her torn shirt, then the terror in her eyes. She told him she was bleeding, that the cop hurt her, maybe scratched her or caused internal damage.

They walked almost a mile to the nearest hospital where Naomi gave the staff a false name—Asia Johnson. Naomi was vague with the details.

“I just want to get myself checked out. I just feel funny down there,” she told nurses. “I just want to make sure I'm okay.” She was too embarrassed to say exactly what Tolstoy did, but nurses suspected immediately that she'd been sexually assaulted.

“I know there's something going on,” a nurse gently told her.

The staff called uniformed cops to escort Naomi and Raheem to another hospital, where the special victims unit was located. Nurses ordered a rape kit and alerted SVU investigators, who bagged her ripped shirt and underwear as evidence, and told her they'd run DNA tests. Naomi pulled aside a female officer. “My name's not Asia Johnson,” she whispered. “I made up the name because I was scared.”

Naomi didn't know Tolstoy's name. But internal affairs had more than a hunch. Dagma had made a similar complaint six months earlier, and at the time she, too, couldn't identify Tolstoy by name. But in both cases, Tolstoy was the only cop who had been alone with the women.

So internal affairs took Tolstoy off the street the same night that Naomi showed up at the special victims unit.

Two days after the assault, Naomi was walking down the sidewalk near her apartment when two uniformed cops pulled their police car to the curb beside her. The cop on the passenger side rolled down his window and asked her what happened in her apartment.

“Nothing happened,” she said, hoping they'd drive off and leave her alone.

“We've got some information . . . ,” the cop began. She ignored him, turned around, and walked off. The cop leaped out of the car, thrust her arms behind her back, handcuffed her, and threw her in the back of the cruiser.

Naomi insisted that this cop was Tolstoy, but Barbara and I couldn't prove it. Tolstoy was on desk duty at the time, but there was a possibility that Tolstoy met up with a cop buddy after work. We knew Tolstoy's squad was chummy with the patrol cops in Naomi's neighborhood. Two district cops had given the squad the initial tip about Beamer dealing crack out of his apartment.

“Whatever you said, take it back,” the cop said, all red-faced as he glared at her.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she said.

“You'll be seeing me around,” he warned. Then he let her go.

Naomi ran to a pay phone and dialed her mom, who came to pick her up. Together they went to the police district to file a report. But the officers told Naomi they needed a name of the cop who stopped her.

“Listen. We have thousands of police officers.”

Naomi and her mom left, disgusted and frustrated. Naomi moved from her apartment on Orthodox Street to her mom's house in New Jersey. Then the phone calls started. Naomi's cell rang at all hours from restricted or unavailable numbers.

“Drop it.”

“Don't say nothing.”

“I know where you're at.”

“We'll find you.”

Naomi suspected the callers were cops. She and her mother changed their phone numbers several times, but the calls continued, and Naomi grew afraid to leave home.

Then one day, roughly five weeks after the raid, two investigators showed up at Naomi's mom's house. They sat the two women down and explained they had some evidence linking an officer to the sexual assault. They wanted Naomi to press criminal charges. She just couldn't do it.

“I wouldn't mind going to court if I knew he was going to get locked up,” she said. “I'd go to court, but it's not just him making the phone calls. It's not just him stopping me. I don't want to walk down the street and worry what will happen.”

Naomi refused to cooperate, and then she disappeared, moving from her mom's house to another apartment. Internal affairs investigators lost track of her. Without Naomi, they decided they didn't have enough to keep Tolstoy on desk duty. So on January 12, 2009—three months after the assault—Tolstoy was put back on the street.

It wasn't until Lady, Dagma, and Naomi all told similar stories to internal affairs that police superiors felt they had no choice. They couldn't leave Tolstoy out there. On April 2, 2009, Lady went to the special victims unit and internal affairs to name Tolstoy as her attacker. The next month, on May 20, 2009, Tolstoy was put back on desk duty and had to relinquish his service weapon.

“Until we investigate further, we don't want him taking police action. We don't want to expose the city to other accusations or to any liability or risk,” internal affairs chief inspector Anthony DiLacqua told us.

Barbara called Lady and Dagma to let them know that Tolstoy was off the street. They were grateful and relieved, though forever traumatized.

“I felt like a pig,” Dagma told Barbara. “He made me feel so bad. I felt disgusting. I didn't even want to be touched no more from nobody. I was aggravated with myself. I hated myself that instant because I wish that never would have happened to me. I just wanted to run away where no one can find me and just run, run, and leave everything, everything behind, but it's something that I can't do. I can forgive, but I will never, ever forget.”

Tolstoy targeted Dagma, Lady, and Naomi for a reason. Each was beautiful, with smooth skin, full sensual lips, and large brown eyes framed by curly lashes. They were pleasers—soft-spoken, slightly fearful of authority, with no arrest record, the type of women who put the needs of their men and their children before their own. They constantly doubted themselves, but beneath the insecurity, there was a sunniness, an optimism. Lady and Dagma shared an inner strength and resolve that propelled them to allow the
Daily News
to print their full names and photos. Dagma and Lady also agreed to do videos, which we posted online. Even now, when Barbara and I watch the videos, we're moved to tears—awed by their courage.

BARBARA AND I SPENT THE FALL CHASING NEW TIPS ABOUT NARCOTICS COPS GONE ROGUE. WE LOOKED INTO CLAIMS OF MONEY LAUNDERING
, shady real-estate deals, a $50,000 theft of drug money from a notorious motorcycle club, and the blackmailing of prostitutes who advertised on Craigslist. On each lead, we ran smack into a dead end.

While we spun our wheels, exhausting ourselves, the police department moved forward with reforms. For the first time in twenty-three years, police brass put out a new directive that placed tighter controls on narcotics officers and their confidential informants.

The new regulations spelled out what narcotics cop could and could not do with informants. Some of the dos and don'ts on the list were so obvious they were almost comical: No sexual relationships. No gifts. No social, financial, or business dealings.

Police Commissioner Ramsey also appointed a chief integrity officer to scrutinize drug cases that used informants. The reforms recognized that the relationship between a cop and his informant was potentially toxic. Drug informants weren't trustworthy, and corruptible cops couldn't be trusted to work with them, not without close supervision. From now on, all contact between the two, including phone conversations and meetings, had to be documented and reviewed by higher-ups, and a supervisor had to witness all police payouts to informants.

The police department finally got what some of Benny's relatives had been saying all along: as Jeff and Benny grew more dependent on one another, their relationship was poisonous. Jeff earned about $100,000 a year, almost half from court overtime, and he won accolades and commendations for drug arrest numbers that soared—mostly on Benny's back. Benny used some of the money he earned helping to take down dealers to feed his own drug habit. They were addicted to each other.

Barbara and I only came to understand this after we spoke with Susette, the woman Benny called his first wife, and their three adult children—Susette Jr., Benny Jr., and Iesha.

“They were using each other,” twenty-six-year-old Benny Jr. said. “But it was like my dad was going down, and Jeff was going up.”

Barbara and I sat in Susette's living room, where the family explained that Benny was, and probably always would be, an addict. He liked it all—crack, cocaine, marijuana, and pills.

He'd been in and out of rehab at least four times, and even now, he would pawn almost anything for a fix.

When Susette was in Puerto Rico for her grandmother's funeral, Benny claimed someone broke into their house through a back window and stole a television and Benny Jr.'s Nintendo, but Susette knew better. When Benny Jr. was fifteen, he bought a new bike with money he earned as a stock boy at a sneaker store, but his father snuck it out of the basement and sold it for crack. Benny Jr. asked his father what happened to his $250 GT bicycle. At first Benny denied knowing anything about it, then he just said, Yeah, I took it. “He didn't give a reason. I already knew,” Benny Jr. said. When Susette realized her high school graduation ring and her grandmother's necklace were missing, she forced Benny to tell her what he'd done with them. Susette marched over to the drug dealer's house to try to buy the jewelry back.

Time after time, Benny called Susette from dark, fetid crack dens, where she'd find him sprawled out on a filthy mattress, immobilized by paranoia. “Don't let him back in here,” Susette rebuked the dealer as she dragged Benny out to the car. She screamed at him the whole ride home.

“Sorry, Susette. I'll never do it again,” he vowed.

She thought, Yeah, right. “Da, da, da . . . I'm not going to get you no more. That's on you.”

When the kids were little, Susette covered for Benny. But when they grew older, she wanted them to understand the poison. She dug around in Benny's pockets and fished out a baggie of crack. She sat the kids down at the kitchen table and held the drugs out in her open palm. “This is what your father is doing,” she told them. She walked stoically into the bathroom and flushed the drugs down the toilet.

Benny's habit only grew worse after he started working with Jeff. Benny sometimes sampled the drugs during a buy, claiming if he didn't, the dealer might suspect he was a snitch or an undercover cop. At the end of the night, Jeff handed Benny his informant pay and dropped him at a corner near his house, but Benny didn't go home. He disappeared for days.

Susette called Jeff to let him know. “Benny went out and did this for you, and now he didn't come back. He's doing his stuff out there. You know he's snorting coke and smoking crack,” she said.