OF ALL THE PEOPLE BENNY BETRAYED, HE FELT THE WORST ABOUT HECTOR SOTO. HECTOR WAS LIKE A FATHER TO BENNY, MORE SO THAN HIS OWN DAD.
Benny’s dad, Ventura Martinez-Perez Sr., was a local celebrity. He made Philadelphia history in 1971 when he became the first Latino officer on the city’s public housing police force. He earned his FCC license at Temple University in 1976 and moonlighted as a Spanish-language radio announcer. On the airwaves, he talked sports, music, and politics. His on-air name was El Coqui, a type of frog in Puerto Rico that makes a racket.
Benny craved his father’s affection and approval but knew he was a disappointment, even an embarrassment.
“My father always told me that I was a loser,” Benny said.
Benny said his father once chased him down the street after he spotted him selling drugs on the corner. He kicked Benny out of the house and tossed all Benny’s designer clothes—the Sergio Valente and Jordache jeans, leather blazer, Adidas sneakers—because he knew that Benny had bought the high-end threads with drug money.
Benny went to middle school with Hector’s son, Noel, and Benny spent a lot of time over at their house. Hector and his wife, Lucy, were fond of the boy they knew as Flash. Benny and Hector shared a love of salsa music. Hector was a record producer who worked with some of the biggest names in Latino music; Benny took up the timbales and got regular gigs as a DJ.
When Hector wasn’t recording music, he dabbled in drug dealing. He drove nice cars, wore neatly pressed slacks and Panama-style hats, and raised tropical birds. He was everything Benny wanted to be, and Hector took him everywhere in his 1976 Cadillac Seville, a two-toned light and dark blue beauty. They cruised through the neighborhood, driving past row houses with aluminum awnings draped with Puerto Rican flags. Brassy salsa music bubbled from front stoops, where old men sat talking or playing dominoes, flyswatter in hand, on folding chairs on the sidewalk.
Benny brought his girlfriends around to meet Hector, whom he introduced as “my pop.” When Benny needed money to take a girl to a hotel, Benny called Hector, sometimes waking him in the middle of the night. Hector often gave Benny money for a hotel room, a movie, whatever. Hector’s own son grew jealous. Noel couldn’t understand why Hector never gave him money. The reason, Hector told Noel, was that Benny pestered him and whined until Hector opened his wallet.
Benny always spent Christmas Eve with Hector and his family. Lucy made her famous Puerto Rican soup, a stew of black beans and garlic, and her shrimp pastelillos. Benny got drunk and spent the night on Hector and Lucy’s couch. Lucy adored Benny. She would have let him move in, if he had asked.
In 1990, around the time that Benny was hustling $10 bags of coke on the corner, the cops nabbed Hector for selling cocaine out of his house. They confiscated twenty-nine grams of coke, a grinder, pestle, heat sealer, and scale. Hector landed in jail on felony drug charges. He posted $50,000 bail. While awaiting trial, he jumped bail and became a fugitive. At forty-three, Hector went on about his life, lying low but not hiding. He probably would have avoided prosecution and remained free—if not for Benny and Jeff.
When Benny turned police informant after Jeff busted him for selling marijuana and threatened to lock him up if he didn’t, he didn’t just flip—he transformed. He grew to like the power and got a rush from knocking on doors and conning his way into drug houses. He emerged from houses, drugs in hand, and strutted over to Jeff, bragging, “Man, I got these guys. They were supposed to be untouchable.” Benny began to see himself as a cop, and Jeff grew to rely on Benny and treated him like a brother, or so Benny thought.
Over time, Benny’s loyalty and alliance shifted from family friends like Hector to Jeff. Nobody killed Benny, because they hadn’t figured out yet that he was a snitch. Benny was smoother than smooth.
In 2006—almost fifteen years after Hector became a fugitive—Jeff got a tip that he was selling drugs out of his corner row house. The house was a fortress. The front porch was caged by black iron bars. A surveillance camera, rigged to a television in Hector and Lucy’s second-floor bedroom, was pointed at the front gate. Hector and Lucy described the camera system as a safety precaution in a dicey neighborhood, but Jeff knew that drug dealers used video cameras for countersurveillance on the cops.
It was 6:20 a.m., still dark out, on a chilly October morning. Hector and Lucy were asleep in their upstairs bedroom. The air-conditioning unit, cranked on high to alleviate Lucy’s hot flashes, hummed and gurgled in the window. Lucy stirred slightly. Her barely conscious brain registered a muffled noise outside. Thud. Thud. Thud. Maybe the neighbor, hammering something. She had no idea that Jeff and seven other cops were at the front gate. Again and again, they slammed a battering ram into the metal lock until the wrought-iron gate banged open.
The cops came in like a freight train, roaring up the narrow staircase, single file, guns drawn. As they reached the second floor, Lucy opened the bedroom door. She stood, terrified, in her nightgown, barefoot.
A cop yelled, “Come down right now!”
She hustled down the steps to the living room. The cops burst into the bedroom and handcuffed Hector.
A cop shoved Hector to the ground. Hector fell on knees creaky and swollen with arthritis; he was an old fifty-nine. The cop struck Hector on the side of the head with the butt of a rifle. Hector’s right ear, which later turned black and purple, took the brunt of the rifle. His ear throbbed.
From downstairs, Lucy heard Hector howl. She began to cry.
“Bingo!” one cop blurted. They found a clear, knotted sandwich bag, secreted in a dresser drawer, with fifteen ziplock packets amounting to 37 grams of cocaine, worth about $3,700 on the street.
A few days later, Lucy sat crying on the porch. With Hector locked up, she felt lost and scared. As she wiped tears from her cheeks, Benny happened by.
“Ma? Ma? What’s the matter?”
“You didn’t hear? They took Hector away, the cops, they took him.”
Benny acted stunned. “If you need anything from me, if you need anything . . .”
Hector pleaded guilty to two felony drug charges: possession with intent to distribute and conspiracy. With the 1990 case still open, Hector could have gone to prison for twenty years. In exchange for his guilty plea, the judge sentenced him to three to eight years. They shipped him to a prison two hours away from Philadelphia.
Hector had been in prison for almost a year when Benny first came to the Daily News. Benny began to sob when he told Barbara and me about Hector. We believed he felt bad, but we struggled to understand how Benny could help set up someone so close to him.
On a cold January day in 2009, while Barbara tracked down Jorge’s family, I drove from the Daily News to Hector and Lucy’s house on the corner of Seventh and Lycoming Street. I knew from court records that Hector was in prison, but hoped Lucy was home. A gangly teen straddling a bike on the corner watched as I struggled to parallel-park my shrimpy car in a spot big enough to fit two Hummers. I got it on my second try, not too bad on the embarrassment scale, though the back bumper of my car stuck out, all hokeypokey, more than a foot from the curb.
Standing on the icy sidewalk, I was stumped by the iron bars encasing Hector and Lucy’s porch. The gate was locked, and there wasn’t a way to reach the front door.
“She not home,” the teen called out. “You lookin’ for Miss Lucy, right? She not home.”
“Oh. Okay.” I pulled out my reporter’s notebook and scribbled a note, asking her to call me. I folded the note around one of my business cards and stuffed it in the gate lock. A few hours later, Lucy called and arranged for me to come over the next morning.
She greeted me at the gate. Lucy was a petite woman with bleached blond hair tied up in a ponytail. A girlish fifty-three years old, her face was smooth, except for a few faint lines that crinkled around her brown eyes when she smiled. A single freckle sat just above her upper lip.
Her living room looked like a white-and-black checkerboard. The popcorn ceiling and the plaster walls were painted a crisp white. The couch and chairs were a velvety black. The thick carpet was a sea of black. Everything else—the china cabinet, coffee table, end tables, knickknacks—was glass. We sat down at her dining room table. I gingerly placed my tape recorder and notepad on the pearl-colored glass table.
Lucy was eager to talk about Hector. She showed me a handmade Christmas card that he’d sent her from prison. On one side, he drew a heart and a rose with the words JUST LOVE underneath. On the other, he inked a portrait of them together, both smiling, with Hector’s arm around her waist.
“I love him so much. You’d never believe how much I love that man,” she said.
I told her what I knew. That Benny and Jeff set up Hector. Benny said he didn’t want to buy from Hector, so he bought a $20 bag of coke from a guy who sold out of a nearby bar.
“For real?”
She thought about it for a minute, quiet. She narrowed, then widened her eyes, her face a fan of expressions that changed from puzzlement to dismay. Lucy’s reaction reminded me of the plastic volcano that my son Brody got for Christmas. We spooned baking soda into the shot-glass-size base, screwed on the tepee-like cone, and poured vinegar into the narrow opening at the top. We watched as the white liquid fizzed from the volcano’s mouth and then bubbled over in an angry cascade. I don’t think the depth of Benny’s deception sank in until long after I left Lucy’s house.
Later that evening, Hector called Lucy from the prison.
“Poppy, you know who did this?”
“Flash.”
“Flash. Flash? No. No, I don’t believe it. He’s like my son,” Hector said.
Hector and Lucy would later throw out all the photos of them with Benny. A photograph of Benny hugging Lucy went straight in the trash. Lucy told me that Benny was raised in a family with no love.
“We gave him love, and look what he did. . . . If you see him, tell him that we don’t want to see his face.”