AFTER BARBARA ASKED JEFF ABOUT RENTING A HOUSE TO BENNY, JEFF HIRED A PIT BULL OF A LAWYER TO FEND OFF BARBARA AND ME. HIS SOLE job was to kill the story. Our job was to hold our ground.
On January 31, 2009, George Bochetto launched the first salvo in the form of a letter. The subject line read: “Urgent Warnings Regarding News Story.” Just to make sure we got it, he sent the letter by fax, e-mail, and first-class mail.
“Officer Jeff ________ is an undercover narcotics officer with the Philadelphia Police Department, and is married and has two school-aged children living in Philadelphia. Any publication of Officer Jeff ________’s name, address, photograph, or any other facts which could lead to his identification or home address will place Officer Jeff ______, his wife, and his children in extreme danger.”
We thought this argument was ludicrous. Jeff routinely testified in open court. He took the witness box and not only said his last name, but spelled it. When the prosecutor asked Jeff if he recognized the person whom he arrested, Jeff pointed to the drug dealer seated at the defendant’s table. Jeff often made this identification in front of a courtroom full of other criminal defendants awaiting their own cases.
Bochetto also wrote that Benny’s rap sheet read like a “credibility horror story,” and he urged us to meet with him immediately.
On a late February afternoon, as heavy wet snowflakes fell, leaving faint pinwheels that quickly melted on the slick streets, Barbara and I stepped out of a cab in front of Bochetto’s downtown law office on Locust Street. With boutiquish French glass doors, hunter green awning, and white stone entranceway, it was nestled among trendy restaurants, shops, and theaters.
I dressed for war. I ditched my size three and a half sneakers for tan leather pumps that I’d had to special-order from a shoe company called Cinderella. I swapped my owlish eyeglasses for contact lenses, put on crimson lipstick, eye makeup, and blush. I wore a plaid wool skirt and a purple V-neck sweater, with a brown scarf looped around my neck. Barbara, who had a wardrobe with clothes dating back to the 1980s, sported a black pencil skirt that she’d recently hemmed just above the knee, bringing the style into this decade. She paired it with a fitted jacket and her signature black leather boots, with the broken zipper and glued-on left heel. The Jewish hillbillies from Philly had arrived.
Once inside the reception area, we took a seat on a chocolate brown leather couch, tufted with buttons, the kind we imagined could be found in an English riding club. The decor was brut masculine, heavy on soft leather and dark wood. We waited for what seemed like a good while, at least one Sponge-Bob episode, I figured, using my kids’ measurement of time. We wondered if the wait was intentional, if Bochetto wanted to make us sweat.
A skinny guy, with pasty skin and slicked-back black hair, approached us. He looked like a boy who had dressed up in his dad’s pin-striped suit, which he paired, thoughtfully, with a blood-red silk power tie. A cross between Pee-wee Herman, a child vampire, and a pimp wannabe. He led us up a flight of steep, narrow stairs and ushered us into Bochetto’s office.
Bochetto stood up from his massive, polished wood desk and shook each of our hands with a confident grip. He wore a smirk, an expression of amusement and curiosity. Clearly, he intended to make quick work of us. Bochetto’s minion sat off to the side in a corner, with a yellow legal pad and pen on his lap.
We sat down across from Bochetto in matching teal-green upholstered chairs with deep seats and wood trim. When I sat back, the chair swallowed me up, clamlike, and my feet didn’t touch the floor. I felt like Lily Tomlin as her five-year-old Edith Ann persona in a giant rocking chair. So I scooted forward and perched myself on the edge.
“Do you mind if I use my tape recorder?” I asked, as I placed it on his desk.
“No. No. You can’t,” Bochetto huffed. “That’s a violation of Pennsylvania’s Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act.”
I started to protest, but he cut me off. “This conversation is off the record.”
“No,” I said, petulant and defiant.
He looked at me incredulously. We could see him begin to simmer.
“I’m sorry, but we can’t agree to that,” Barbara said.
Ding. Ding. We were in Bochetto’s boxing ring, and round one had begun. The fiery attorney liked to fight. He was a fighter from the moment he was born.
As an infant, Bochetto was abandoned at a Brooklyn orphanage and spent the first seven years of his life without a last name. He cycled in and out of foster homes and fell prey to street punks who teased him and beat him up. A family from Rochester, New York—the Bochettos—adopted him. The scrawny teen found a second home in a nearby gym, where he taught himself to box, punching a weight bag to toughen himself up—inside and out. Bochetto became an amateur boxer and later graduated, cum laude, from Temple University School of Law in 1978. Then-governor Tom Ridge appointed Bochetto state boxing commissioner in 1995, and the Pennsylvania Veteran Boxers Association named him Man of the Year in 1997. As boxing commish, Bochetto raised money to open gyms and boxing leagues in neighborhoods battered by violence. He dug into his own pocket to pay gym fees for poor kids.
The fifty-six-year-old Bochetto oozed panache and power. Under other circumstances, we might have thought him handsome, in his stylish dark-framed eyeglasses and starched white dress shirt embroidered GEORGE near the breast pocket. He combed his thick graying hair back in a wavelike ripple.
His office was a shrine to boxing. The dark green walls were decorated with posters of legends like Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson and photos of Bochetto with them. Silk boxing trunks autographed by Ali and Joe Frazier hung on the wall near oil paintings of fighters. Boxing gloves were displayed in an antique china cabinet with a glass door. On Bochetto’s desk sat a 1936 bronze sculpture of clashing boxers. The work, entitled The Uppercut, was created by boxer-turned-artist Joe Brown. A black T-shirt sold during the 1995 fight between Mike Tyson and Buster Mathis Jr. was preserved in a picture frame. As boxing commissioner, Bochetto had licensed Tyson to fight in Pennsylvania after Iron Mike got out of prison for rape, paving the way for the Philadelphia Tyson-Mathis matchup. On a side table was an original, unopened Wheaties cereal box with Ali on the front.
Bochetto, who specialized in libel law, began to lecture us, his voice laced with anger and frustration. He couldn’t understand why we would even consider writing a story based on the word of a convicted drug dealer turned informant.
“What do you guys think you are going to do? Win a Pulitzer Prize?” he sneered.
Of course drug dealers arrested by Jeff, a decorated cop, would say that Benny never made the buy. They’d feed us any bullshit to beat the case, and Benny was a bottom-feeder, Bochetto told us.
“Being a confidential informant, those are spaces occupied in the main by scumbags,” Bochetto said. “These are liars and thieves and snakes who will do anything and say anything for any reason. They never man up. They never face reality and accept the consequences. They are always looking for a crack to crawl in, a rock to crawl under.”
Any reasonable person, anyone playing with a full deck, would have got Bochetto’s point and probably dropped the story.
Not us. Maybe we were off our gourd, but we knew that Jeff had rented a house to Benny. I mean, Barbara had been at landlord-tenant court. We believed that Jeff had lied on some of the search warrants. They read alike, as if they were cookie-cutter form letters that Jeff filled in with different names and addresses, a kind of Mad Libs. And we weren’t the only ones who thought that the search warrants smelled. Veteran and smart attorneys like Stephen Patrizio, who had represented Raul Nieves and figured out Jeff had rented a house to Benny, thought so, too.
And no one—not even Bochetto, this hardscrabble bully with his commonsense argument—could convince us otherwise. This was why Bochetto was worried. He knew we were trouble. We lacked the skepticism and doubt that Bochetto had seen in other seasoned reporters. He sensed our enthusiasm, our energy. He could tell we were enjoying this fight, though he was convinced we’d lose.
He leaned forward, his arm extended over a Civil War–era sword—a gift from a client—that sat in the middle of his desk. He jabbed his index finger, first at me, then at Barbara. “I’m going to sue you—and you—personally!”
We stood up to leave. I whipped my scarf over my left shoulder and shook his hand. “It’s been a pleasure,” I said, rolling my eyes. My sarcasm elicited a little snort, almost a chuckle, from Bochetto.
We climbed into a cab and looked at each other, wide-eyed.
“Do you think he can sue us? Personally?” I said.
“Geez, I hope not. We’d lose our houses. Wendy, we’d be homeless,” Barbara said.
We began to giggle nervously.
“Nahhhhh!” I said.
Barbara and I did cede some ground to Bochetto. He had chastised us for not contacting officers and supervisors who could vouch for Jeff’s character. We realized he was right. Bochetto agreed to e-mail us names and numbers of Jeff’s colleagues, and we agreed to send him a list of our questions for Jeff.
Bochetto sent over the list of people he described as “more than willing and anxious to provide you with direct, firsthand knowledge of important facts relating to your article.” We hit the phones the minute we got the list. Richard Eberhart was the first name. Eberhart was Jeff’s former partner. He had retired a few years earlier and now, along with Jeff, owned J&R Dunk Tank Rentals, a company that rented moon bounces and carnival games for kiddie parties.
Barbara called Eberhart on his cell. Not surprisingly, Eberhart described Jeff as “an excellent police officer, a straight shooter, a hard worker, an all-around good guy.” She asked Eberhart if he thought Benny was credible and reliable. When Eberhart said, “Yes,” Barbara began to feel the endorphins of a reporter’s high, a blend of panic attack, sugar rush, too much caffeine, and great sex.
“Did you know that Jeff rented a house to Benny?” she asked, and threw in, as if a casual afterthought, “What did you think of that?”
“Would I have done that? Probably not. But who am I to judge?” Eberhart said. “I thought he was helping him out. It didn’t seem inappropriate at the time, but looking back, maybe it was.”
Barbara hung up and zoomed over to my desk, flapping her arms like a seal just before the zookeeper tosses a fish. “You’re never gonna believe this,” she said.
“Get the fuck out!”
We sent Bochetto our questions, fourteen in all, and to tweak him further, we gave him a deadline—highlighted in bold—of 5:00 p.m. the following day. He must have wanted to box our ears.
Bochetto didn’t answer a single question, but he gave us a colorful and snarky quote: “It is overwhelmingly clear that, when the hard facts are put on the table, your story falls apart and your questions become empty vessels of naïveté. What you have, and what you apparently want to rely upon, are nothing but a self-serving series of fictionalizations by professional liars, felons, and drug addicts, each of whom are looking to avoid more jail time by playing the Daily News for a patsy.”
Barbara and I labored over writing the story. We spent hours together in front of the computer, surrounded by documents, interview notes, and empty coffee cups. The floor underneath my desk was littered with Rice Krispies Treats wrappers. At ninety calories apiece, the marshmallow sponges were the only junk food that Barbara allowed herself to eat. I bit my fingernails and gnawed at the cuticles until they bled. I would have salted myself and chewed off my fingers—if I didn’t need them to type.
The story was a sprawling tale about how Jeff and Benny met, their rental arrangement, and Benny’s allegations that Jeff fabricated evidence to get into drug homes.