A FEW DAYS AFTER THE FRATERNAL ORDER OF POLICE NEWS CONFERENCE, IN EARLY MARCH 2009, TIME MAGAZINE LISTED THE DAILY NEWS AS NUMBER one on its list of “The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America.”
But Barbara and I had a plan that had nothing to do with our newspaper’s predicted demise. We had to track down every drug informant who had ever worked with Jeff. High on our list was Tiffany, a hellcat and former stripper from the row-house-lined streets of Philly’s Kensington neighborhood, home to a hodgepodge of hustlers, from hookers and drug dealers to minimum-wage workers juggling two jobs and sorry souls eternally on the dole.
Tiffany’s ex-boyfriend claimed that she and Jeff had conspired to set him up in a lover’s revenge plot, and that Jeff lied on the search warrant used to raid his house.
We wanted to hear what Tiffany had to say about Jeff. We knew she wouldn’t be happy to see us. But it never—not for a minute—occurred to us that it could be dangerous for us to pursue Tiffany, even though a year earlier, cops had arrested her for bashing a man in the head with a glass bottle and stealing $250 and a necklace.
On a cold gray afternoon in early March, with a snowstorm looming, Barbara knocked on the door at Tiffany’s two-story redbrick row house. At twenty-eight, Tiffany was the mother of two kids by two different men and still lived with her parents. Her mom, Mickey, answered the door with a Marlboro Menthol wedged between two fingers. Mickey stood steely and stone-faced in the doorway. Barbara offered a sunny hello and thrust out her hand, which Mickey reluctantly shook. Still gripping Mickey’s palm, Barbara stepped closer and wormed her way into the living room.
Mickey was a stout and sturdy woman who favored baggy T-shirts and sweats. She was fifty-one years old and had had the same job as a machine operator at a ribbon factory for nearly two decades, working the overnight shift from 2:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. On Fridays, she stopped by the liquor store to pick up her favorite—coconut vodka.
Barbara smiled as she plopped herself down on a velour couch the color of rotted red grapes and opened her notebook.
“I was just wondering,” said Barbara, trying to sound casual. “Have you ever seen Jeff? Has he ever been over to the house?”
Mickey proceeded to tell Barbara that Jeff had showed up on her doorstep after Tiffany got arrested for aggravated assault and robbery. He handed her $300 in cash to bail Tiffany out of jail. Wow, this is good stuff, Barbara thought as she felt the first pinpricks of adrenaline, the rush that reporters feel when they get a juicy nugget. Barbara instinctively knew that Jeff had crossed the line when he footed Tiffany’s bail. With her cheeks warm and head down, Barbara scribbled away. She flipped the blue-lined pages with her fingertips like paper somersaults as quickly as Mickey spoke. She was so focused and excited that she didn’t pay any attention to the loud stomps from the top of the staircase leading to the second floor. Tiffany barreled down the steps, a she-devil with a pierced nose and long, dirty blond hair flaring out behind her, and charged toward Barbara.
“I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you!”
When Barbara looked up, Tiffany loomed over her. The first strike came hard and fast, Tiffany’s open hand slamming into Barbara’s left cheek and knocking her head sideways. The second belt, to Barbara’s right cheek, had even more force. Barbara felt the sting of something hard, maybe Tiffany’s rings as they whacked into her cheekbone. Barbara let go of her notebook and crossed her arms over her head in an X shape to shield her face from more blows. Tiffany snatched the notebook and hurled it across the room. It landed near Mickey, who just sat there, on an adjacent couch, not saying a word, as Barbara cried out, “Please! No!”
Barbara stood up, the pen on her lap dropping to the floor, and quickly grabbed her brown leather purse. She crouched low, her back hunched, and darted across the room as if dodging gunfire. Her hand shook as she scooped up the notebook and sprinted out the front door.
As she ran, Barbara fished around in her bottomless, sacklike purse for her cell phone. She flipped open the phone and pressed my number. Her voice was a high-pitched squeak.
“Wendy! Wendy! She hit me!”
I was seated at my desk. I bolted up out of my chair and shouted, “What? What happened?” The reporters who sat near me looked up from their computers. The phone went dead. I dialed her back. No answer. I dialed and redialed, each time getting her voice mail. I began to panic.
Barbara, cheeks aflame, closed her phone when she heard fast footsteps behind her. Barbara glanced over her shoulder and saw Tiffany, a wild-eyed, fuel-raged bullet train, screaming bloody murder into a cell phone.
Tiffany had frantically called Jeff. At that moment, Jeff felt sick: he knew Barbara and I weren’t going to stop with just Benny; we planned to track down all of his informants.
In a panic, Barbara finally found her car keys. She struggled to steady her hand as she unlocked the car door, jumped in, locked all the doors, and sped off. When she got a few blocks away, she pulled over and examined her face in the rearview mirror. She wanted to make sure she wasn’t bleeding. Then she called me back.
“Tiffany hit me. Twice. Across the face. She threatened to kill me,” Barbara said. “But don’t worry, I got the notebook . . . but I lost . . . my pen.”
It wasn’t funny at the time but later, the lost pen would become a running joke between us. The Daily News supply closet only stocked cheap Bics, which tended to leak and smudge, so Barbara bought her own special ones: Paper Mate Profile retractable ballpoint pens in assorted colors in packs of four for $3.99 at the grocery store. To her, losing a pen was a big deal.
Barbara knew the city well, having been a Philly reporter for sixteen years, but this, her first assault, rattled her. Suddenly she couldn’t figure out how to get back to the office. She asked me to stay on the phone until she found I-95 South, heading toward Center City.
By the time Barbara walked into the newsroom, Brian Tierney had gathered the staff for a big announcement. Barbara joined the circle of about forty reporters, photographers, and editors gathered around Tierney near the sports desk. Because Tierney had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection just a week ago, the staff was extra jittery and abuzz with rumors that Tierney planned to merge our ragtag ranks with the restrained Inquirer staff and close the Daily News.
We’d been on journalism’s endangered species list for decades, and a lot of the old-timers had become numb to death threats, like prisoners of war. They put out the paper each day with an attitude that said, Either shoot me in the head or get out of my way.
Tierney nervously swooped back his thick mane of chestnut hair, a cross between Donald Trump’s and Shaun Cassidy’s locks, and explained that starting March 30, the phrase “an edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer” would appear under the Daily News logo on the paper’s front page. He assured us that the two papers would remain intact, with separate news staffs, and that the move was purely economic. Tierney hoped that making the two papers a single entity with combined circulation numbers would help boost ad sales, and save us money as a single subscriber to wire services.
“Instead of telling advertisers we have 330,000 circulation (at the Inquirer) plus the Daily News, it will help to say we have 440,000 daily circulation,” Tierney explained to a roomful of journalists trained to expose and rail against any cooking of the books in city government who were suddenly resigned to accepting our own creative math.
But I barely heard what Tierney was saying. I kept looking at Barbara, who stood among the crowd, somewhat dazed, gingerly touching her cheeks, which sported angry red slap marks. I could actually see handprints parallel to her pearl earrings. She looked dainty in those earrings, with a long strand of fake pearls draped over a peach-and-cream-colored J.Crew sweater. What kind of person would hit Barbara Laker?
I could feel a nervous giggle creeping up my throat. My reaction was inappropriate and insensitive, but I couldn’t help it. I kept thinking: What the fuck? Tiffany hauled off on Betty Crocker! It was funny in a horrible kind of way.
“You okay?” I asked after the meeting.
“Do you think it will bruise?” she said.
“I’m gonna get you ice for your face.”
When I got back from the cafeteria with Styrofoam cups packed with ice, Barbara was talking to Gar, our editor, who wanted her to press criminal charges.
“If you get killed, it’s a good one-day story, but long-term, it’s bad for business,” I overheard Gar telling Barbara.
She refused to file a police complaint against Tiffany, mostly because she didn’t want to become part of the story.
The thing was, Tiffany came from a seamy world, one in which she could, if she wanted, find some lowlife to off Barbara for a price. And Jeff now knew that Tiffany had told us one more thing that could get him in trouble. Jeff and Bochetto wanted more than ever to shut us down. Bochetto got the private investigator right on it.
Tiffany soon found herself in a scene straight out of a film noir. She climbed into the gumshoe’s Mercedes-Benz, and they sat in the Home Depot parking lot on Aramingo Avenue, a busy commercial artery lined with big-box stores.
Russell Kolins, a private investigator since 1969, was an old hat. With his weathered, pleasant face and classy business suit, Kolins came off as both grizzled and imperial. He was a marine who worked counterintelligence in Vietnam, and the former owner of a Jersey nightclub called Private Eyes.
The impeccably dressed Kolins began to pepper Tiffany with questions. What did the reporter ask? And what did Tiffany’s mom tell her? He needed details, specifically any minefields surrounding Jeff.
Tiffany was spooked. In the mind of this hardened hood diva, Kolins was the embodiment of the Man. He might as well have been a state senator, judge, bank president, corporate CEO. It didn’t matter. She had to get out of that car.
Once home, Tiffany wondered what the hell she’d gotten herself into. She called Barbara.
“I’m real sorry I hit you,” Tiffany said.
“Tiffany, that’s okay. I know you’re sorry. I know you didn’t mean it,” Barbara replied.
I was standing by Barbara’s desk when she picked up the phone. My ears perked up: Tiffany? The notorious bitch slapper? I turned to the reporters and editors around me and stage-whispered, “She’s on the phone with Tiffany,” woodpeckering my finger above Barbara’s head. Everyone came over to eavesdrop.
“Wow, Barbara has a new BFF,” joked hipster reporter Stephanie Farr.
Tiffany explained to Barbara that she felt confused. She’d thought Jeff was a good guy. If she got jammed up on a traffic ticket or got collared, Jeff helped her out, often with cash. He talked to her like a buddy, all chatty and warm.
“What’s going on, kiddo?” Jeff asked, fishing for neighborhood intel that might lead to his next drug bust.
After talking to Kolins, Tiffany realized that Jeff had slapped her informant number on drug buys she never made. She was scared to venture out of her house. She felt like all the local dealers were giving her an accusatory stare-down.
“They think I’m a snitch,” she told Barbara.
The informant job, at least under Jeff, came with perks. Jeff rewarded Tiffany and his other informants with cartons of cigarettes, prepaid phone minutes, candy bars, and snacks.
“Here, get your sugar up,” he’d say, tossing Benny a Snickers bar.
Barbara and I didn’t really think about where Jeff got the stuff. Until we got a phone call from a Center City lawyer.