THE FBI AGENTS ON THE POLICE-CORRUPTION CASE READ THE BODEGA STORY AND FLIPPED OUT. THEY DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE STORE ROBBERIES because Benny didn’t know about them. All Benny knew was that Jeff sometimes gave him cartons of cigarettes and other goods. Now the FBI had to follow us. Agents immediately fanned out to interview store owners. This gave Barbara and me a little thrill, but we doubted that the FBI was overjoyed.
We were “feeling our oats,” as my mom always said when I got all cocky and full of my pint-size self, when my phone rang at work.
“This Wendy? I have video. Backup,” the man on the other end said.
“What? Did you say video? Of a raid on your store?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Video. I got computer hid. They went crazy looking for computer,” he said. “I got copy.”
“A copy? Of the video?” I said, practically yelling into my phone.
Jose Duran had come to the United States some thirteen years earlier, but his English was a nightmare. It’s not that he didn’t speak the language. He did. Only with an accent that smothered his words like a wet wool blanket. He had a high-pitched gravelly voice that reminded me of Tattoo, the midget who played Mr. Roarke’s assistant on the TV series Fantasy Island. I asked Jose if I could get the tape that night. He gave me his address in New Jersey. He lived only five miles from my house.
I turned into his long driveway, and even in the dark, I could see that the house was a stately colonial with a wide front porch framed by ornate white columns. The three-story house, set back from the street, was parchment yellow with dark shutters. Oh shit, I thought, I hope he isn’t some kind of big-time drug dealer.
Jose answered the door. He was stout, with a thick helmet of black hair and dark eyebrows, like two bushy caterpillars. He wore khaki pants, tan leather loafers, and a sweater with a dress shirt underneath. He had a long vertical scar on his forehead from when, as a thirteen-year-old in the Dominican Republic, he crashed a motorized dirt bike into a utility pole with a nail that ripped into his skin.
Jose was only twenty-eight, and at the time of the raid, he ran a bodega in Philly and a mini-mart in New Jersey. Turned out, Jose shared the house with a nest full of relatives, including his sister, her husband, and their kids. He handed me a copy of a CD containing ten minutes of footage, including audio. I knew from the search warrant that Jeff’s squad had raided Jose’s bodega, with Jeff’s brother, Richard, in charge.
It was about 9:30 p.m., and I called Barbara from Jose’s driveway, shrieking, “I got it. I got it!” Then I called Karl.
“I’m on my way home. I was gonna stop by the grocery store. Do you need anything?”
“Yeah, a wife,” he said, and we both laughed.
I couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about Jose’s CD in my black vinyl work bag. When I got to work the next morning, the first thing I did was call my cop source, Ray. Barbara and I wanted him to see the tape. We knew what Jeff looked like, but we needed Ray to help identify the other cops and school us on what was police protocol—and more importantly, what wasn’t. Ray was nearby at the criminal courthouse and said he’d be right over.
In the two years I’d known Ray, we’d never met in the newsroom. This was a big risk for him. What if another cop saw him going into the Daily News building? Ray’s curiosity won out over good sense. There was nothing surreptitious about his entrance into the newsroom. He strutted down the center aisle with a toothy grin.
Barbara had put the CD in computers all over the newsroom, but couldn’t get it to play on any of them. Everything at the Daily News was janky. The computers were bulky and sounded like jet planes taking off whenever we turned them on. Barbara, Ray, and I walked over to a graphic artist who was computer-savvy to see if he could get the tape to play. Still, no go. Damn it. Damn this washboard newspaper with its old-timey technology.
We knew we’d have to drive back to Jose’s house to play the tape. To our surprise, Ray offered to go with us. Barbara checked out a company car and Ray stretched his legs out in the back of a PT Cruiser, one of about a dozen fleet cars shared by reporters at both newspapers. Barbara drove. I told Ray that my driving scared Barbara because I was a nervous, brake-stomping wheel-jerker. I couldn’t get my mind around the idea that we humans are really nothing more than souped-up monkeys who vroom down highways at eighty miles per hour, sometimes doing so while applying lipstick or texting or reading MapQuest directions. Even I was guilty of tweezing my mustache hairs while driving. I hated the idea of entrusting strangers to stay in their own lanes while driving and often thought how the only thing separating me and my car from a horrific crash, possibly death, was an imaginary barrier in the form of a white painted line. As I was explaining my driving phobia to Ray, I looked at Barbara, who gripped the steering wheel tighter and darted her head from left to right to check her side mirrors.
“You’re freakin’ me out,” Barbara said as she changed lanes.
We arrived at Jose’s house by late afternoon. Jose and Ray shook hands in the foyer. “Ray is a friend. He’s helping us with the story,” I offered with a shrug.
Jose was a savvy guy; he didn’t ask too many questions. He led us to the dining room, where a computer sat at the head of a polished wood table with a glass chandelier overhead. Jose’s wife flitted in and out of the kitchen, offering iced tea and snacks.
Jose told us he was a technology buff who loved to tinker with computers and electronic gadgets. After high school, he studied electronics at a trade school in the Bronx. He’d rigged his bodega with a sophisticated $15,000 surveillance system, which recorded video on a backup hard drive hidden behind a display of bobby pins in the store. The backup downloaded the footage to a secure Internet site that he could access from any computer.
“I record everything because sometimes I got to go out and I leave employees by themselves. That’s how you find out who’s doing right, who’s doing wrong. Plus, the money. I got cameras watching the money,” Jose explained.
The four of us huddled around Jose’s computer. He slid the CD in. We instantly recognized Jose on the screen, wearing baggy knee-length jean shorts, a dark blue polo shirt, and black Adidas slider sandals with white ankle socks.
In the video, Jose paces back and forth in front of the store’s ice-cream freezer, which sits in front of the cash register window. As he chats with his brother-in-law in Spanish on a cell phone, Jose’s back is turned to the store’s front door when the first cop bursts in. The cop, a pudgy frat-boy type, has his gun drawn. He points it at Jose’s head.
Ray recognized the cop immediately. “That’s Tom Tolstoy.”
“The Boob Man?” Barbara asked, referring to the nickname for the cop who fondled Lady Gonzalez’s breasts and was rumored to have sexually assaulted other women during raids. Barbara moved in closer to Jose’s computer screen for a better look at Tolstoy’s face. Tolstoy was a cross between Fred Flintstone and Bob’s Big Boy, particularly with his doo-wop hairstyle. His bangs were moussed or jelled into a stiff point that swooped back, S-shaped.
“Hand me the phone! Gimme the phone,” Tolstoy yells on the videotape.
“Hey, I work here,” Jose says.
“Put your hands on your head!”
“I’m the owner.”
“Put your hands behind your back!”
Tolstoy spins Jose around and cuffs him. Five other cops, all wearing jeans and vests or shirts emblazoned with the word POLICE, barrel into the store behind Tolstoy. At first the cops ask routine questions, presumably for their safety: Does Jose have a gun? Does anyone live on the second floor? Are there dogs in the basement?
Sergeant Joe Bologna, a beer-bellied bully with a baseball cap who supervised the raid, looks up and wags his finger toward the ceiling.
“Whaddya got, cameras over there? . . . Where are they hooked up to?” Bologna barks.
Every cop in Jose’s store is fixated on the surveillance system.
“There’s cameras all over the place,” Jeff’s brother, Richard, says. “Where’s the video cameras? The cassette for it?”
“Does it record? Does it record?” Jeff quickly interjects. Standing next to Jeff, Richard appears much shorter and scrawny, lacking his brother’s good looks.
Tolstoy glances up and scans the ceiling. “I got, like, seven or eight eyes.”
“There’s three right here,” says Thomas Kuhn, a squat and chubby cop who is wearing shorts and a baseball cap on backward.
“Listen to me,” Tolstoy says. “There’s one outside. There is one, two, three, four in the aisles, and there’s one right here somewhere.”
Jose asks if he can call his wife, and Tolstoy gruffly tells him he can’t call anyone. Then Tolstoy opens the cash register drawer and eyes the money, then looks up at the camera above the register, and back down at the money. His meaty frame stuffed in the narrow space behind the cash register, Tolstoy reaches up and swats at the camera lens. He can’t get at it, so he walks away, comes back with a long serrated knife, and goes to work on the camera. There’s a close-up of his wrist and the blade of the knife. Jeff is in the background, looking at the cash register. The camera eventually goes dark.
An outdoor camera, aimed at the street, catches Richard rummaging through Jose’s white van without a search warrant.
Back inside the store, Kuhn on the other side of the counter steps up onto a blue milk crate and struggles to grab a camera above his head.
“I need to be fucking taller,” Kuhn mumbles as another cop laughs.
“You got a ladder in here, cuz?” Kuhn asks Jose.
“Yo,” Tolstoy calls out from behind the cash register. “Does this camera go home? Can you view this on your computer, too?”
“I can see, yeah, home, yeah,” Duran replies.
“So your wife knows we’re here, then?” Tolstoy asks.
“My wife? No. She not looking the computer right now.”
“Hey, Sarge . . . Come ’ere,” Tolstoy shouts.
Bologna waddles over to the front counter, and Jeff leans in and whispers, “There’s one in the back corner right there.”
Officer Anthony Parrotti, sporting a khaki military cap and a goatee, his forearms covered in tattoos, reaches up to a camera in front of the register, pulls a wire down, and slices it with a bread knife from the store’s deli.
“It can be viewed at home,” Tolstoy tells Bologna.
“Okay. We’ll disconnect it. That’s cool,” Bologna assures Tolstoy.
One by one, the cops disarm and destroy all seven of Jose’s cameras until the screen goes dark and the audio cuts out.
When the tape ended, we sat at Jose’s table looking at each other. No one could watch that tape and not know that the cops were up to no good. We played it again, and Ray pointed out each cop by name.
“He no touch the money with the system looking at him. No, he touch the money after they destroy all the system,” Jose said while watching Tolstoy behind the cash register.
“These cops are in so much fucking trouble,” Ray said.
“Look at these i-d-i-o-t-s,” Jose said.
“I know,” Ray said, shaking his head. The two men busted out laughing, as if they were old friends.
It was a surreal scene, watching a narcotics cop and a merchant victimized by narcotics cops joking around together about the video. “He a good guy,” Jose said about Ray.
After leaving Jose’s, Barbara and I took Ray to Applebee’s for dinner. We sat at a booth, surrounded by families with whiny toddlers in high chairs and old couples chewing their food in silence. The food was bad, the place was loud, and the service sucked. It was pure paradise. We had the goods on these cops, the video was gold—and all three of us knew it.