OVER THE NEXT FOUR DAYS, BARBARA AND I WORKED LATE EACH NIGHT PUTTING THE STORY TOGETHER. THE MOST LABORIOUS PART WAS TRANSCRIBING the audio portion of the video. I spent close to eighteen hours listening to, then pausing and replaying, the audio. I worried that the Daily News could get sued if I didn’t get the verbiage exact or I screwed up which cop said what.
On one of those nights, at about 10:00 p.m., Barbara and I walked out the building’s back door and got spooked when we saw a pickup truck.
The truck was idling at the stop sign on the narrow road that reporters crossed to get to the parking garage. The truck had a small flatbed and a Fraternal Order of Police specialty license plate. Two men, both white, glared at us from the truck’s front seat. Barbara and I froze. “Wendy, they’re cops,” she said, grabbing my arm, a gesture that grew out of Barbara’s protective maternal instinct, not fear.
If they intended to hurt us, now was the time. At this hour, the area was desolate, with plenty of dimly lit crevices and alleys between closed office buildings. At least one editor had been mugged here. The corner bar, Westy’s Tavern, was still open, but the place wasn’t crowded on weeknights, except for Thursday karaoke nights.
The men, stone-faced, stared us down. We didn’t recognize their faces from the video. Maybe they were friends of the cops on Jeff’s squad. We didn’t know. Barbara and I darted across the street, keeping an eye on the truck’s reverse lights just in case the driver decided to flatten us. We got to our cars, parked close to one another.
“Wendy, they might follow one of us home. Make sure you lock your doors,” Barbara said. “Call me as soon as you get home.”
I spent the whole ride home checking my rearview window to see if the truck or some other car had followed me. Once home, I had to crawl over to the passenger door to get out because the driver’s-side door, when locked, didn’t open from the inside.
I checked in with Barbara; neither of us slept well that night, listening for the rumble of cars or any unusual house sounds.
By then, we’d practically memorized the store video. The cops’ voices replayed in our heads. The cops unholstered their guns and stormed into Jose’s store as if they were taking down Pablo Escobar or some other notorious kingpin. Not looking for a businessman selling ziplock baggies.
“You have any paraphernalia in here? Twelve-twelves,” Richard says to Jose on the video.
“What you mean, twelve-twelves?” Jose asks, hands cuffed behind his back.
“The baggies. You got twelve-twelves? . . . You have some?”
“A little bit, yeah.”
Jose tries to explain to Richard that he bought the store already stocked with merchandise, including baggies.
“Okay, it don’t matter. You should know your business,” Richard says.
Richard then inexplicably asks Jose, “You have cats in here, too?” As if he’s about to get mauled by a killer tabby.
Jeff tells Jose that he has to seize the cameras as evidence. “So we gotta get rid of it. You got yourself on video selling drug paraphernalia.”
“It’s illegal, boss. It’s illegal,” Richard tells Jose.
Yeah, and it’s also illegal to lie on search warrants, Barbara and I thought when we viewed the video. The fact was, Richard got captured on video selling bullshit.
In the application for the search warrant, Richard wrote that he watched as a confidential informant went into Jose’s store and bought baggies at about 4:30 p.m. on a September afternoon, about two and a half hours before the store raid.
Jose’s digital surveillance footage was time-stamped. Barbara and I studied the stretch of tape between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. Not a single customer asked for or bought a ziplock bag. On top of that, the video shows Richard searching Jose’s van without a warrant, which is illegal. Richard left it unlocked with the keys in the center console, so anyone could steal it.
The cops locked up Jose on misdemeanor charges, stole almost $10,000, and left his store in a shambles. Jose couldn’t understand why the cops didn’t just give him a warning or even a citation for having baggies in his store. “If it’s illegal, okay, take it out . . . don’t destroy my business and rob me,” Jose said.
A judge sentenced Jose to nine months’ probation.
I called Charles Ramsey, the city’s police commissioner, to tell him about the video and get a comment. Ramsey couldn’t think of any reason cops would destroy video surveillance cameras. “You wouldn’t just cut and take it because that’s somebody’s private property,” he said.
Ramsey wanted us to turn over the video to internal affairs and the FBI. “It’s pretty serious, and I want to get to the bottom of it.”
Ramsey thought that Barbara and I only cared about getting a big story. In his mind, we weren’t interested in nabbing dirty cops, not really. “You’re looking at something I’ve not seen. I’ve got a task force that’s looking into this entire matter. They need to be informed of this and they need a chance to look at it,” Ramsey said. “If we need a subpoena . . .”
“We’ll give it to you. We’re putting it up on our website tomorrow,” I told him.
Michael Days asked me, Barbara, and Gar to come into his office.
“This video is great stuff. It’s unbelievable. And when you see that cop cut those wires with the knife—wow, I mean wow,” Michael said with a chortle.
Michael intended to put the entire ten-minute tape online, along with a transcript. He wanted to name names. The only question was whether we should blur the cops’ faces. There wasn’t any law or court opinion that forced us to do so. After all, these cops routinely testified in open court, where they faced drug dealers seated a few feet away at the defendants’ table.
“You know what? I think we should take the high road on this one,” Michael said. “I don’t want anyone to accuse us of putting these cops’ lives in danger, with them being undercover and all.”
It took hours for the photo and online staff to fog the cops’ faces with grayish circles and make sure the blur followed them as they moved through the bodega.
Barbara called George Bochetto, who by this point was almost crying uncle. The fight in his voice was gone. When Barbara told him about the video, he didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t even ask to see it.
“I stand by what I said before,” he offered lamely.
Barbara and I recycled Bochetto’s quote from the first bodega story in which he accused the Daily News of stirring up mass hysteria.
The front page was a freeze-frame of Officer Anthony Parrotti wielding a bread knife, seconds before he slices the camera wire. The headline was, “Caught on Camera: Narcs Snip Store’s Surveillance Wires Before They Allegedly Loot & Rob It.”
Allegedly. What a great word.
The next day, computers across the Philadelphia region kept crashing because so many people wanted to view the video. By 8:15 a.m., there were nearly a hundred reader comments posted online. That number would swell exponentially by day’s end. Overwhelmingly, readers were disgusted with the cops:
Why would the Daily News blur the officers’ faces in these shots? As members of the community, shouldn’t we know what these dangerous men look like?
World’s Most Stupidest Criminals.
Where’s fat-neck [Fraternal Order of Police president] McNesby to defend to these scumbag heroes?
Now will someone get “Training Day” out of the Police Department Film Library? My hope is that the Daily News is watching out for these reporters. . . . There are too many armed thugs with badges running around masquerading as good cops.
Well, it’s nice to know that the crackdown on ziplock baggies is in full swing in a city that records 300+ murders a year, and solves less than half.
Barbara and I wouldn’t hear from Bochetto again.