AFTER SEEING THE VIDEO, COMMISSIONER RAMSEY TOOK RICHARD CUJDIK OFF THE STREET. RICHARD JOINED HIS BROTHER AND JEFF’S PARTNER, Robert “Bobby” McDonnell, on desk duty, where they spent their days answering phones and shuffling police paperwork, their law enforcement powers virtually nonexistent. Bobby hadn’t been part of the raid on Jose’s store, but he was linked to bogus search warrants with Jeff.
Richard went around defending himself to other cops, spinning his desk-duty stint as a mere hiccup in his police career. He believed he’d be back on the street soon enough. For Richard, the months riding a desk would stretch into years as the FBI-led investigation crawled forward. Richard, Jeff, and Bobby were stuck there, and Barbara and I were determined to land Officer Thomas Tolstoy, the Boob Man, on the desk with them.
Tolstoy’s preoccupation with large-breasted women was an open secret among the cops in his squad. In fact, at least one narcotics cop from a neighboring town knew Tolstoy, a thirty-five-year-old married father of two little boys, as the Boob Man. Tolstoy was a predator, and we wanted him off the street.
Benny had told us early on that Tolstoy “fisted” a woman; at least, that’s the story he heard from Jeff.
“What?” Barbara asked. She recoiled, not able to get her mind around it. “What do you mean?”
Benny blushed while explaining that Tolstoy supposedly shoved his hand up a woman’s vagina during a drug raid. His words were peppered with nervous chuckles and awkward pauses.
The feds had told Benny not to talk to us. But he called constantly using throwaway Cricket Wireless phones. There were health dramas: a garage-bay door slammed down on his back at the auto dealership where he worked detailing cars. He tumbled down some steps and broke his foot. Sonia had a lump on her breast; she slipped on the sidewalk outside a doctor’s office and smacked her head, which triggered a brain bleed. They made frequent trips to the hospital, mostly for painkillers, and to the offices of personal-injury lawyers.
There were Benny’s I’m-gonna-die dramas: The cops were going to hire a hit man to make him “disappear.” One of the drug dealers set up by Benny and Jeff got knifed in prison, and the guy’s relatives wanted to retaliate against Benny. He regretted turning against Jeff and wanted to kill himself. The feds sent Benny to a therapist, but he didn’t trust her.
There were money dramas: He couldn’t afford the rent at his new place, and the feds weren’t helping him. He didn’t have money to buy his kids birthday presents. He had to sell the family’s wide-screen television. He couldn’t afford a defense lawyer and feared the feds might charge him with theft or fraud for accepting money for drug jobs he never did.
Behind all the drama, there was an unspoken message: Barbara and I had ruined his life by writing his story. We were to blame.
As journalists, Barbara and I couldn’t give him money, but we tried to help him in other ways. We went on ApartmentFinder.com to search for a cheaper place for Benny and his family to live. We called criminal defense attorneys to see if they would accept him as a client. I bought him groceries, rushing over to his home with bags of vegetables, turkey, and Dora the Explorer fruit snacks. I bought his son a Razor scooter for his birthday and told Benny to say it was from him. In retrospect, I wondered if Benny sold the scooter for drugs, but at the time, I was so plagued with guilt that I couldn’t see through his manipulation and lies.
Barbara and I knew the things we did for Benny crossed the line. But that line—the one between reporter and human being—got blurry.
After we started writing about the bodegas, the FBI knew Tainted Justice was much more than a case of fabricating evidence for search warrants. It was going to get big. The FBI needed Benny to be safe, so they relocated him, Sonia, and their two kids to a fully furnished two-bedroom suite near Philadelphia International Airport. The rent was $2,600 a month, which the feds agreed to pay—at least for now. The suite, described in a brochure as a “chalet,” was like no place Benny and Sonia had ever lived. It was equipped with a washer and dryer, a luxury for most people back in the hood. The decor was simple and crisp, with a taupe couch, a glass coffee table, and a dining set with high-backed chairs. Powder-blue walls offset a spotless beige carpet. The suite’s front door opened up to a courtyard with a manicured lawn bordered with shrubs and flowers.
Benny watched the store-raid video on a computer in his suite. “I couldn’t believe it,” Benny said excitedly. “And Tolstoy . . . I was like this motherfucker, he’s just a fuckin’ bastard.”
The Hispanic community, particularly the Dominicans, was in a furor over the bodega raids. “None of these people should have spent half a day in jail over these bullshit charges,” fumed Danilo Burgos, head of the three-hundred-member Dominican Grocers Association.
One week after the Daily News posted Jose’s video online, the city’s Hispanic leaders banded together and wrote a searing letter to Ramsey. The letter, which they copied to the district attorney, a city councilwoman, and the mayor’s office, called on Ramsey to crack down on bad cops.
“The fact that many reluctant businesspeople have felt compelled to come forward with their complaints, risking their livelihoods and that of their families, indicates that the problem of police abuse has reached a boiling point,” Danilo and five other Hispanic leaders wrote.
Jose’s video forced Ramsey to do something that his predecessors had failed to do. He took a sledgehammer to the cliquish and chummy squads within the narcotics field unit, splitting up cops who had worked side by side for years.
Seven years earlier, a police watchdog had recommended regular reshuffling of narcotics officers and their supervisors to keep cops honest and prevent abuse. Police brass had ignored the recommendation—until now.
But Ramsey’s move to break up the ten narcotic squads did nothing to appease angry Hispanic leaders. “That’s just shuffling the deck. It’s just window dressing,” one said.
Ramsey’s style was to tackle thorny issues and criticism head-on. Before coming to Philadelphia in 2008, Ramsey had served as chief of police in Washington, D.C. As an outsider, Ramsey didn’t care whether he was popular among Philly’s rank and file. He agreed to address irate residents and merchants at a nighttime community meeting. The meeting was held at a church, not far from some of the bodegas raided by Jeff’s squad.
We didn’t both have to attend the meeting. One of us could have gone and written the story on deadline for the next day’s paper, but neither of us wanted to miss it. Ramsey had to appease an entire community because of our stories. Typically, Barbara and I wrestled with our own insecurities, fearing that we weren’t good enough or smart enough. For me, those doubts stemmed from grade school, when my teacher wanted me to repeat fourth grade and labeled me a “late bloomer,” which I thought meant I was destined for the tart cart, the short blue school bus that brought “slow” kids to special ed. Barbara’s doubtfulness, in part, came from her mom, an advertising sales rep who pushed herself to be No. 1, and set the bar high for Barbara. Her mom often started sentences, “The problem with you, Barbara, is . . .”
Now, at the community meeting, our insecurities were on hiatus, temporarily banished by our egos.
Ramsey stood up at the podium, looking weary, as usual. Whenever Barbara and I saw Ramsey, he looked as if he had fifty problems on his mind. The boyish freckles smattered across his face didn’t seem to mesh with his trademark stoicism. Ramsey had buried slain cops and fired dirty ones, each time finding just right the words to honor or scorn.
And here, before a contentious crowd of sixty or more, Ramsey again struck just the right note. “Corruption of any kind will not be tolerated in this department, period. And those who engage in it are going to face charges both from the department as well as criminal charges.”
Immediately, loud applause broke out in the church.
When the meeting ended, merchants and community leaders came over to Barbara and me. They grasped our hands in theirs and thanked us for exposing a wrong, for caring about them. I looked at Barbara and saw her green eyes moisten. We fed off their emotion and left the church feeling good about the Daily News and the power of journalism. At that moment, the death knell of our industry seemed remote.