BARBARA STOOD IN THE CENTER OF A WEARY BLOCK OF THAYER STREET IN WEST KENSINGTON, WHERE THE ACID OF THE DRUG TRADE HAD EATEN AWAY at its core. A pair of sneakers dangled from a utility wire that sagged from one side of the street to the other, probably a signpost, placed by dealers, to let junkies know that crack was sold here and to mark the block as theirs. Barbara could roll her foot over a drift of litter and find quarter-size drug baggies obscured by sticky soda cans, broken beer bottles, and Chinese takeout menus.
Tolstoy’s squad had raided at least five homes on this block. Every single one was now boarded, some with plastic tarps covering glassless second-story windows.
Abandoned homes were a pox on neighborhoods like this. There were some 40,000 vacant homes or lots in Philadelphia, and the drug war nudged that number higher. Under state forfeiture laws, the city district attorney’s office had the power to seize drug homes, which then sat empty for months, even years. Drug addicts weaseled through plywood to make crack dens or shooting galleries. Stray dogs and cats took refuge in basements with dirt floors and rodents burrowed into soggy drywall. Neighbors on either side struggled to keep the scourge at bay.
Barbara took in the decay around her—slumped roofs on the verge of collapse, crumbled brick facades, rotted wooden porches, and missing front steps. It was around seven on a Friday night, and Barbara, tired and beaten down, called me. I was at my desk, flipping through Tolstoy search warrants in a manila folder marked “cases w/potential.”
“Wendy, I’m on Thayer, and these houses are boarded,” she said. “I don’t know how we’re going to find these people.”
“Just come on back. It’s getting dark,” I said.
For eight weeks now, Barbara and I had been out knocking on doors. Winter had given way to spring, and summer was almost here. Each night, we went home sweaty and dirty. Our clothes and hair reeked of cigarette smoke and household insecticide, and our legs were pocked with flea bites. One night, I tossed my work bag on the stone-tiled porch and a plump cockroach crawled out. I yelped and stomped it to death.
Barbara wasn’t ready to give up on Thayer Street. “I’m already here. Let me try a couple more neighbors,” she told me.
Barbara climbed the steps to a rickety and cluttered porch, haphazardly covered in green outdoor carpeting. The man who opened the door was short, with a pencil mustache and ink-black hair, slicked back into curls at the nape of his neck. His name was Angel Castro, and he warmed quickly to Barbara. He vividly recalled the raid at the house next door.
In a raid led by Tolstoy, the cops stormed into Angel’s neighbors’ house looking for marijuana. Soon after the cops left, a woman emerged; she stood sobbing on her porch.
“Are you okay?” Angel asked softly from his adjoining porch.
“No,” she said. Little by little, Angel coaxed details from her. “An officer touched my breasts. . . . He was feeling up on me. . . . He rubbed up on me.”
Barbara got excited. “Oh, Angel. Do you know her name? Do you know where she lives now? Can you help me? Please, I have to find her.”
Her name was Dagma Rodriguez, and Angel thought he might be able to trace her whereabouts through friends and relatives. “Let me make some calls,” he said, and Barbara took a seat next to him on the porch. About an hour later, Angel had an address.
Barbara leaped up and hugged him, then bolted to the car, where she called to tell me, rapid-fire, what Angel had told her. “Can you believe it? I’m telling you, Wendy, we’re going to find this woman.” I gave Barbara directions to Dagma’s house.
There was no way I was going home until I heard back from Barbara. I sat at my computer and gnawed at the jagged skin around my fingernails. Most everyone had gone home for the weekend, but the light was still on in Michael Days’s office. I ran through the newsroom and breathlessly flew through his door. “Michael! I’m so excited . . .”
Barbara pulled up at Dagma’s house ten minutes later. Dagma’s cousin cracked open the door and said Dagma wasn’t home; she was out with her fiancé and would be back later that night. Barbara explained why she wanted to talk to Dagma. “Do you mind if I wait for her? I’ll just be out here. In my car.”
Barbara sat in the dark and thought about Tolstoy. She felt for Dagma and knew what it was like to feel violated. When Barbara was in high school, a boyfriend had tried to force himself on her. She cried no and shoved him away. “You’re cold. You’re just a prude. No one will ever love you,” he sneered.
Dagma arrived home in an old beat-up Chevy. “A reporter is here to talk to you,” Dagma’s cousin told her as she stepped out of the car. “She wants to know what happened during the raid.”
Dagma walked slowly toward Barbara, as if in a trance. Barbara thought Dagma was tentative and leery; she wasn’t sure the woman would want to talk about the raid. Then Dagma held out her arms and embraced Barbara. She clutched Barbara tightly for a few long seconds. Dagma stepped back, wiped a tear from her cheek, and said something that Barbara would never forget: “I’ve been praying for this day.”
Dagma recounted the dinnertime raid. It was a tale that would make Barbara despise Tolstoy.
Dagma’s fiancé, Armando, was cooking rice and beans and frying chicken drumsticks on the stove when Tolstoy and eight other cops slammed open the front door. “What are you doing—killing cats?” one cop said.
When a cop, whom Dagma would later identify as Jeff, saw the family’s pit bull, Goldie, he yelled, “Get the fucking dog out of here before I shoot it.”
The cops flipped over the futon couch, ripped a closet door off its metal hinges, and tossed clothes, CDs, everything they had, on the floor. “Where’s the fucking gun? Where’s the fucking drugs!”
Tolstoy almost immediately spied Dagma, who stood in the living room wearing a lime-green nightgown over a pair of gray sweatpants. He cornered her: “Do you have any tattoos? Let’s talk.”
Dagma’s three kids—ages fifteen, nine, and eight—were outside on a porch of splintered wood planks. The cops had threatened to board her house, take her kids, and throw her out in the street.
Tolstoy led her upstairs. He told her everything would be all right. He just wanted to talk. Dagma inched away from the beefy cop. They were alone in a back bedroom. The room was dark, cavelike, with just a glint of light from a shattered windowpane.
She placed one foot behind her, then the other, and pressed her back against the faded blue wall. Her palms, slick with sweat, fluttered against the cracked plaster. He moved closer. She felt his breath on her face.
“You know you got some big tits,” he said. “What size are you? Can I touch them?”
“Please, please, no,” she whimpered.
Tolstoy stood cocksure, his bay window of a belly thrust out. She saw a rabid look in his brown eyes.
“Can you show them to me?”
“No. No.”
The thirty-three-year-old woman began to cry, tears streaking her smooth brown face framed by coils of long dreadlocks. She folded her hands and clasped them over her breasts. Her heart felt jammed in her throat, choking her. She feared she’d vomit.
“Don’t cry. Shhh. Sshhh. Shut up. Be quiet.”
She fell to her knees.
“Get up.”
“I’m nervous, and I got heart problems. I need my heart pills,” she said.
“C’mon. Get up. Get up!” He yanked her up by the elbows and pinned her against the wall.
Oh my God, he’s gonna rape me, she thought.
He plunged his hands into the top of her nightgown. His thick fingers slithered under her beige bra. He rubbed her nipples, thumbs moving in circles.
She grabbed his wrists, her hands trembling, and cried louder.
“Shut the fuck up!” Tolstoy yelled.
Now, as he forcefully groped her breasts, she had no way to escape.
“I’m scared. I’m so scared,” she told him.
“You don’t have to be scared. Scared of what?”
Downstairs, the other narcotics cops noticed he was missing. They knew the deal.
A cop, whom Dagma described as tall and handsome with blue eyes, came halfway up the steps. “Is everything all right?” he called out.
Tolstoy took his hands from Dagma’s breasts.
“Yeah. Everything’s all right. We’re about done here.”
He stepped back, a smirk on his face. She slid down the wall and crumpled to the floor, wheezing and gulping.
Tolstoy paused in the doorway and looked back at her.
“Take your shit pills.”