DAGMA’S STORY WAS UNIMPEACHABLE. FOR STARTERS, SHE’D TOLD HER FIANCÉ WHAT TOLSTOY DID TO HER DURING A PHONE CALL TO THE JAIL, where Armando was locked up after the cops found three marijuana joints in his pockets and a rusty, unloaded hunting rifle inside the Thayer Street house.
“I went off. I was in jail, and there was nothing I could do but punch the walls. All I could think of was that he could go back and do something more,” Armando told us.
Next, there was Angel, who consoled Dagma as she cried on the porch.
Lastly, on the night of the raid, Dagma went to the nearest police district. She was hysterical and shaken. “I’m here to make a complaint against this cop who came to my house.” An officer who spoke Spanish took a statement.
An internal affairs investigator later came to Dagma’s house. He wanted to bag her nightgown, bra, and sweatpants as evidence, but Angel advised her not to turn over the clothes. Angel thought it unwise for her to part with the only physical evidence she had. Angel and Dagma’s guardedness was symptomatic of a pervasive lack of trust between the community and police. Of course, the police department didn’t help mend the rift.
Internal affairs showed Dagma a photo array of some eighty cops. The photos were headshots of uniformed cops. Most dated back years, likely taken when they first joined the force, and Dagma didn’t recognize Tolstoy among all those baby-faced cops. “I felt like they were hiding him,” Dagma said.
Tolstoy had assaulted Lady four months earlier. But unlike Dagma, Lady didn’t file a police complaint immediately after the raid; she went to internal affairs after Barbara and I knocked on her door. Dagma’s single complaint, coupled with an inability to identify her attacker, wasn’t enough for internal affairs to restrict Tolstoy to a desk.
That all changed on October 16, 2008, when internal affairs yanked Tolstoy off the street. In the six months between Dagma’s complaint and October 16, Tolstoy did something that got him red-flagged.
Police sources told us that Tolstoy had engaged in “sexual misconduct,” and Barbara and I were almost positive that the incident was connected to the woman Benny had told us about, the woman who’d been fisted.
Benny thought the assault had happened near Torresdale and Orthodox Streets. Barbara and I pulled out a map, zeroed in on the intersection, and pressed “enlarge” on the Xerox machine, tapping the button until it reached 150 percent. We printed out two copies on eleven-by-seventeen paper and drew a fifteen-square-block radius in yellow highlighter. We circled the intersection with a navy blue Sharpie. We left the office with folders crammed with search warrants for raids on homes within the area’s zip code—19124.
We went together; of course Barbara drove. Karl had bought me a GPS for Mother’s Day, but Barbara, who sometimes got lost while jogging around her own neighborhood, still managed to get all turned around. “Recalculating route,” the GPS girl crooned in a calm, robotic voice. We heard her voice so often that we gave her a name—Henrietta. I wanted to throw the thing out the window.
Torresdale and Orthodox was a wide intersection with bus lanes. There was a pizza shop on one corner and a bodega across the street, next to an appliance store, where each morning the employees dragged used washers and dryers and fridges and stoves out onto the sidewalk, lining them up at curb’s edge. There were several car-repair shops and a seedy gentlemen’s lounge.
We split up the search warrants and fanned out on foot. In between knocking on doors, we ran down every woman we saw on the street. We ambushed them as they stepped off the bus, emerged from a shop, or ambled along the sidewalk, some with kids in strollers. We asked them if a cop had ever touched them inappropriately, and we were surprised by the number of women who, without hesitation, started off, “Oh yeah. There was this time when . . .”
They recounted chilling stories about a vice squad cop or district cop, or a cop who didn’t fit Tolstoy’s description. They’d say his name was John or Bill. Some said they’d never been sexually assaulted, but they had a friend or an acquaintance . . .
We had so many tips that Barbara and I didn’t know which ones to chase. Some led us miles outside of the 19124 zip code. Because the women weren’t sure whether the victim they knew had been “fisted” by a cop, we thought we had to find out—so we could at the very least rule her out. We even asked the women who had supplied the tips to drive around with us while they scanned the streets for the victim they described.
One description was of a white woman with blond, dirty blond, or mousy brown hair and a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder—or maybe her wrist. Barbara and I chased tattooed women down the street, trying to get a closer look.
We began to question whether the incident was even connected to a raid. What if Tolstoy had assaulted this woman somewhere out on the streets? Maybe she was a prostitute. Torresdale and Orthodox was a short 2.3-mile drive from the ground zero of lost souls, an area known as K&A—short for Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, where blow jobs went for $20 and full-on sex in a car or alley was just $10 more.
We spent hours talking to drug-addicted prostitutes with rotten teeth and scabbed faces and arms, the result of obsessively picking at their skin while high on crack. They wobbled around on rail-thin legs, wearing rhinestone-studded stilettos and miniskirts or worn-out Chuck Taylors and low-rise jeans. All had glazed eyes and vacant expressions.
“Are you ladies from the church?” a waiflike woman came up and asked us. Candace had an angelic face—catlike blue eyes, high cheekbones, and dirty blond hair pulled up in a ponytail. She was almost twenty-eight, though she looked no more than twenty. She was drug-worn but beautiful. In her fist, she clutched a wad of bills. She told us she desperately wanted to get clean; she wanted to be able to care for her four-year-old son. I gave her my card. A cop arrested Candace for drug possession a few days later, and she wrote me a letter from jail. “Ms. Ruderman, I honestly need help once returning home. My mom reminds me her home is not my home, due to my addiction . . . I do not want to repeat that lifestyle of drugs and prostitution. I write to you with hope of direction. I therefore have no one else to turn to.” She included a postscript, “PS, one day maybe you can write a story of my success.”
I wrote her back and contacted a social worker who met with Candace in jail. Four days after Candace got released, and two months after we met her, Candace was dead of an overdose. It was heartbreaking.
Barbara and I grew frustrated, yet not discouraged. We decided to track down pimps, thinking it would be an easier and more efficient method to find a hooker who’d been victimized. We guessed that a prostitute might confide in her pimp.
A lot of the pimps we met didn’t fit the stereotype. One was toothless and frail, in his sixties, and suffering from diabetes-related foot ulcers; another was a former hooker turned mother hen in her fifties. She had large, saggy breasts and wiry, broomlike gray hair.
She suggested we find a pimp named Omar, who had a stable of hookers, but she warned us that he was violent, possibly dangerous, known to smack his girls around.
I took one side of Kensington Avenue; Barbara took the other. The El trains whistled and click-clacked overhead. Barbara found one of Omar’s hookers outside a mini-mart. The girl was skittish and her eyes shifted around in the sockets, chameleon-like. She gestured with her head toward me. “See that short little woman with the glasses . . .”
I was on the other side of the street, talking to a black man wearing a white knit skullcap, even though the temperature was pushing eighty. He sat on a concrete step, his back against a reddish brown door.
“Hi, I’m looking for Omar,” I said. “Do you know him?”
“Yeah, I know him.”
He was friendly, a bit of a jokester, and we started to chitchat. Somehow we got on the subject of our favorite movies. We both liked films about police corruption, like Serpico. Laughing, I handed him my card and asked him to pass it on to Omar.
Barbara rushed toward me, crossing the street against the light. “What did he say?”
I was puzzled by her excitement. “He said he’d tell Omar we were lookin’ for him.”
“Wendy. That was Omar. You were talking to Omar.”
I looked back, and he was gone. He’d slipped behind the reddish door. We knocked, and no one answered. I tugged on the handle, but the door was locked.
I got home, and Karl was watching a home-remodeling show on the DIY Network. My escape was work; his was fantasizing about projects that never got done. He was adorable, with those damn Bambi eyes and heart-shaped lips that broke into a gigantic smile. I leaned in and kissed him.
“How was work?”
“I spent all day looking for a pimp named Omar.”
Karl put his hand up. “Please, I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me.”
Barbara and I could do crazy. We understood crazy.
We both came from zany Jewish families that instilled a strong, often obsessive and neurotic work ethic. Karl summed up the Ruderman motto as “Work till you drop, then go out to a restaurant.” I was surprised Karl, who came from a reserved Catholic family, married me.
A few months before our wedding, Karl went with my family on a trip to Martha’s Vineyard. It was my mom’s idea to go to a bathing-suit-optional beach. She stripped naked, wearing only sneakers and white tube socks, and slathered sunscreen all over her body. Karl averted his eyes. “Take a good look,” she told Karl. “See these raisin boobs—this is what Wendy will look like in thirty years.”
Barbara’s mom was a rebel. Instead of settling down with a nice Jewish boy, she fell in love with a smooth-talking British goy. When the couple married, Barbara’s grandmother sat shivah and threatened suicide; she refused to meet her daughter’s new husband, never even spoke his name. Years ago, Barbara’s dad worked on a cruise line, entertaining elderly women. He later described his job title as “cruise ship gigolo.” Barbara wasn’t sure he was joking.
People like Omar had nothing on Barbara’s dad and my mom. Now, they were scary; they were uncorked and unfiltered, and Barbara and I were sometimes more afraid of what would fly out of their mouths than of getting hurt—or killed—while in pursuit of this mystery woman. But we also feared failure—and at times, that fear blinded us.
“You’re putting this story ahead of your own safety,” Hutch told Barbara. “You’re losing touch with reality. You’re all consumed with this story, but you’re gonna knock on a door and get assaulted, raped, or robbed.”
Hutch worried constantly about Barbara and gave her unsolicited advice on how to stay safe. Some of his suggestions made sense—carry Mace and step back, out of reach, after knocking on a stranger’s door. Of course she did neither. Hutch also doled out advice that made us chuckle. “Before you go out, call the district cops, tell them you’re a reporter for the Daily News and let them know where you are and what you’re doing, and see if they can send someone by to check on you.”
I worked so much that when I headed out one morning, Brody smirked and said, “Mom, it was so nice having you for a visit.” He knew how to twist the knife.
When Karl went shopping or out for a jog, Sawyer asked, “Mom, are you babysitting us?”
I had largely relinquished my parenting role to Karl, but I still wanted control. I left Karl notes on the refrigerator or front door: “Don’t forget to give Brody and Sawyer fruit.” “Brush their teeth.” “Make them eat carrots.” I often added, “I love you,” so Karl wouldn’t be too mad.
Karl began to talk about getting a vasectomy, and I suspected that he wanted to get snipped just so he could veg on the couch for a weekend and get a break from the kids.
Barbara and I realized we were driving the people in our lives nuts, but we just couldn’t stop. We kept coming back to the same search warrant. A raid that took place on October 16, 2008—the exact date Tolstoy was pulled from the street.