BARBARA AND I SPENT THE FALL CHASING NEW TIPS ABOUT NARCOTICS COPS GONE ROGUE. WE LOOKED INTO CLAIMS OF MONEY LAUNDERING, shady real-estate deals, a $50,000 theft of drug money from a notorious motorcycle club, and the blackmailing of prostitutes who advertised on Craigslist. On each lead, we ran smack into a dead end.
While we spun our wheels, exhausting ourselves, the police department moved forward with reforms. For the first time in twenty-three years, police brass put out a new directive that placed tighter controls on narcotics officers and their confidential informants.
The new regulations spelled out what narcotics cop could and could not do with informants. Some of the dos and don’ts on the list were so obvious they were almost comical: No sexual relationships. No gifts. No social, financial, or business dealings.
Police Commissioner Ramsey also appointed a chief integrity officer to scrutinize drug cases that used informants. The reforms recognized that the relationship between a cop and his informant was potentially toxic. Drug informants weren’t trustworthy, and corruptible cops couldn’t be trusted to work with them, not without close supervision. From now on, all contact between the two, including phone conversations and meetings, had to be documented and reviewed by higher-ups, and a supervisor had to witness all police payouts to informants.
The police department finally got what some of Benny’s relatives had been saying all along: as Jeff and Benny grew more dependent on one another, their relationship was poisonous. Jeff earned about $100,000 a year, almost half from court overtime, and he won accolades and commendations for drug arrest numbers that soared—mostly on Benny’s back. Benny used some of the money he earned helping to take down dealers to feed his own drug habit. They were addicted to each other.
Barbara and I only came to understand this after we spoke with Susette, the woman Benny called his first wife, and their three adult children—Susette Jr., Benny Jr., and Iesha.
“They were using each other,” twenty-six-year-old Benny Jr. said. “But it was like my dad was going down, and Jeff was going up.”
Barbara and I sat in Susette’s living room, where the family explained that Benny was, and probably always would be, an addict. He liked it all—crack, cocaine, marijuana, and pills.
He’d been in and out of rehab at least four times, and even now, he would pawn almost anything for a fix.
When Susette was in Puerto Rico for her grandmother’s funeral, Benny claimed someone broke into their house through a back window and stole a television and Benny Jr.’s Nintendo, but Susette knew better. When Benny Jr. was fifteen, he bought a new bike with money he earned as a stock boy at a sneaker store, but his father snuck it out of the basement and sold it for crack. Benny Jr. asked his father what happened to his $250 GT bicycle. At first Benny denied knowing anything about it, then he just said, Yeah, I took it. “He didn’t give a reason. I already knew,” Benny Jr. said. When Susette realized her high school graduation ring and her grandmother’s necklace were missing, she forced Benny to tell her what he’d done with them. Susette marched over to the drug dealer’s house to try to buy the jewelry back.
Time after time, Benny called Susette from dark, fetid crack dens, where she’d find him sprawled out on a filthy mattress, immobilized by paranoia. “Don’t let him back in here,” Susette rebuked the dealer as she dragged Benny out to the car. She screamed at him the whole ride home.
“Sorry, Susette. I’ll never do it again,” he vowed.
She thought, Yeah, right. “Da, da, da . . . I’m not going to get you no more. That’s on you.”
When the kids were little, Susette covered for Benny. But when they grew older, she wanted them to understand the poison. She dug around in Benny’s pockets and fished out a baggie of crack. She sat the kids down at the kitchen table and held the drugs out in her open palm. “This is what your father is doing,” she told them. She walked stoically into the bathroom and flushed the drugs down the toilet.
Benny’s habit only grew worse after he started working with Jeff. Benny sometimes sampled the drugs during a buy, claiming if he didn’t, the dealer might suspect he was a snitch or an undercover cop. At the end of the night, Jeff handed Benny his informant pay and dropped him at a corner near his house, but Benny didn’t go home. He disappeared for days.
Susette called Jeff to let him know. “Benny went out and did this for you, and now he didn’t come back. He’s doing his stuff out there. You know he’s snorting coke and smoking crack,” she said.
“Nah. Not Benny,” Jeff said.
“He’s always out there doing stuff with you, and then he gets caught up because he has to try it. He keeps on,” she told him.
“He doesn’t have to try nothing. Benny comes out and he’s perfectly fine,” Jeff said.
Jeff either didn’t believe her or didn’t want to listen.
Benny Jr. called Jeff five times, sometimes crying:
“My dad is on drugs heavy.”
“My dad has problems. You have to help my dad.”
“You’re making my dad worse.”
“He’s gonna kill himself, or someone’s gonna kill him.”
Still, Jeff wouldn’t listen. He couldn’t quit Benny. It was a vicious cycle—Jeff gave Benny money. Benny bought dope and now had a new address to give Jeff. Jeff set up a raid. Benny again got paid. Then Benny scoped out his next crack house. And on it went.
When Benny was off on a binge, he’d sell his sneakers for crack. “It would be a miracle if he’d come back with his shoes on. He’d come back barefoot,” Benny Jr. said.
One day, Susette couldn’t take it anymore. She wanted him out, but he refused to leave unless she gave him $2,500. “I asked at work about borrowing from my 401k. He went with me to cash the check,” said Susette, who worked as a social worker. “Then I started thinking if I gave him the whole thing, I’d be behind. I gave him two thousand dollars and kept five hundred.” Benny, who was already running around with Sonia, moved in with her.
For the big moments in the lives of his oldest children, Benny was a no-show. In 2007, he bought Iesha a $500 dress for her Sweet Sixteen party, but he didn’t give her what she wanted most. In front of the some 250 guests, Benny, as her father, was expected to perform a coming-of-age ceremony. Benny was supposed to remove Iesha’s flat shoes and replace them with strappy heels to symbolize that she’d become a lady. Iesha cried, her face streaked with mascara, as Benny Jr. stepped in for their dad. He didn’t go to her high school graduation, nor did he show for his two oldest kids.
“He was always promising stuff,” Benny Jr. told us. “Like ‘I’m going to take you to the Phillies game. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that.’ Somehow I would expect it. But after a while, I knew not to expect it.”
Benny Jr. tried to act like he didn’t care, like he was over it, but he wasn’t—clearly. None of them were. They were wounded.
For Benny, being an informant was like having a legal license to do drugs. The police department essentially became Benny’s pusher. Cops like Jeff were curbing the drug trade—and at the same time feeding it. When Jeff evicted Benny and deactivated him as an informant, Benny lost a key pipeline to money and drugs.
Barbara and I thought that Jeff might not have known that Benny was an addict. We kept coming back to the fact that Jeff rented a house to Benny. “Would you rent a house to a known crackhead?” Barbara asked me when we wrestled with it in our heads. “You’d have to be crazy.” Jeff also helped Benny get jobs with his friends, including current and former cops who had started their own businesses.
Benny never came across, at least not to Barbara and me, as a dope fiend. He was a master at hiding it. Up until Benny burned Jeff, Jeff probably thought he was a good judge of character and knew how to smell a con. I thought the same thing about myself.
Throughout the yearlong Tainted Justice series, Benny was my albatross. He would call me, not Barbara, whenever he had a problem. Barbara and I later speculated that Benny picked me because I had little kids. Brody and Sawyer were around the same age as Benny’s two youngest, Giovanni and Gianni. On top of that, I was a pushover around kids, and Benny knew how to play me, knew just the right sob story to spin: he had no heat in the house and the kids got sick from the cold; he and Sonia couldn’t afford to give the kids a Christmas; he’d spent what little money he had on Catholic school tuition for Gio.
Benny repeatedly told me, with slight variations, that his kids were suffering in the wake of the Daily News story about him. He said Gio didn’t understand why the family had to keep moving. “I feel like we’re running from place to place,” Benny told me, crying. “I feel bad. I should be taking my son to Cub Scouts.” Benny said he couldn’t risk being seen with the kids. He couldn’t walk them to school or take them trick-or-treating without putting their lives in danger. He painted himself as a good parent who was miserable because he couldn’t give them a normal childhood or provide for them. He said that every time he tried to get a job, potential employers Googled him and got put off when they came across the Daily News story.
Other times Benny called and said he was being followed, convinced that this was the day his body would end up in a ditch. Sometimes Barbara and I believed that the day would come when we’d hear from Sonia, the police, whoever, that Benny was dead and we wondered how we’d live with the guilt. There were plenty of drug dealers who would get freed from prison and want street justice. Revenge and snitch murders were commonplace on Philly’s streets.
But those who knew the rules of the hood told Barbara and me that anyone who wanted to off Benny would wait. They would make him sweat, for seven, eight years maybe, knowing that life on the run was no life. And time would protect his killer. Cops would be hard pressed to finger a suspect. There were too many to name, and the cases had grown rusty.
When Benny wasn’t talking about his own murder, he claimed he’d kill himself, if not for the kids. “These little guys, they keep me going.”
I was tortured by this. I spent hours talking to Benny on the phone, trying to console him while trying to console myself.
“Benny, I’m sorry. I feel like this is my fault.”
“No. No. Noooo, Wendy,” Benny said, before throwing in that FBI and internal affairs investigators always told him that Barbara and I didn’t give a shit about him, we just wanted a story. “I tell them, noooo. Youse girls have been there for me.”
Benny did a number on my head, and for the longest time, I couldn’t disentangle myself from him. I bought Benny groceries for Thanksgiving and toys for his kids at Christmas and for Gio’s birthday. At my weakest moments, Barbara stopped me from giving him money. “Wendy, don’t do it.” She reminded me that it would be unethical and would cross the line as a journalist; she saved me from myself. Jeff didn’t have the same oversight. Jeff allowed himself to get sucked in by the drug trade’s riptide, which separated him from his oath as a law enforcement officer.
When Barbara and I left Susette’s house, we felt sick. I realized that we weren’t to blame for the mess Benny had made of his life. I was done with Benny, done feeling responsible. I was free.