BARBARA JOINED US IN THE PENALTY BOX, AND BENNY STARTED FROM THE TOP. HE’D BEGUN WORKING WITH JEFF CUJDIK IN LATE 2001, AFTER JEFF caught him selling marijuana on a corner. Benny was thirty-five years old and on probation for a prior drug conviction. He didn’t want to go to prison, so he accepted Jeff’s offer to turn informant.
“I knew I was gonna do some time,” Benny told us. “So I said, ‘Well, I gotta do what I gotta do.’”
So Benny became Confidential Informant 103. Roughly three times a week, Jeff picked up Benny in an unmarked police car. They worked a list of suspected drug homes. Benny’s job was to knock on the door and make a drug buy, while Jeff and his partner watched from a hidden location. Benny used cash that Jeff had given him, called prerecorded buy money, for the drugs. Benny then handed over the drug packets to Jeff, who put them into evidence.
Once the deal was done, Jeff prepared an application for a search warrant, which he would need to enter a home. In the warrant, he typically included why he was targeting a certain house, what drugs he saw Informant 103 buy, where he bought them, and from whom. Sometimes Jeff had a first and last name of the suspect; other times only a physical description and a street name like “Macho” or “Blackie.”
A judge then issued a search warrant that Jeff would use when he and his squad members busted into the house.
The police department, through Jeff, paid Benny cash for the jobs. He usually got $20 for each drug buy and $150 to $250 for a big drug seizure, and if police found weapons, the department paid Benny an additional $100 for each gun. And Jeff nearly doubled his $55,400 salary in court overtime because each time he locked up a dealer, he had to testify in the case. More important, Jeff got attaboys from the “white shirts,” sergeants and captains who had earned enough stripes to hang up their uniform blues.
Over the years, Benny emerged as one of the city’s most prolific drug informants, and Jeff became one of the department’s golden boys, a favorite son who brought home the stats and made his bosses look good. Jeff, perhaps more than other cops, needed informants like Benny. With his clean-cut looks and his I-own-this-town swagger, Jeff’s appearance screamed cop. No dealer would be stupid enough to sell to him.
Benny told us that at first he and Jeff did things by the book, but then the lies began. If Benny couldn’t score drugs from a house, Jeff sometimes told him to buy elsewhere. Then in the application for a search warrant, Jeff would say that the drugs came from the targeted house. Benny even set up some of his closest friends—people he considered family, people who trusted and loved him. But that wasn’t the only secret Benny and Jeff shared.
About four years after they started working together, Jeff rented a house he had purchased for $30,000 to Benny and his family. The rent was $300 a month—a steal in Philly’s rental market.
Some of the cash that Benny earned as a police informant flowed back to Jeff in the form of rent money. This was against police department rules, and Jeff knew he’d get in big trouble if internal affairs found out.
The beginning of the end of their friendship came in 2006, though Jeff and Benny didn’t know it at the time. In November of that year, Benny tipped Jeff off to a drug dealer named Raul Nieves. Benny knew Raul from an auto-detailing shop where he had worked. Raul knew Benny as Benny Blanco, a reference to a character in the 1993 movie Carlito’s Way. In the film, Al Pacino plays a Puerto Rican ex–drug dealer dogged by Benny Blanco, a pesky young gangster from the Bronx.
Benny got Raul’s cell number and arranged to buy $125 worth of weed, enough to roll about fifty joints. After that, Benny hounded Raul for more pot, but Raul brushed him off. Something didn’t feel right.
Jeff and his squad later tore apart Raul’s Ford Expedition and found fifty-six orange-tinted crack baggies stashed behind the dashboard. Another twenty baggies were hidden behind a driver’s-side door panel. They locked up Raul on felony drug charges.
Raul hired a meticulous, serious-minded veteran defense attorney named Stephen Patrizio. Right away, Raul suspected that Confidential Informant 103 was Benny. Patrizio hired a private investigator to tail Benny home from work.
Raul’s case lingered in criminal court. Again and again, hearing dates got scheduled, then postponed. Raul waited, coolly. Finally, on October 10, 2008—almost two years after Benny bought weed from Raul and two months before Benny came to the Daily News—the case leaped forward, exploding at Jeff’s feet.
Jeff sat in the witness stand. Patrizio stood before him. He was short and stocky, with a fuzz of hair on a mostly bald head, his pants pulled up perhaps a bit too high, and belted over his paunch. Those who wrote him off as a mild-mannered, harmless geek would soon be proven wrong.
Patrizio took out a copy of Police Directive 15, the rules that officers should follow when dealing with informants, and showed it to Jeff.
Patrizio began to read aloud: “‘Police personnel will maintain professional objectivity in dealing with informants. No personal relationships will jeopardize the objectivity of the informant or the integrity of the department.’”
Patrizio paused and looked up at Jeff. “Correct?”
“Correct,” Jeff replied.
Then Patrizio pounced. He stuck a photo under Jeff’s nose. It was a snapshot of Benny walking out of Jeff’s house.
“Without asking you anything about the person depicted in the picture, do you recognize that street?”
“Yes,” Jeff said.
“And not only do you recognize the street, but you recognize the house that the informant is coming out of, correct?”
“I don’t know exactly what house the individual came out of, but I can identify one house on that block,” Jeff said.
“You can identify the house of 1939 East Pacific Street?”
“I own that house,” Jeff said.
“That was my question. You can identify that house?”
“I answered the question,” Jeff said, icily.
Patrizio told the judge that he planned to subpoena Informant 103. Defense attorneys often filed motions seeking to drag informants into court. Ninety-nine percent of the time, prosecutors and judges laugh at the request. Confidential informants were just that—confidential. For good reason. Judges protected their identity to prevent drug dealers from killing them. But this case was different. Raul already knew Benny’s identity, and he hadn’t touched him.
“He has known who he is for long periods of time, and nothing has happened to him,” Patrizio argued.
The judge saw Patrizio’s point, and the court issued a subpoena for “Benny Blanco,” aka “Benny Martinez.”
Jeff panicked. With their relationship exposed, he moved to cut all ties with Benny. Jeff put the rental property up for sale and told Benny that he had to leave. Benny wouldn’t budge.
So in December 2008, Jeff filed a complaint in landlord-tenant court to evict Benny and Sonia, noting that he’d received no rent since October. Jeff then deactivated Benny as an informant.
By the time Benny came to Barbara and me, he was desperate. Benny, the woman he referred to as his wife, Sonia, and their two small children had nowhere to go.
He sat across from us, seemingly terrified, convinced that he’d soon be a dead man. Word had spread on the street that Benny was a snitch. He feared Raul wanted to kill him. If not Raul, some other drug dealer. He told us that he’d opened his door to find a chunk of cheese on the stoop. It was a street message: Benny was a rat.
He told us that, like prisoners, he, Sonia, and the kids spent nights in the upstairs middle bedroom, where his ten-month-old daughter Gianni slept. He pushed her crib against the wall and dragged a king-size mattress onto the pink carpet. He told his three-year-old son Giovanni to pretend they were camping. He figured they were safer there, holed away in a Benny-made bunker. But he still couldn’t sleep. He sat saucer-eyed, fixated on the bedroom door, convinced the knob would turn and he’d see the barrel of a gun.
Jeff no longer had his back. In fact, Benny told us he feared him, that Jeff could patiently lie in wait for the perfect moment to put a bullet in his head, which we later learned was Benny being overdramatic.
“I was dreaming the other night that Jeff shot me in my face,” Benny said. “Jeff is a hunter. He likes to hunt. . . . I could be sitting on my porch smoking a cigarette and I could get shot real easily.”
Benny stopped talking. Barbara and I looked at each other. We sat back in our chairs. Quiet. Dubious.
“Look, it’s true. I could call Jeff right now,” Benny said.
Benny flipped open his cell. Jeff answered immediately. Barbara and I practically laid our upper bodies across the table. I kneeled on my chair seat, propped myself up on my elbows, and shoved my head next to Benny’s cell phone. I was close enough to kiss his cheek. I could see every follicle of his scant pencil mustache and goatee and smell his cologne. Barbara did the same on the other side.
“You know I know a lot,” Benny was saying.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jeff said.
Benny tried to bait him, but Jeff gave up nothing. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he warned Benny.
The conversation was short, and Jeff sounded guarded, edgy. Could Jeff really kill Benny or find some street thug to do it for him? We didn’t know. What we did know was that Jeff wanted Benny out of his life.
Before long, I’d want the same thing.