Busted (11 page)

Jeff and Benny often targeted nickel-and-dime drug peddlers. This case was different. Thomas Cooper—twice convicted on felony drug charges—was big-time. When Jeff and his squad raided his house, they found a stash of drugs, including 155.6 grams of crack worth more than $12,000, an amount that bumped the case up to the federal level. This was Thomas's third strike, and if convicted, he would spend the rest of his life in prison.

Federal prosecutors were preparing the case for trial when our first Tainted Justice story hit. The story prompted them to
reexamine what had led up to Thomas's arrest. The facts didn't add up.

In an application for a search warrant, Jeff said Benny had tipped him off to a guy named Pooh Bear who stored guns and sold marijuana and crack from his mother's row house. Jeff claimed that he and another cop watched Benny knock on the door and buy marijuana from Pooh Bear. Jeff described Pooh Bear as tall, about six-two, and thin, roughly 180 pounds.

“I never heard of a guy named Pooh Bear. I never made a buy at this place,” Benny told us.

Thomas Cooper never went by the nickname Pooh Bear and wasn't exactly thin—he topped the scale at 350 pounds.

Federal prosecutors decided to drop the charges “in the interests of justice.” It was the first case to be dismissed since Barbara and I had started the Tainted Justice series.

I called Cooper's public defender, Nina Carpinello Spizer, who told me she had always been troubled by the case because the warrant gave an inaccurate description and nickname for Cooper.

“We never suspected that this was all made up,” she told me. “We didn't know until it came out in the newspaper,” she said, referring to our first Tainted Justice story.

Thomas Cooper was set to walk free at any time. We wanted to talk to him, or at least find his relatives and see his house.

When Barbara walked up to his three-story brick row house with smudged cream paint and brown trim, she had a gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach. The house, owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority, sat across the street from an elementary school for children pre-K through eighth grade.

It was around 2:30 in the afternoon, and school had just let out. Children clamored outside in their winter coats, and Barbara knew that to get home, these kids had to walk past corner drug boys with dark hoodies pulled tight over their heads
to shade their hard-boiled eyes.

Barbara and I knew that nothing tore down a neighborhood faster or harder than drug houses. They attracted desperate addicts who were unpredictable when they couldn't get a fix and potentially dangerous when they did. They took over abandoned houses and made them crack dens or shooting galleries. Many dealers were never far from a weapon and often shot each other over territory or nonsense—it didn't matter. Children, some of them toddlers, had been gunned down in the crossfire, even outside a school. Neighbors feared telling cops about the drug trade on their block, believing their homes would be firebombed.

Barbara knocked on Thomas Cooper's worn front door. Cooper's mother, a woman we'll call Helen, let Barbara into the gloomy, sparse living room, empty except for two chairs. Helen plopped down in one, and Barbara carefully perched herself on a wobbly metal folding chair with a bent, misshapen leg, knowing that with one wrong move, she would topple to the floor.

Helen was forty-nine but looked haggard and moved so precariously, she appeared more like a sickly sixty-year-old. A colostomy bag was attached to her hip. She blamed two recent surgeries on the stress of the raid and the “nasty” cops who threw her son in jail.

Barbara had no doubt that she was sitting in a drug house. While Helen said she was angry that the cop had set up her son, she made no apologies for Thomas or his lifestyle. Drugs were a cottage industry, the one and only economic engine in her section of town.

Thomas mostly hung out on the third floor, and Helen said she seldom climbed the stairs to see his bedroom or look at what he kept inside. Against the backdrop of a bedroom window that overlooked the elementary school, Thomas cut,
weighed, and packaged a potpourri of drugs with studious precision.

Helen told Barbara she suspected that the search warrant was bogus because her son never ran a knock-and-buy operation.

“This is not like you could come to my house, knock on my door, and come in and buy drugs,” she said.

Barbara knew that Helen, without saying it, meant that her son didn't roll that way—he gave the drugs to street corner dealers, probably so he wouldn't risk getting his family booted out of public housing. This was home. The family had lived there ten years.

“I don't understand why the cops were here,” Helen said with a shrug.

“Did you know your son was selling drugs?” Barbara asked flat-out.

“I kind of thought it, but I didn't see it myself,” Helen said.

Some moms of drug dealers played dumb, telling us that they had no idea what cops had found in their homes. Not Helen. She told Barbara she knew cops had discovered crack cocaine, cocaine, and marijuana. She didn't talk specifics or mention that inside her son's bedroom, Jeff and his squad found marijuana in eighty-nine glass jars with pink lids and a digital scale.

Thomas didn't have a job because of a bad knee, yet police found almost $2,000 in his pocket when he was arrested.

“They tore the whole house up. They didn't find no guns,” she proclaimed, punctuating the end of her sentence with a slight smile and an expectant pause, as if waiting for Barbara to respond, “You go, girl! Those pesky cops are always making a big deal out of nothing.”

Helen cast herself in the role of victim. “It really makes me angry,” she said. “Cops are supposed to help us, not to lock
people up for nothing so they can make themselves feel better. I think they get off on making themselves feel better.”

Barbara emerged from the house feeling like a hypocrite. She never intended to become a champion for the city's drug dealers. It's one thing to get all high and mighty about cops who piss all over the US Constitution, but she didn't have to live here. Her children never had to go to school across the street from a drug dealer's house.

Barbara could parachute into the city's blood-splattered neighborhoods to report on the latest murder, then go home to comfy suburbia, where she never awoke to the sound of gunfire at midnight.

On the first morning of Thomas's freedom, Barbara and I had a front-page story about how Pooh Bear was released from prison because the search warrant seemed to rely on fabricated evidence. The headline on the story: “Dismissed! People Paper Exposé Leads to Release of North Philly Man.”

Barbara and I groaned when we saw the photo and headline. We knew that the average reader would take one look at the headline and conclude that we were gleeful that we had helped free the neighborhood crack vendor. Most readers don't know that reporters don't write headlines. To further make us appear that we were empathetic to Cooper's plight, the story featured a family photo of Thomas, this happy hulk of a man, grinning from ear to ear while holding his two small nephews, ages two and four months. The timing couldn't be worse.

The day the story ran, yet one more slain police officer was buried. This time it was John Pawlowski, just twenty-five years old, the fifth officer killed in the line of duty in the past twelve months.

It was a hellish period for a police department that felt under siege. In a city where cops were heroes, the number of police deaths in such a short span was unprecedented. Soccer moms displayed photos of fallen officers in the back windows of their minivans. Cops fastened black ribbons over their badges, and working-class guys with grease under their nails wore T-shirts or buttons to memorialize the latest fallen cop.

For each funeral, the city came to a virtual standstill to allow for the motorcades that stretched for miles. Thousands of mourners, some waving American flags, lined the streets outside the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul. Cops from as far away as Canada came to pay their respects. The sound of sobs, the wail of bagpipes, and the
tat-boom-tat
of drums rose from the crowd as each flag-draped coffin was loaded into the hearse.

Pawlowski, whose father and brother were also cops, was shot to death by a revolving-door criminal, a parolee with a decade-long arrest record for theft, robbery, and gun crimes. When Pawlowski responded to a 911 call from a cabbie who said Scruggs was threatening him, Pawlowski ordered Scruggs to raise his hands. Instead, Scruggs squeezed the trigger of a .357 Magnum that had been tucked inside his coat pocket. A bullet tore into Pawlowski's upper chest, just over the top of his bulletproof vest.

Police Commissioner Ramsey and Mayor Nutter spoke at Pawlowski's funeral, where the cries of Pawlowski's wife, Kimmy, his childhood sweetheart, echoed through the cavernous cathedral. Kimmy was five months pregnant with their first child, a son she would name after her husband. A grainy ultrasound photo was tucked into Pawlowski's folded hands before undertakers closed his brushed copper casket.

To some readers, Barbara and I were no better than killers
like Scruggs. “It's people like you who are to blame for the unprecedented violence against the Philadelphia Police,” one e-mailed us.

Barbara and I were targeted on Domelights.com, an Internet forum where cops, their supporters, and cop wannabes vented anonymously. The website's slogan—“The Voice of the Good Guys”—was a joke. Many of the postings were angry, racist rants. In one posting, the writer described black children as “a bunch of ghetto monkey faces.” Cops and others who posted on the site dubbed us “Slime Sistas,” some wished us dead, and a few wrote that they hoped we got raped and no one would respond when we called 911. I didn't tell Karl that cops had posted our home address on the site.

The verbal assault became so savage that our colleague Jill Porter felt compelled to write a column defending us. “You may be furious that a suspected drug dealer was freed—as well you should be. But don't aim your fury at Laker and Ruderman,” she wrote.

Again and again, our critics argued, Who cares if cops cut corners or lie to take a drug dealer off the street? They believed that the ends justified the means.

The argument reminded Barbara and me of a famous scene from the 1992 movie
A Few Good Men
, a courtroom drama about two US Marines on trial for killing a fellow marine. When pressed by the prosecutor for the truth about the murder, Colonel Nathan Jessup, played by Jack Nicholson, barks, “You can't handle the truth!” meaning that national security comes at a price. “Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You?”

Yes, Barbara and I weren't cops. We didn't know how it felt to chase down an armed robber or deranged killer, only to find ourselves in a dark alley, staring into the barrel of a gun.
But we did know that when reporters fabricated stories, when they invented people, facts, or quotes, they tarnished the entire industry and eroded trust. The same applied to cops, only more so. Martin Luther King Jr. put it this way: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

BARBARA AND I WERE HUDDLED OVER MY COMPUTER WRITING OUR NEXT TAINTED JUSTICE STORY. THE NEWSROOM WAS UNUSUALLY LIVELY FOR
a Sunday evening. It was Oscar night, and editors had ordered pizza, as they did for all big events—election night, the Super Bowl, the World Series. Reporters and copy editors gathered, vulture-like, around a white cardboard tower of pizza boxes. They pulled apart the gooey slices, wiped their greasy fingers on thin takeout napkins—or on their jeans—and then zipped back to their desks.

From my desk, I could see the Sunday-night editor, Will Bunch, furiously typing away at his computer behind stacks of yellowed newspapers. Will, the Ivy League–educated, fifty-year-old mad scientist of the
Daily News
, always looked like he'd just jammed a metal fork into an electric outlet, with his thin strands of hair zigzagging every which way. Between bites of pizza, Will took generous swigs of Diet Coke straight from the two-liter bottle. By night's end, the bottle would be empty, left on a desk smeared with sticky brown crop circles of corn syrup and a dusting of dandruff.

Will, like everyone else in the newsroom, had just learned that the parent company of the
Daily News
and
Inquirer
had
filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. As he worked on a piece about the filing, which he later posted on his liberal-infused blog
Attytood
, reporters began to Google “Chapter 11” to see if they'd still get paid.

Barbara and I barely looked up, deaf to the chatter of doom around us. We had come in on our day off to write a story about a woman named Lady Gonzalez. Gar, our editor, wanted the story for Monday's front cover. We could hear the thundering hooves of
Inquirer
reporters behind us, and we were determined to outrun them. That meant working double-time to get our story in the paper.

We'd spent most of the week chasing tips that Jeff wasn't the only blemished cop in his squad. A suburban narcotics cop who occasionally joined forces with Philly drug cops called Barbara with a tip that one cop in Jeff's squad was known as the Boob Man.

“Boob Man?”

“Yeah. You know. He fondles women. He's a perv. He goes up under their shirts and touches their breasts when he's on a raid,” he told Barbara.

“Oh my God. You've got to be kidding me,” Barbara said.

“I'm not fucking with you. He gets them alone in a room. All the other cops know it. I hear he likes large-breasted women—the bigger, the better.”

Around the same time, I'd heard similar rumblings from Benny. It wasn't long before we discovered that the cop with the breast fetish wasn't an urban myth. In hunting down people who had been set up by Jeff, we met Lady Gonzalez, a soft-spoken, almost demure woman with almond-shaped brown eyes, smooth skin, high cheekbones, Angelina Jolie lips, and a small diamond stud in her nose. Her father named her Lady because he thought his tiny, delicate baby was deserving of such a regal name.