Busted (20 page)

By spring 2009, media analysts were writing print journalism's obituary. “It's the end of the newspaper business right now, this point in time,” pronounced longtime media watcher Michael Wolff.

Tierney wouldn't hear it.

“We,” he told CBS News, “are the originators of the investigative work that needs to be done.”

WE SPENT HOURS IN THE OFFICE, REPLAYING THE JOSE VIDEO. WE PAUSED IT ON A CLOSE-UP OF TOLSTOY'S FACE. WE ALREADY HAD HIS BADGE NUMBER;
now we knew what he looked like.

Of all the cops in the video, Tolstoy came across as the biggest asshole, a caricature of a cop on a power trip, the self-important type who gleefully puts people in handcuffs, making them extra tight, and slams their heads against the cruiser to show who's boss.

We wanted Lady Gonzalez to see Jose's video, the version without the cops' faces blurred. The cop who sexually assaulted her had told her to call him Tom. When Barbara and I first met Lady three months earlier, we hadn't told her the cop's full name. We wanted to play fair; we needed Lady to identify him without prompts from us.

Lady had grown to trust Barbara and me, so when we asked her to come to the office to see the raw video, she immediately agreed. We cued up the raw video on a computer in the newsroom and asked Lady to take a seat.

“Lady, we want you to look at this video and tell us if you recognize the cop who fondled you. I can't tell you if he's on here, and I can't say anything while you watch it,” Barbara said.

She repeatedly said she was nervous and rubbed her palms up and down the front of her blue jeans.

“Okay. I'm ready,” Lady said softly before taking a deep heave of air.. Barbara pulled up a chair and sat next to Lady. I leaned over and pressed play.

There's a few seconds of Jose talking on his cell phone, pacing back and forth in his store. Tolstoy hits the door first. He zooms in, gun drawn. “Hand me the phone. Gimme the phone,” Tolstoy orders.

Lady immediately stiffened, and her brown velvet eyes widened.

“Oh my God, that's him,” Lady said. Tears spilled down her cheeks faster than she could wipe them away.

“Are you okay?” Barbara asked, putting her hand across Lady's back.

“My heart is just racing right now,” Lady said, starting to tremble. “Just to see him come through that door like that makes me shake all over. It brings back a lot of bad memories.”

“Put your hands behind your back,” Tolstoy barks to Jose.

“That's him talking right now. I know it,” Lady said. His loud and pompous voice was unmistakable.

“You're sure?” Barbara asked. “You're really sure?”

There was no doubt. Shortly after leaving the
Daily News
, Lady contacted internal affairs and the special victims unit to identify Tolstoy as her attacker. “He doesn't deserve to wear the police badge. If he did it to me, he'll strike again,” she said.

And yet Tolstoy remained on the street. Barbara and I thought this was mind boggling, indicative of a back-slapping good ol' boys culture in which a cop's word trumps a woman's damning and convincing accusation. At the time, we didn't know that internal affairs had a file on Tolstoy.

Barbara and I went back to the search warrant room. We had little to go on. No names or addresses, just a hunch that we'd find other victims.

We pulled search warrants for raids in which Tolstoy was present, combing through three years' worth. Out of thousands, we set aside at least 150 warrants that listed Tolstoy's badge number.

The warrants gave us the addresses and dates of the raids. To find people, Barbara and I typically used a database that culled information, like home mortgages, liens and bankruptcies, civil suits and voter records, creating thumbnail people profiles. All we had to do was type an address into the database, and names of occupants, both former and current, would pop up. But the women we were looking for lived off the grid. They didn't have landlines, their cell phone numbers changed constantly, and they moved every few months.

Barbara and I would have to rely on old-fashioned shoe leather to find potential Tolstoy victims. The method was inefficient, tedious, and tiresome. We'd often arrive at a house to find the tenants long gone. Other times we'd find the house abandoned, the windows and doors boarded with graffiti-marred plywood. We kept in touch via cell phone, updating each other on our progress—or lack thereof.

Occasionally we went out together, and of course Barbara drove. One afternoon, we turned down a narrow street and found ourselves in the middle of a feud. Two men, each surrounded by their own posse, stood on opposite sides of the street, cursing at each other. One of the men walked over to a parked car and popped the trunk. “I'm gonna get my piece,” he said.

“Oh shit. Did he say he's getting his piece?” I said.

“Yeah, we need to get out of here,” Barbara said.

That's all we need, to get killed in the crossfire, I thought.

Barbara hit the gas, the car lurched forward, and she sped through the stop sign. “Whoa, Slicey,” I cautioned. Barbara stretched her right arm across my chest, like the protective bar on an amusement park ride, as I jammed my hands against the dashboard. We came to a dead stop, stuck behind an idling car parked in the middle of the one-way street. The driver was yapping to a guy on a stoop. This wasn't a part of town where you wanted to beep your horn. We had two choices: wait, or reverse down the street. We waited.

When we finally tracked down people who got raided, they told us a slew of horror stories about the cops. Tolstoy and his squad members splintered doors with battering rams, urinated in bathtubs, poured bleach on family photos, upended couches, and sliced open cushions. The cops ordered pizza or made a McDonald's run and then discarded empty boxes, Styrofoam containers, and food wrappers all over the house. They helped themselves to beer and vodka, drinking straight from the bottle. They spewed venom—“You people live like animals” and “This place stinks like shit.” They swiped whatever caught their eye—PlayStations, video games, CDs, jewelry. They always took money and even smashed kids' piggy banks and pocketed coins.

Almost everyone Barbara and I talked to remembered Jeff, the cop they described as “the tall one with the blue eyes.” They mostly remembered his lunatic rants. “Get the fuck on the floor. Shut the fuck up!”

Jeff's style was all gangbusters. “He started out with no respect,” a narcotics cop told us. “He'd say, ‘I have pictures of you, if you don't tell me where the drugs are, you'll lose your kids.' He'd lose control. He started with chaos.”

But in Jose's video, Barbara and I saw a softer side to Jeff. When the cops raided the store, a boy, roughly twelve years old, was inside.

The cops usher the boy to the front of the store and tell him to put his hands up. He stands with his back to the camera, his hands cupped to the back of his head, elbows out. Dressed in khaki shorts and a lime green shirt, the boy is a statue as an officer searches his pockets for a gun. Jeff approaches the boy and gingerly questions him. “Where do you live at? In the hood?” Jeff asks his name and age, then lightly pats the boy's stomach and tells him to scram.

Barbara and I saw a tenderness there. It was like Jeff was two people.

We were getting a more complete picture of these cops. After each house we visited, Barbara and I made little notations on the search warrant:

Between my sleep-deprived mommy brain and Barbara's early-onset senility, plus the sheer number of homes, we relied on these scribbled notes to keep track of which doors we'd knocked on and what people had to say about the raids.

At least a dozen women told us that Tolstoy and the other cops in his squad had degraded and demeaned them.

A forty-eight-year-old woman named Denise described Tolstoy's modus operandi. The cop, whom she described as white and stocky with brown hair, took her alone to an upstairs bedroom. “What's your chest size?” the officer asked, eyeing up Denise's generous breasts in her low-cut white summer dress. Denise gave him lip and more than a little attitude: “What has that got to do with anything?” With that, the cop backed down and didn't touch her.

In another summertime raid, a thirty-year-old woman was asleep, naked, when the cops whooshed into her bedroom. She sat up, startled, gripping the bedcovers to her chest.

“I'm not dressed. I'm not dressed,” she shouted, but an officer, whom she described as white with a big belly, scruffy brown hair, and a small goatee, yanked the sheets from her fingers so viciously that she thought he was going to rape her. The woman reached for her clothes and turned to dress with her back to the cops, but the officer who pulled off the covers ordered her to face them. She stood naked before them. She was so terrified that she put her clothes on inside out. The cops sent her downstairs, and she heard them cackling in her bedroom. After they left, she found her personal items, including the couple's sex toys, strewn around the room. They removed a black leather teddy from a drawer and laid it out on top of her dresser. The whole scene frightened her. The cops arrested her thirty-five-year-old husband for giving a few of his prescription painkillers to a friend. The couple lived in Cop Land, a term Barbara and I used to refer to the section of Philadelphia that many police officers, firefighters, and other city employees called home. The woman and her husband weren't drug dealers; they were hardworking middle-class people, and the raid humiliated and wounded them. They felt such shame.

“I'll never get that day out of my head,” the woman told me. “Ever since this happened, I don't sleep. I'm not comfortable in my house. . . . I felt like all my dignity had been stripped from me.”

Barbara and I were disturbed and repulsed by the cops' behavior. Nothing pissed us off more than men in power who preyed on vulnerable women, and on a Friday night in May, Barbara would meet yet another Tolstoy victim.

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.