Busted (24 page)

“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.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, BARBARA AND I DIDN'T MAKE GEORGE BOCHETTO'S CHRISTMAS CARD LIST
.

That year Jeff's attorney sent out holiday cards that could only have been dreamed up by this contentious barrister. The card featured a Photoshopped image of Bochetto and his law partner swimming underwater, surrounded by teeth-baring sharks and a bosomy blonde in a skimpy bikini. In the photo, Bochetto's wavy hair floats atop his head and a plume of air bubbles rise up from his nose. He's wearing a ferocious expression and his trademark pinstriped suit, briefcase in hand. The card reads, “Litigation is an ocean . . . full of sharks.” The words next to Bochetto and his law partner, Gavin Lentz, say: “Man Eaters . . . George and Gavin wish you an ocean of good fortune in 2010.”

A
Daily News
reporter who had received Bochetto's card thought I'd find it humorous and handed it to me. “I love it,” I said, as I thrust a pushpin through Bochetto's forehead and tacked it up on the fabric-covered wall divider near my computer.

Barbara and I had moved past Tainted Justice to write stories on topics other than police corruption, and the
Daily News
was nearing the end of its fourteen-month slog through bankruptcy.

Philadelphia Media Holdings, which owned the
Daily News
, the
Inquirer
, and Philly.com, was more than $300 million in debt. Though the company cleared about $15 million in profit in 2009, that gain was gobbled up by $26.6 million in legal and professional fees associated with the bankruptcy. That expense included legal bills generated by the lenders, but paid for by Philadelphia Media Holdings.

The company was now slated for the auction block, where it would be sold to the highest bidder. For months, the auction was held up by a legal battle over credit bidding in federal court: company CEO Brian Tierney and his investment group wanted all the bids in cash; the senior lenders, who held the largest portion of the company's debt, wanted to use that debt as IOUs to bid on the company. Tierney wasn't expected to win the fight, but the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit handed him an improbable victory—and the auction was a go.

The victory meant Tierney stood a chance of holding on to the papers. Tierney ramped up his efforts to recruit investors who would go up against senior lenders. He approached every super-rich benefactor or businessman in the region and crisscrossed the country in search of civic-minded bidders. Tierney put it to them straight: This isn't an investment. It's philanthropy. We'd be saving a cultural gem, an institution with a community value that could never be measured in dollars.

This was a change in thinking for Tierney. Like a lot of publishers across the country, Tierney had believed that Internet advertising would save newspapers. He figured if he could drive up web traffic on Philly.com and increase the number of page views, he could charge more for online advertising. But even though the number of page views soared on Philly.com, the Internet became awash with competing websites, which drastically drove down the price of online advertising.

“This aspect of the business really scares the crap out of me,” Tierney mused. “You look at it and you say to yourself, ‘Online maybe isn't the future.' . . . That was the killer for the model.”

Tierney finally realized that newspapers as a for-profit venture were a thing of the past. But that didn't stop him from fighting for his hometown papers, and he mounted a last stand against the lenders in the form of a “Keep It Local” advertising campaign that made them bristle.

“You're in Philadelphia, pal,” Tierney said. “This is my town. . . . If this was a box-manufacturing company in Akron, I wouldn't be fighting like this. But I live here.”

Tierney cast himself as the home-team backer, and the senior lenders, who included Angelo Gordon, a New York–based hedge fund that specialized in distressed debt, as vultures who would ruthlessly go after short-term dollars and erode the quality of journalism.

Tierney's sales pitch worked, and local investors—the very ones who had lost millions in the first 2006 go-around—once again agreed to put up money, this time sold on the notion that without their help, journalism in Philadelphia would die. The team assembled by Tierney also included new investors: benefactor David Haas, an heir to the Rohm & Haas chemical company fortune; Revlon chairman Ronald Perelman and his philanthropist father Raymond, who together threw in $27 million; and at the last minute, amid the heat of the auction, cable television mogul H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest, who went in for $10 million.

The reality of the impending auction didn't really hit Barbara and me. We were too focused on a fantasy. Barbara and I had already won two national awards for Tainted Justice. The
Daily News
had nominated Tainted Justice for a Pulitzer for investigative reporting, one of the hardest categories to win. Editors at big newspapers across the country nominate reporters every year. Being nominated was nothing more than a pat on the back by your colleagues. It had as much weight as a parent advocating that their kid deserved to be Student of the Year. The
Daily News
wasn't exactly a heavy hitter in Pulitzer world.

We couldn't bring ourselves to say the word, even though there was buzz that we had a shot. Almost every other day, Barbara scooched over to my desk, crouched down until her Cheshire Cat face was at eye level with mine, and began to sway, hands clasped, as if praying or gripped by a stomach cramp. “Wendy,” she whispered, “can you imagine if we won the P? Imagine that?”

Any chance of winning would require a little divine intervention. I took out an old photo of my dad. In the photo, I'm no more than fifteen, wearing a sea-green sundress, my long bangs feathered back à la Farrah Fawcett. I'm smiling at the camera, and my dad is gazing at me adoringly. I kissed the image of my dad's face and tucked the photo under my pillow. While out for a jog, Barbara looked to the sky and talked to her mom. “Ma, please, please make this happen . . .”

My dad died in 1997; Barbara's mom died three years later, both of pancreatic cancer. Each was the parent who pushed us to achieve and understood what drove us. Barbara prayed to her mom when she was struggling and grieving over her divorce. I prayed to my dad for help when my three-year-old nephew developed a brain tumor. Barbara and I prayed to them when we wanted something really bad.

At exactly 3:00 p.m. on Monday, April 12, 2010, the winners would be posted on the Pulitzer website, and Barbara and I would know if our break-glass-in-an-emergency parents came through.

The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which administered the Pulitzers, tried to keep the winners a secret until the announcement. A committee of top-tiered editors and journalists from across the country judged the Pulitzers. Committee members often had friends or colleagues at newspapers that submitted Pulitzer entries. Once the committee had whittled down the entries to a few finalists, leaks happened, and winners and finalists got a heads-up.

But on the Friday before the announcement, Barbara and I still hadn't heard anything. We lingered around until about 7:00 p.m., when Michael Days stopped by Barbara's desk on his way out. As the paper's top editor, he'd be the one to get tipped off.