Busted (6 page)

“C'mon, you know I would never volunteer to go to Iraq if we had kids. That'd be selfish,” I argued.

Karl gave me a look, shaking his head. He wasn't buying my bullshit. He knew me too well. A good story was my drug.

Barbara drank from the same Kool-Aid.

She thought nothing of plunking down her credit card to buy a powder blue bulletproof vest for a ride-along with cops on drug raids. “Don't worry, honey,” she told her husband at the time. “You'll see $795 on the Visa, but it's for a bulletproof vest, and the paper will reimburse me.” She didn't get why the color drained from his face. He told her she had a serious problem.

Not long after that, Barbara had worn the vest as she shadowed narcotics cops into a crack den. Two little kids—one in diapers—sat on a soiled carpet, watching cartoons and eating Cheerios for dinner. A Phillies Blunt box filled with crack vials sat within reach. There was a filthy mattress strewn with lighters and matches. Barbara opened the refrigerator to find only ketchup, mustard, margarine, and wilted celery. She stood in the doorway as cops cuffed the glassy-eyed twenty-two-year-old mom. Her children sat just a foot away, with blank stares, their legs tucked under their tiny bodies. As cops led the mom outside, she walked by her kids, silent, not even looking at them. Barbara cried when she left the house.

The next morning, Barbara called the Philadelphia Department of Human Services to see if a social worker could check on the children. An intake worker told Barbara that parents who smoked and sold crack don't fit the city's definition of abuse or neglect. Barbara was incensed. She told Ed Moran, a reporter she had partnered with for the story, that
she was going to check on the kids. He told her not to go, but she wouldn't listen, so he reluctantly went along.

The children were playing outside when they arrived. Their mom, released from jail six hours ago, sat on a stoop a few houses away. She shot Barbara a steely stare. Barbara knelt down and asked the kids, “How are you guys?” A cluster of drug dealers walked toward Barbara. To them, she was a busybody meddling with their business.

“Time to go, Barbara,” Ed said, heading to the car.

“I'm not ready,” she said, shooing him away with one hand.

“It's time,” he shouted.

The young dealers closed in on Barbara. A few reached into the pockets of their baggy jeans.

“Barbara, NOW!” Ed bellowed in his thick Boston accent. Only then did she hop in the car.

So when friends and relatives asked Barbara and me if we were scared to knock on the doors of drug dealers, we didn't understand the question.

IN THE SEVEN YEARS THAT BENNY HAD WORKED WITH JEFF, THEY BEGAN TO LOCK UP SECOND GENERATIONS OF DRUG DEALERS. IN PHILLY, THERE
were cop families and drug families. Children of cops wanted to wear the badge; children of drug dealers got sucked into an underworld of fast money.

The first house that Barbara visited belonged to Jorge Garcia and his family, whose names have all been changed in this book. Benny had told us that he'd never bought heroin from Jorge, even though the search warrant said otherwise. Jorge lived in the Badlands, a four-square-mile drug bazaar centered in West Kensington, home to the city's top three drug corners.

Drug dealers hung on corners while lookouts, teens on four-wheelers, sped around the block, looking for cops in uniform or street clothes. They yelled various codes as a warning:

Bomba! Aqua! Gloria! Five O!

This was corporate America of the streets, home to a multimillion-dollar business that had a finely tuned organizational structure. Above the corner boys were the holders, or guys who stashed the dope, and the caseworkers who picked
up cash and delivered it to the drug bosses. Blood was spilled over turf wars. Little else.

By 2007, murder in the Badlands almost single-handedly gave Philly its nickname: “Killadelphia.” That year there were 391 murders, the highest rate per 100,000 residents among the nation's ten largest cities, according to crime statistics compiled annually by the FBI. Gunshot wounds were so common that trauma surgeons from Sweden traveled to Philadelphia to learn lifesaving techniques they'd rarely need in their country. On average, one person was killed in the city every day. Many of these murders happened here in the Badlands.

When kids walked to school, they saw dealers pushing their brands. At Cambria and Hope Streets, the dope was known as Louis Vuitton. At Cambria and Master, Bart Simpson. At Cambria and Palethorpe, Seven-Up.

At Howard and Cambria there were two brands, Nike and Lucifer. This was the corner that never slept, one of the hottest drug spots in the city—and the most dangerous.

Most children at the elementary school on Cambria Street knew at least a few people who had been killed. Some were relatives. Kids as young as seven spoke of gunfire and blood on the street as if it were part of life; for them, it was. Every morning, school custodians swept up used condoms, needles, vials, and trash from the concrete play yard before children arrived.

Weathered memorials with teddy bears, balloons, and candles were scattered all over the Badlands. Sidewalks became street cemeteries. And these urban graves became part of the drug trade. Some dealers hid their heroin packets under worn stuffed animals.

A number of homes in the area were vacant or boarded up
and reeked of pee and dead rats. Inside, addicts shot up, sitting on grungy mattresses or sofas with no springs. In the middle of some blocks, one or two houses had collapsed or been torn down to become weed-filled lots that looked like broken, missing teeth in a row of red brick. None of the battered homes on Jorge Garcia's block was worth more than a $15,000 used Chevy.

Barbara walked past the corner drug dealers and knocked on the door of the two-story redbrick row house with splotches of peeling cream paint. Jorge was still locked up, but his mom, Dolores Jimenez, was home. Dolores was suspicious of Barbara, almost hostile, but she was also curious about what Barbara had to say.

Family portraits in wood frames hung from the living room wall. A cross with Jesus on the crucifix was on the dining room wall, near a glass-top table with four chairs. Dolores's collection of black leather horses was inside an old wood cabinet. A playpen for her grandkids sat on the smudged linoleum floor. Two candles burned in clear glass. Her son Ricky's dusty basketball, baseball, and football trophies were scattered around.

Dolores's skin was sallow, and she moved slowly, as if her body hurt. That's because it did. Dolores suffered from high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, a severe anxiety disorder, insomnia, and a ripped bowel duct. “They tried to take my gallstones out, but they messed up and now I have a stent in my stomach.” She lifted her black T-shirt to show Barbara a dark, foot-long scar under her belly.

Dolores packed about 225 pounds on her four-foot-eleven frame. Her long black hair cascaded down to her waist, but most days she tied it back tightly in a ponytail, accentuating her full lips and large brown eyes that looked tired of the struggle. She wore no makeup, never did,
except for a hint of black eyeliner every once in a while. Her nails were acrylic, perfectly rounded and finished in a natural shine, no color. She chose sweats in the winter, shorts in the summer, T-shirts always.

Dolores looked nothing like the other drug dealers that Barbara and I had met. When Barbara arrived, Dolores had just been released from prison on her own drug case. Eight years earlier, Jeff had busted her with Benny's help. Dolores was Benny's childhood friend, then a chunky, good-hearted, scruffy girl who went to church. Only a year apart in age, they rode the same school bus, and their moms were close friends. Later, she would become one of his drug suppliers.

Dolores didn't consider herself a drug dealer. In her mind, she was a thirty-six-year-old grandmom who dealt $20 bags of cocaine from her deep-pocketed black apron to make ends meet.

At the time of her arrest, she lived in a neighborhood on the cusp, just fifteen blocks from the Badlands. Her seven-room home was subsidized by the Philadelphia Housing Authority, and she got a welfare check. So did her twenty-year-old daughter Sofia, her firstborn. Problem was, Dolores told Barbara, there were so many children to feed and clothe. Dolores had four children. Sofia had her first baby at fourteen, followed by three more, all about a year apart.

Dolores had watched the mom across the street in disgust; the woman often left her seven kids alone with no heat so she could go “party.”

“If you don't feed those kids, they'll take them away,” Dolores warned her. Sure enough, she lost her children.

That would never happen to me, Dolores told herself. “I take care of my kids.”

Dolores raked in about $1,000 or so a week, wads of twenties that gave her a taste of middle-class life. She bought a
minivan. She had the house painted and fixed up because PHA seldom made repairs.

“I bought the kids designer clothes,” she told Barbara with a proud smile. “Polo, Nautica, Nikes, Air Jordans.”

At first Dolores was nervous about selling drugs. But then she shrugged; what the hell. It was easy, really. Her customers called her cell phone, said they'd stop by. She greeted them at the front door in her apron, the same one she wore to cook beans and rice or pan-fried chicken for her kids. She wiped her hands on the black cotton, then gave them ziplock bags of coke and folded their twenties into her apron pockets. Some buyers made small talk, but they never stayed long.

Business was brisk. Paydays were golden, like happy hour at five on a Friday. All kinds came—blacks, Puerto Ricans, whites from the Pennsylvania or New Jersey suburbs. In a snap, she switched from Spanish to English in dope speak. “No offense,” she told Barbara, “but even Italians came,” as if somehow they were considered the drug world's elite.

She had been selling cocaine about a year when Benny knocked on her door in 2001, while Jeff watched. It was Benny's first job as an informant.

Dolores wasn't suspicious, since she'd sold to Benny before. She pulled a $20 bag of cocaine from one pocket of her apron and put the cash in another. “It was like she had a little cash register,” Benny said.

Benny felt a tinge of guilt, but nothing more. “Jeff was telling me, ‘You're doing the right thing. You're cleaning up your hood.' I told Jeff I felt bad, but he said, ‘They're sellin' in front of their kids. They're going to end up just like them.'”

Dolores didn't see it that way. “Yeah. We got in the game,” Dolores told Barbara unapologetically. “You get in the game to survive. And that comes with it, getting booked.”

She figured she wouldn't sell forever, just a year or so more to stay afloat.

Dolores's brother, Manuel, who lived with her, also helped with the drug business. Until Jeff busted them, neither had a criminal record. Dolores's biggest crime had been a parking ticket.

Manuel had worked for more than twenty years at Today's Man, where he was a supervisor of the shipping and receiving department, making sure slacks, jackets, and button-down shirts landed in the right place.

At home, Manuel's closet was a shipping and receiving center—for cocaine. Everything they needed, including a metal sifter, digital scale, cutting agent, staples, and bags, was stored in a black leather bag.

It was four days before Christmas 2001, around 6:30 at night, when Jeff and his squad knocked on Dolores's front door. She cracked the door open and saw men she immediately figured were cops behind the iron-gated, locked storm door. She slammed the front door shut, scurried upstairs and flushed packets of cocaine down the toilet. In seconds, cops pried the steel apart with a crowbar and burst in.

Dolores's three-year-old grandson started to scream, terrified by a cop wearing a thin, silky black ski mask over his face. All anyone could see were his eyes. Some undercover narcotics cops who made buys wore masks during raids to conceal their identity, but Dolores's grandson thought a monster was coming after him.

Dolores said she'd never forget the way Jeff looked at her, like she was scum, or worse, a murderer. “It's like his shit don't stink, like he's better than everyone,” she said. “It was like I was a nobody.”

In Dolores's living room, cops found 119 packets of cocaine at the base of a baby stroller. They were tucked inside
a Christmas cookie tin with a picture of Santa Claus on the cover. There was more upstairs. All in all, cops found $10,000 worth of coke in Dolores's house.

Prosecutors called her house a drug “operation.” To them, it was people like Dolores who sank neighborhoods, smothered them like kudzu, that noxious coiling weed that quickly spreads over trees and shrubs until they die.

Dolores and her brother were sentenced to three to six years in prison. Guilt ate at her. Not for selling drugs, but because she couldn't be with her kids. “They was all lost souls,” she said. Her worst fear was realized; her three youngest were alone. Jorge was sixteen, Ricky, fourteen, and Elena, eleven. Dolores asked her mom to take care of them, but she doubted that would work. Her kids drifted. Jorge, the one she'd nicknamed Macho as a baby, got locked up for violating probation on a gun case. Jorge's urine came back dirty because he was getting high on weed. The system couldn't save kids like Jorge. When he was released, there was no one, and that, in part, sealed his fate.

Jorge roamed the Badlands, the place Dolores knew was trouble for her kids. But there was little other choice. After the raid, Dolores and the kids were evicted from the Philadelphia Housing Authority house. Ricky, ever resourceful, even at thirteen, made a few calls to find a place for which the landlord didn't require references or job history. He found a three-bedroom house in the Badlands. The rent was $500 a month.

Dolores was still behind bars when Jeff locked up Jorge. It was 2005, and Jeff was no longer a stickler for rules. Jeff was sure he'd find heroin in Jorge's house. He just needed to get in there, and Benny knew exactly where to score dope. Benny purchased heroin from a drug house not far from Jorge's place, and Jeff used that heroin as the basis for a search
warrant.