Busted (2 page)

The
Daily News
was a white multitiered building that resembled a giant wedding cake topped with a clock tower and brass dome. We had shared 400 North Broad with the
Phila
delphia Inquirer
, or
Inky
, since 1957, when
Inky
owner Walter Annenberg purchased the scrappy but near-bankrupt tabloid, but locals still referred to the eighteen-floor landmark as the Inquirer Building. The
Daily News
was the
Inquirer
's brassy little sister with flaming red hair and an attitude. The edifice stood alone on Broad Street, cut off from the city's other skyscrapers by the expressway. Inga Saffron, the
Inquirer
's acclaimed architecture critic, liked to say that the building's location was symbolic of an independent press, an unbiased government watchdog, “the noble, lone seeker of truth.”

Around midafternoon, Benny walked through the front doors. He stood in the front lobby and reached into his jacket pocket to pull out a crumpled piece of paper with my name scrawled on it.

“I'm here to speak to Wendy Rudumam,” Benny said, butchering my last name. The security guard nodded and dialed my extension.

That morning, Benny had put his plan to get help and protection in motion. He had gone to the Police Advisory Commission, a watchdog over the 6,600-member city police force. Benny talked to Wellington Stubbs, whose job was to investigate citizen complaints against police officers. The commission was supposed to be independent from the police department and the mayor's office, but it relied on city funding. It was so understaffed and underfunded that Wellington and a handful of other investigators struggled to keep up with complaints. The commission lacked the clout and resources to do much about rogue officers. Police corruption in Philly was like a recurring cancer that reared its ugly head every ten years or so, and the commission could do little to stop or expose it. This frustrated Wellington. So he fed me story tips.

Wellington called to let me know that he was sending
Benny over. Although Wellington didn't feel like he could immediately help Benny, he felt urgency. Benny didn't come across like your run-of-the-mill disgruntled criminal who wanted to seek revenge on a cop and sue the city for money. In words and actions, Benny sounded and looked desperate. Wellington didn't give me any details about Benny's story. He just figured maybe I could help him and told me so—a decision that would later cost him his job.

I headed to the lobby. Odds were, this would be a waste of time. Most stories about police corruption or brutality were garbage. They often came from lowlifes who wanted either to have their criminal records wiped clean or a payout from city coffers. Or from people who had no proof, nothing to back up their story. But some stories were the real deal. I prided myself on knowing the difference. The fact that Benny came to me through Wellington would give his tale extra weight.

Benny and I greeted each other warily. We shook hands. His palm felt moist and meaty. Benny had the baleful look of a tired basset hound, a round face atop a short, plump body. His brown eyes sat afloat in bloodshot pools of white. He wore dark blue Dickies work pants and a puffy charcoal-gray jacket, embroidered with
BENNY
and
GEGNAS CHRYSLER JEEP
, the auto dealership where he cleaned and buffed cars.

I led him up the lobby's worn marble steps near the elevators. The lobby was a tomb of marble and gold-painted molding. The light fixture was a giant globe with blue oceans and white continents encircled by a brass Saturn-like ring. The
Inquirer
used to cover the world, but the paper had called home its reporters and shuttered its last foreign bureau, an outpost in Jerusalem, in 2006. The
Daily News
had never covered the world. It covered Philly. Period.

The ornate lobby was the magisterial curtain that hid the building's grimy—and desolate—innards. Brian Tierney, the
new CEO and head of an investors group that purchased the
Inky
and
Daily News
in June 2006, now hoped to sell the building. The investors needed the cash. Layoffs and financial cutbacks had left the place half empty. The printing presses had been moved to a plant in the suburbs more than a decade ago. The building was so empty that randy staffers roamed its vacant floors looking for rooms where they could have sex.

I'd come to the
Daily News
about two years ago as an
Inquirer
refugee. After four years as an
Inquirer
reporter, I jumped ship and landed on the
Daily News
dinghy to avoid being laid off. At the time, I was one of some seventy
Inquirer
newsroom staffers on the chopping block. For the
Daily News
, this was an era of buttercream-frosted sheet cakes served at newsroom good-byes. So many staffers had taken buyouts that the
Daily News
was exempt from this round of cuts.

I led Benny through the lobby, then he followed me down a flight of steps that led to the
Daily News
. I heard the clack of Benny's industrial work boots on the tile floor, where a black, gooey gunk made its home in the crevices. The ceiling was all exposed water pipes and wires. A neon 1950s-style sign mounted outside the newsroom read “Philadelphia
Daily News
. The People Paper.” I pushed opened the beige door to reveal a football field of empty desks separated by chest-high gray partitions. Fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling like suspended tanning beds. A stout metal filing cabinet doubled as a table, with a fax machine on each end. We walked past stacks of yellowed newspapers, dusty dictionaries, a broken typewriter, and an ancient unplugged TV set.

We sat down in the “penalty box,” the reporters' nickname for the small meeting area enclosed by low glass walls, slightly bigger than the time-out box for hockey players.

“Do you want coffee? Or water?” I asked.

I hoped he'd say no. I wasn't sure we had cups, let alone fresh coffee.

“Nah. I'm OK.”

Benny sat across from me, his hands folded on the table. He licked his lips, ran his tongue over a chipped top tooth, and began talking, his words a whispered cascade. I leaned in. I opened my reporter's notepad and started to scribble: “Ventura Martinez Perez. Confidential Informant. Jeffrey Cujdik, cop, Narcotics Field Unit.”

Over the next forty-five minutes, Benny laid out a Shakespearean tale of trust, betrayal, and revenge. I felt stressed and overwhelmed, not certain how to proceed, but my gut told me there was something to his story.

“Benny, can you excuse me for a minute? I'll be right back.”

Barbara Laker was at her desk. Of all the reporters in the room, she was the one I admired most. Like me, she lived the job. She'd been a reporter since 1979 and worked at the
Daily News
for more than sixteen years. When I came to the
Daily News
, she was my editor. At the time, her kids were away in college, she was mourning the dissolution of a twenty-five-year marriage, and she thought the editing gig might fill a void. Instead, it gave her migraines. During her three-year editing stint, she nurtured cub reporters so much that they pegged her “Mama Laker.” She was known for baking gooey chocolate brownies for staff parties and mentoring rookies, helping them craft their stories.

Barbara walked them through how to master street reporting, sometimes even writing out questions for them. She knew she did too much hand-holding, but she wanted the best story possible and enjoyed seeing inexperienced report
ers learn and get better. But as time went on, she grew frustrated with reporters who returned to the office with little in their notebooks. She couldn't understand how some reporters were satisfied with canned interviews that everyone else had. How could you be a reporter without any fire in your belly? Barbara wondered. She had to resist the urge to push them out of the way and just do the job herself.

Barbara was a sweetheart who, unlike me, never dropped the f-bomb or got crass about her sex life. Barbara was like no boss I'd had at the
Inquirer
.
Inquirer
editors came across as Ivy League intellectuals—cynical, self-important, stiff. The men resembled aging college professors, with disheveled, thinning hair, khaki pants, striped ties, and light blue or white dress shirts, usually with the sleeves rolled up. The women looked more like aging Flower Power hippies, with long flowing skirts, Birkenstock sandals, no makeup, and flat, graying hair that hadn't seen a box of Clairol in years. So when I first laid eyes on Barbara, I thought, Who is this bimbo?

Barbara was oblivious to her ability to make men's heads turn, even at our workplace cafeteria, where a horny
Inquirer
reporter once had the chutzpah to ask me if her boobs were real. At fifty, she was an avid runner, trim and shapely, with three marathons under her belt.

Barbara had long, wavy highlighted blond hair and a tangerine slice of a nose. Her big green eyes, flecked with caramel, reminded me of top-of-the-line granite kitchen counters. She rimmed them with dark olive eyeliner and a hint of grayish blue eye shadow. With her coral lip gloss, silver hoop earrings, snug skirts, and candy-colored blouses, Barbara came off all bubble-gum—wifty and gee-whiz. But that was just her facade. She was a master at getting people to talk,
using her charm, smarts, and girlish warmth to get into houses and get the story. She truly got people. She knew just what to say to convince anyone from criminal to victim that she was friend, not foe, and that they could let their guard down, she could be trusted. When she stood to leave with her full notebook, they would invariably say, “I can't believe I told you all this! I haven't told anyone.”

Obsessive reporters often describe themselves with one phrase: “Journalism is in my blood.” And Barbara and I had the same blood.

I grew up in a family of newspaper readers. A newspaper landed on my front porch every morning. Each week, a delivery boy showed up at my door for his $3.50. At night, I'd walk by my parents' bedroom and see them lying beside one another, each of their faces obscured by newsprint stretched between their hands. My parents loved newspapers. When I got busted in college for underage drinking and my arrest got written up in the local paper, my parents cut out the article and saved it in a scrapbook. They were thrilled to see my name in the paper, even for something criminal.

My dad, who grew up in Brooklyn and was short and balding, spent his entire career as an accountant for a car dealership. He dreamed of bigger things for himself and for me, my sister, and my brother. He took us as kids to Broadway shows, read us poems by A. E. Housman and Edwin Arlington Robinson, and recited—from memory—Ernest Thayer's “Casey at the Bat” from the top of the three steps leading from our kitchen to the living room. He took us to great restaurants every Friday night. “Eat slow. Eat slow,” he'd tell us, wanting us to savor the meal. He planned family vacations to historic landmarks, like Colonial Williamsburg, where we complained of boredom while watching actors in eighteenth-century costume churn butter in the scorching August
heat.

My dad, who died of cancer when I was twenty-eight, thought I was a superstar. He believed I could do anything and do it better than anyone else. When I graduated from Columbia University with a master's in journalism, he wanted to know why some other student—and not me—got an award at graduation: Didn't the professors recognize how great I was? A lot of my ambition as a reporter was tied to my need to live up to my father's galactic expectations.

Barbara came of age in journalism's heyday. With a gaggle of other teenage know-it-all Baby Boomer idealists, she decided she wanted to be a reporter in the 1970s when Watergate broke. She was fascinated by
Washington Post
reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and how they, with the help of a then-mysterious source known only as Deep Throat, uncovered the most notorious political scandal in American history.

She wanted to know step by step how Woodward and Bernstein had unearthed a trove of secrets, including sabotage, spying, and bribery, that in the end would topple a president. She still remembered huddling around the boxy black-and-white TV with her family to hear Richard Nixon resign in August 1974.

That year, applications to journalism schools reached an all-time high. Barbara's was among them. Since then, two of the five newspapers that Barbara worked for—the
Clearwater Sun
and the
Dallas Times-Herald
—have died. A third, the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, is now online only.

The afternoon when I first met Benny, I hoped that Barbara wanted in on his story. Truth be told, I was tired of being alone in the trenches battling police misdeeds. I'd already gained a reputation as the go-to reporter for people who had run-ins with cops. I'd written stories about a cop caught with
a racist sticker in his locker, a cop who unleashed a testosterone-fueled beating on a group of women at a baby shower, and a swarm of cops who stomped on and kicked the heads of three shooting suspects while a TV news helicopter filmed overhead. I was sick of being called a “cop hater” and a “bitch” by anonymous callers. I needed reinforcements, someone to help steel up my backbone, an ally in the fight.

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.