Busted

  DEDICATIONS

  For my boys, Brody and Sawyer, who give me immeasurable joy. I love you.

  In memory of my father, Stan Ruderman, my spiritual guide. Thank you for always cheering me on and for inspiring me to dream—and dream big. In memory of my nephew, Jake, a little firecracker who died too young.

  —WENDY RUDERMAN

  For my children, Josh and Anna, who make everything in life better and brighter. I’ll never love anyone more.

  In memory of my mom, Etta Laker, who gave me strength and love. She taught me to never give up—and to take time to dance in the kitchen.

  —BARBARA LAKER

  CONTENTS

  Dedications

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Photographic Inserts

  About the Authors

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  VENTURA “BENNY” MARTINEZ HADN’T SLEPT IN DAYS. THIS FRIGID DECEMBER NIGHT, LIKE SO MANY OTHERS, HE SAT AWAKE, STIFF-BACKED AND TENSE IN A living room chair. His pudgy, sweaty fingers gripped the handle of a .44 Ruger equipped with an infrared laser to illuminate whoever would be coming for him.

  His wife, Sonia, and their two small children slept on a mattress in the dining room behind him. There, they would be insulated from any bullets that tore through the walls.

  Benny locked his eyes on the front door of his two-story brick Philadelphia row house and waited. Maybe tonight he’d get whacked. Maybe tomorrow. He didn’t know when. He just knew it would happen.

  Even on those rare nights when he could briefly doze off, slumped in a chair, his chin hitting his chest, he’d bolt upright in a cold sweat. He had a recurring nightmare in which Jeff Cujdik, the cop he had worked for as a drug informant, blasted his face off with a shotgun.

  Benny inched toward the living room windows. He split the plastic window blinds with his fingers and checked the front porch, then slowly moved his eyes up and down the block—over and over. A streetlight cast a dull, shadowy glow. No one was there. At least Benny couldn’t spot anyone.

  Benny stood stock-still.

  “Babe, babe, what are you doing?” Sonia asked.

  “Shhh,” Benny whispered.

  In the darkness, Benny listened to the sounds of the street: a far-off police siren, a dog’s growl, a hip-hop pulse blaring from a car stereo, the buzz-saw whine of the El.

  “I can’t take this no more,” Sonia said. “We’ve gotta leave up out of Philly.”

  “Nah. It will be okay,” Benny told her. But Sonia knew Benny didn’t believe his own words.

  For three years, Benny had been happy and safe in this tan row house sandwiched into a narrow block of Pacific Street. It was a neighborhood where Latinos, blacks, and whites judged one another only by who went to work and who was on welfare.

  Now he feared a silent sniper, maybe crouched behind a parked car or hidden in the shadow of a neighbor’s porch.

  Benny never thought it would come to this. Just a few months earlier, he’d considered Jeff a blood brother. Benny’s kids called him Uncle Jeff.

  They were an unlikely pair. Jeff, tall, muscular, and confident, with chiseled movie-star good looks, came from a family of cops; Benny, short, plump, and street-smart, was an ex–drug dealer. Yet they developed a bond, bitching about their wives, gushing over their kids. And they both got an adrenaline rush from danger.

  Jeff was a narcotics cop who relied on Benny to bust drug dealers. Time and time again, Benny ticked off names for Jeff. He told Jeff what they sold, where they lived, and the places they stashed the drugs. Then Benny made drug buys, so Jeff could get a search warrant to raid the dealers’ homes and make arrests. Benny was rewarded for each buy he made, and Jeff’s arrest numbers skyrocketed. They stroked each other’s egos. They rose together, mismatched allies, and both became stars of the game.

  Benny was practically a lifer in the world of Philadelphia police informants. The tenure of the typical informant was short. Most ran out of people to roll on, and after they made lots of drug buys, dealers could figure out who had dimed them out. But Benny was the king. He had worked for Jeff for seven years. He was smooth and convincing, the perfect con man. Dealers believed Benny was part of their world because he had been for so long. That is, until something went terribly wrong.

  Now Benny was convinced that Jeff wanted him dead. And maybe worse, so did Philly’s drug dealers, who’d figured out Benny was a snitch. He had a target on his back. Too many people knew where to find him and how to gun him down.

  Benny knew he couldn’t live like this anymore.

  He came up with a plan. Tomorrow was the day.

  2

  IT WAS A COLD BUT SUNNY DAY IN EARLY DECEMBER 2008, AND MY WEEKDAY MORNING BEGAN IN A GROUNDHOG DAY KIND OF WAY. AFTER I SLIPPED into jeans, sweater, and sneakers for my job as a reporter at the Philadelphia Daily News, I served the kids Eggo waffles, submerged in a lake of gooey syrup, on the black leather couch. I turned on the TV. They always complained when I turned on Sesame Street or Clifford the Big Red Dog, so I put on Sponge-Bob, or some other age-inappropriate cartoon, and went to fetch the newspaper.

  We subscribed to both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News, even though I could get them for free at work. As fewer and fewer people bought newspapers—let alone had them delivered—I felt it was my duty to support the dinosaur of an industry that was mine. It was sad to me that ours was the only house on the block to get a daily newspaper. Seven days a week, a woman drove up in a maroon minivan, rolled down the driver’s-side window, and hurled the plastic-wrapped newspaper sleeve onto our front lawn, a grassy postage stamp dotted with weeds and bald patches. She barely slowed before banging a K-turn in the neighbor’s driveway.

  At 8:00 a.m., my husband, Karl, was still asleep. I had met Karl in a tae kwon do class back in the early 1990s. He was a second-degree black belt and taught classes three nights a week. I spent the entire class watching his firm butt as he demonstrated down block, center punch. I could see his navy-blue Fruit of the Loom briefs through his white uniform. He was lanky yet muscular, with a big, beaky nose, a sexy cleft chin, and doelike brown eyes that were so warm and gentle they caught me by surprise, and still do.

  Most of the friction in our marriage centered on sleep—and who got more of it. At times, I resented that Karl could sleep in, but I told myself that he, as the stay-at-home parent, needed his sleep to handle Brody, five, and Sawyer, three. The boys had a way of pulling your nerves taut and snapping them over their little knees like kindling.

  “Mom, I’m sticky. I need a wipe,” Brody called from the couch.

  “Okay.” I kept reading the newspaper, over coffee, at the dining room table.

  “Mommmm! I need a wipe!”

  “Okay! Jesus! I’m coming!”

  In my decade-long career as a reporter, I’d written stories that helped send a corrupt New Jer
sey state senator to jail, shamed a governor into firing a rotten state police superintendent, and prompted lawmakers to hold hearings on racial profiling by police, nearly jettisoning the career of an ambitious and powerful state attorney general. I’d earned my share of scalps. At work, I wasn’t afraid to take on the law. At home, I was totally unable to lay down the law.

  I had never put my kids in time-out. Not once. Not when Sawyer punched me in the back and barked, “Get me something to drink, little woman,” or when he cleaned the television screen with a wet wipe and one of his many concoctions—a mixture of pancake syrup and body lotion.

  I breast-fed Brody until he was two and a half. He’d walk up to me and say, “I want boob,” and I’d lift my shirt and bring his curly blond head toward me. I couldn’t say no. Ever.

  If the kids wanted Popsicles for breakfast, fine. Though every so often, I got tough: “No Popsicle until you finish that whole bowl of Apple Jacks.” Then I’d add, “I mean it.”

  If they wanted dinner in the bathtub, I spoon-fed them spaghetti while they played with a fleet of blue and yellow plastic boats. Chunks of tomato and strands of pasta drifted to the bottom of the sudsy water and left an oily slick on the white porcelain.

  I allowed them to watch so much TV that they went around the house singing jingles to commercials for Nationwide insurance and electric wheelchairs for the elderly—“I want to go, Go, GO in my Hoveround.”

  When Brody woke up in the middle of the night and stumbled into our bedroom on his stick-figure legs, I held up the covers and nestled him close, even though I knew he kept Karl awake. Brody flopped around all night, kicking and jabbing Karl with his little toenails, until Karl fled to Brody’s bed or squeezed into bed with Sawyer and his menagerie of stuffed animals. Karl was a nighttime nomad, condemned to wander the Land of Bad Parenting.

  Karl liked to say that I was a great mom and a terrible parent. Part of it was guilt. A workaholic, I was never home during the week. The other part was fear. The responsibility of being a parent intimidated me. So I handed over the job to Karl. He stayed home with the kids while I went off to work and sank my teeth into the hide of some crooked or incompetent city official. This way, if the kids refused to eat veggies, if they were disrespectful to other adults, if they didn’t do their homework, if they became social outcasts and landed in therapy, I could blame Karl.

  Karl was good at the job, too. He had the mommy thing down. He was loving and stern all at once. Of course, I didn’t help much. When Karl went out grocery shopping or to the store, chaos and mischief ruled. I became the third kid. On summer nights, I allowed Brody and Sawyer to catch fireflies in Tupperware containers and let them free in the house. We turned off the lights and watched them flit around the ceiling, giggling. Sawyer sometimes dumped entire bottles of bubble bath into the tub. He then jumped out of the water and did body slides across the hardwood floors in our living room. I quickly cleaned up the snail-trail of suds with a towel before Karl came home. Karl was annoyingly compulsive about water on the hardwood. In the mornings before work, I let them play with mounds of moldable Moon Sand at the dining room table or allow them to decorate the chairs with Lightning McQueen stickers. Or they turned our kitchen into a bowling alley, flinging ripe peaches into V-shaped lines of Dixie cups. The game left splats of sticky peach juice all over the tile floor. Then I scooted out the door, leaving Karl to mop up the mess and deal with two kids, hopped up on sugar, smacking each other with pillows and wrestling naked.

  It took me less than ten minutes to get from my New Jersey house to the foot of the Ben Franklin Bridge. From there, it was a straight shot down the Vine Street Expressway, through Chinatown, to Broad Street, the city’s north-south artery. Broad Street cut through Philadelphia, spilling down and around City Hall like an asphalt stream.

  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 Philadelphia 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 be
ing 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.