DAVIS:
Congratulations on your Pulitzer Prize and the book. I thought the book was
interesting; especially that it was about Philly, where I grew up and where I
live today. Why did you write the book?
RUDERMAN:
When we first won the Pulitzer Prize, Hollywood types started looking into the
series that won and we started getting phone calls from people who wanted the
story for nothing. We really wanted to have some ownership of the story. If
anything was going to be expanded upon the series we wanted to be the ones with
literary control of it and to make it our own. We don’t know anything about
Hollywood, but it seemed like all these people came out of the woodwork. No,
this is our story to tell.
DAVIS:
I’ve interviewed Joseph Wambaugh a couple of times. He’s a great writer who
served as an LAPD detective sergeant before he became a best-selling novelist. I
recall he said something like he spent 14 years dealing with crooks, criminals
and lowlifes, but they were nothing compared to the Hollywood people he later
met.
I
should go on record as being pro-cop, although I certainly don’t support crooked
cops. I grew up in South Philly, the hub of organized
crime and gambling in the Philadelphia area, and I’ve covered the police for a
good number of years. I’ve also interviewed Robert Leuci, of Prince of the City fame, and Frank
Serpico. It seems to me that crooked cops are in the minority - a few rotten apples. So why
did you believe Benny Martinez’s story?
LAKER:
One reason was Jeff Cujdik was renting a home to Benny and we had documentation
on that and that was against police protocol. I was able to go to Landlord
Tenant Court and see Benny and Jeff interact. Benny was almost comically saying,
“Look, I’ve been your informant for years and we took down all these drug
dealers. Why are you doing this to me, man?” Jeff told me he was there as a
landlord and not as Jeff the cop. So that was one reason.
RUDERMAN:
I don’t think we could have or would have written the first story had we not had
Landlord Tenant Court paperwork and had we not been at the proceeding.
LAKER:
One other reason was Benny gave us examples of homes that Jeff said he bought
drugs from when he said he hadn’t. That it was a lie, a fabricated search
warrant. So he could pinpoint certain houses or certain jobs that were based on
lies. So what Wendy and I went to those homes and talked to the drug dealers or
the drug dealers’ relatives and we believe they were honest with us. They
admitted they were heroin or cocaine dealers, but they didn’t sell that
particular brand of heroin. They sold the heroin with the skull face, not the
smiley face, or as it was called, “Homicide,” not whatever the other name was.
So we did try to check out everything that Benny said in addition to the whole
documentation from Landlord Tenant Court. Jeff was indeed renting a home to
Benny. Benny worked for Jeff for seven years. That’s almost unheard of, because
informants get found out pretty quick and they run out of people to set up.
There wasn’t really a way for Benny to continue doing what he was doing unless
they were sort of fudging it, because seven years was a record and just not very
believable that you could work as an informant for seven years and have no one
in the neighborhood figure it out.
RUDERMAN:
But honestly, I consider myself to be pro-cop. My neighborhood is all police
officers. I love living next to police officers, and I don’t think myself or
Barbara are anti-cop at all.
DAVIS:
Renting the house to an informant is not a crime.
RUDERMAN:
It is certainly against police department protocol.
DAVIS:
I know of cops who have close relationships with their informants, sometimes too
close, and there are a lot of infractions. Robert Leuci admitted that he gave
his informants drugs.
LAKER:
We believe that Jeff was renting the house to Benny to help him.
DAVIS:
How would you describe Benny Martinez? He seems to me to be a weasely Henry Hill
type.
RUDERMAN:
I’d describe him the same way. I think he is an opportunist, kind of a parasite,
a drug addict. I don’t think he is portrayed in the book as anything but a
shyster.
LAKER:
I think that he has the personality of an addict. He is an addict. One of the
reasons he worked for Jeff for so long and was so very upset when Jeff wanted to
boot him out of the house was because he knew that working with Jeff was his
ticket to getting more drugs. People are complicated. They are gray. They are
not all good, they are not all bad. It took us a while to see all the different
layers to Benny. He is a manipulator, like a lot of addicts are. He could
manipulate his family, he could manipulate Jeff and some would say he could
manipulate us. But I think that in the book we describe part of his motivation
as he was a drug addict who didn’t that supply cut off.
RUDERMAN:
And he was perhaps angry at Jeff for that reason and not about getting kicked
out of the house and having nowhere to go, but mostly about his drug supply
being cut off. That was coming to an end.
DAVIS:
How were you both assigned to investigate the allegations of police abuse by the
Philadelphia Daily News? And in this
age of shrinking resources, how much freedom and support did your receive from
your editors and publisher?
LAKER:
We were given a lot of freedom at the newspaper, partly because there are so few
people here. There are some people who do two or three daily stories and there
are other people like Wendy and myself who are given more freedom to do the kind
of stories we want to do. The investigative stories we do are not assigned. They
are things we decide to chase or a tip one of us gets, or from doing another
story we think well maybe this is something we should look into. They are not
assigned; they are something that we decide are worth looking into. We have a
lot of support from our editor, Gar Joseph, and the top editor, Michael Days, to
do that. We’re lucky.
RUDERMAN:
If we didn’t get a call from this attorney making the allegations about the mom
and pop stores, the bodegas, it would have not gone any further because there
would have been nothing to further look into.
DAVIS:
It would have been only a single story rather than a series,
right?
RUDERMAN:
Yes. We had no agenda. It unfolded in to what we call in the business a “rolling
investigation,” where you think you’re done and something else comes up, and
then you think you’re done and something else comes up.
DAVIS:
I interviewed crime novelist Michael Connelly, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, and he wrote
a novel that noted that with the Internet often breaking the news overnight, a daily newspaper
simply becomes The Daily Afterthought.
I thought that was kind of clever. But the one thing newspapers can do, and
do very well, is investigating reporting. The newspapers have the talent,
reporters like yourselves, and the resources to do long, important,
investigative series.
RUDERMAN:
Definitely, you’re correct. It is so hard to write breaking news and then you
realize the next day that by the time the newspaper gets delivered everybody has
already heard about it. The trick for us to do is to try to find something fresh
and new that nobody else has. That’s what readers should come to expect from
papers, I think.
DAVIS:
You sought out these bodega owners, rather than the owners coming forward to
you, am I right?
LAKER:
Yes, they didn’t complain to anyone after it happened, because they come from
countries where the police sometimes do this. They thought that this was the
price of doing business in the City of Philadelphia. When we first got word from
one attorney who represented one merchant who said this had happened, we thought
from going through all the other search warrants for prior stories that we
remembered that this particular squad had raided an inordinate number of stores
and bodegas across the city. Where other narcotics squads had only done one a
year or maybe zero a year, this squad had done 30 or 40 in a six month
period.
DAVIS:
Raiding stores for drug paraphernalia seems like a waste of
manpower.
RUDERMAN:
These are elite squads, they are higher than strike force squads, and they are
supposed to go after the big-time dealers on the street. They don’t do the
street-level sales like the strike force, so it was kind of puzzling. Why were
they zeroing on these misdemeanors cases? And Internal Affairs knew that Tolstoy
was a problem. They investigated him themselves previously for the very same
thing. I think that investigative reporters, obviously, have a lower bar when it
comes to evidence than law enforcement. But certainly there was enough evidence
to write the story and in fact Internal Affairs became re-interested in the
cases after we started writing about it. They wanted to take a second look. But
they knew they had a problem with him, because if you get three similar
complaints a red flag goes up.
DAVIS:
How do you respond to the FBI and the Philadelphia Police Department’s complaint
that your newspaper series hurt rather than aided the investigation of these
police officers?
LAKER:
The FBI task force was set up right after our initial stories, so Wendy and I
uncovered the bodegas and the women. They didn’t know about it. I don’t know if
our work hampered their investigations, and when it got to the women, we had a
source in Internal Affairs who helped us because they couldn’t find one of the
women and they wanted our help because they thought we would have a better
chance of finding her and convincing her to talk to Internal Affairs.
DAVIS:
But in your book you write that an FBI agent told you their investigation was
down the toilet because of you guys.
LAKER:
Yes, an FBI agent did say that because they were hoping to “wire-up” a police
officer to get the evidence they needed. But frankly, we broke the story; it
wasn’t the other way around. It was not the Five Squad case, where they were
already investigating and then reporters came along and reported on their
investigation. We wrote the initial story and they announced the task force.
After you announce a task force and have a press conference, how the hell do you
think you’re going to wire someone up? They said we ruined your opportunity to
wire someone up by doing what we do. We’re newspaper reporters; we don’t have
the same goal. I respect Commissioner Ramsey and what he told us was, “Look, I
may want you to hold off on a story, but basically you’ve got have your job to
do and I’ve got my job to do.” He respects that and I respect him for saying it
that way.
DAVIS:
What would you say were the positive and the negative outcomes from your
newspaper series?
LAKER:
I’d say that one of the positives was it exposed something that was going on in
the city that should be stopped, like that narcotics squad shouldn’t be raiding
the bodegas and a police officer shouldn’t be able to sexually assault women
during raids and get away with it.
DAVIS:
And be better supervised, I would think.
LAKER:
We had a story about the supervisors and their role in it. If there is a
negative, I would say that there is a huge divide in this city between some
people in bad neighborhoods and the police and there is a distrust there, and so
maybe because we did expose some wrongdoing and corruption within the police
department, in some case it may have given fodder for people in the community to
say, “See, all cops are bad.” That’s not what we’re saying at all, but I think
there could be a danger in people jumping to that
conclusion.
DAVIS:
It has been nearly five years since your series. Why do you think the FBI has
not charged or cleared the officers?
RUDERMAN: We heard through the grapevine and from people who are on the inside that with
the bodega owners the problem was they didn’t keep very good financial records.
There was this old Korean woman who didn’t go to a bank and stuffed her money
under the bed.
They
didn’t have great receipts or record-keeping, so that was problematic. Also,
none of the cops were rolling on one another and saying who took what.
DAVIS:
And I don’t think Benny Martinez would make a good witness at a
trial.
RUDERMAN:
Benny would make a terrible witness, we knew that. Benny was a problem when it
came to the part about the search warrant. But with the shop owners the FBI
thought they needed something higher to bring the case. They needed more than
just 22 people saying the exact same thing. And the fact of the matter was these
shop owners were selling these baggies and it is illegal if you know or should
have known they were being used for drugs. As for Tolstoy, Seth Williams, the
Philadelphia District Attorney, is responsible for bringing charges against
Tolstoy, because it is not a federal crime. But he is not doing anything for
whatever are his reasons.
DAVIS:
I’m kind of surprised that the politicians who represent the alleged victims
have not stepped in and placed pressure on the prosecutors and the FBI. Have you
talked to any of them?
RUDERMAN:
I think the problem is that these victims are very much not within the power
structure. They are off the grid and they don’t have clout and they don’t really
have somebody who would make a big uproar over it. The people we reported on are
much disenfranchised to begin with.
DAVIS:
Are they illegal aliens?
LAKER:
No, they are all legal in the United States, every single store owner we talked
to. They also had no criminal records. The three women and every single store
owner we used in the series had no criminal record, whatsoever.
DAVIS:
The narcotics officer you call “Ray” in the book is sort of your “Deep Throat.”
Can you tell us about him without exposing his identity?
RUDERMAN:
I can tell you that I met Ray years earlier covering a court case and I gave him
my card. We kind of kept in touch, mostly about positive stories about big drug
busts that narcotics officers were doing across the city. That was how our
relationship began. He felt that public affairs could do a better job at
promoting the good work the narcotics officers were doing. So if a huge drug
bust was going down he would let me know after it went down and see if we wanted
to write about. Simply because he felt that officers doing this kind of
dangerous work didn’t get the kind of attention they deserved. He was a source
of mine for years before the series. Ray thought these guys were cutting corners
and doing things that weren’t right and he could see it from his squad. He had
no ax to grind. He was one of the nicest people I’ve met and he was just a good
cop. But he wasn’t going to blow the whistle because he didn’t want to be seen
as a rat. He didn’t want to turn on his brother and sister in blue, but one way
you can get rid of corruption is to slip things to a newspaper and that’s
exactly what he did.
DAVIS:
Were you worried about your personal safety when you visited some of
Philadelphia’s meanest neighborhoods, especially after Barbara was
assaulted.
LAKER:
We really weren’t up until Tiffany hit me. We’ve been out on the street a lot
covering different stories. For the most part if you talk to people and tell
them who you are and show them respect and just want to hear what they have to
say, they are not going to do anything to you. There were a couple of times
where we were worried that we’d get caught in the crossfire, but not as a
target.
DAVIS:
I have to give you two credit for being brave and determined to get the story.
Why did you include so much information about your personal lives in the
book?
LAKER:
We
thought that we wanted to write the book in the first person to make it more
intimate and personal. And we thought it was only fair that since we were going
to develop characters like lawyers, drug dealers, cops, the bodega owners, the
women victims and editors here at the paper, that we include our lives and our
own baggage too.
DAVIS:
For those who have not read the book yet, can you give us a brief overview of
your lives and careers?
LAKER:
I graduated from the University of Missouri in 1979 and I worked at the Clearwater Sun then the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Dallas Times Herald, the Seattle Post Intelligencer and I’ve been
at the Philadelphia Daily News since
1993. I love being a reporter. I think there is no better job in the world. I’m
divorced and I have two great adult children who are awesome.
RUDERMAN:
I’ve been a newspaper reporter since 1991 and I came up the traditional way
where you go from little papers to little bit bigger papers and I worked my way
up in newspapers at a time when newspapers were thriving. I love my job a lot.
Being a journalist takes a toll on your family, as you never know when you are
going to be called to work or you have to work late.
DAVIS:
It is a consuming job.
RUDERMAN:
I could never compare myself to a police officer and the work they do, but there
are things that you think about that keep you up at night. Or to follow the
story where it takes you is not a nine to five kind of thing. Long and short,
I’m also divorced recently
DAVIS:
Wendy, you left Philadelphia for the New
York Times. For a journalist, that might be considered the top of the line,
but then you returned to the Philadelphia
Daily News. Can you tell us why?
RUDERMAN:
Quite simply, I was at the New York Times
and I really enjoyed it and it was a lot of work. It was high profile, high
pressure job, and I planned on staying but things fell apart in my marriage and
I kind of realized that I had to take a step back in my career and reevaluate
what was important to me. My family and friends are from the Philadelphia area.
I felt like it was so hard to get to the New York Times and then my personal life
was a mess, so I decided to do what was best for me and my kids. It was a hard
decision, but I don’t regret it.
DAVIS:
I’ve interviewed a lot of New York cops. From your experience, what’s the
difference between Philly cops and New York cops?
RUDERMAN:
I don’t think I was there long enough. I was there for a year and being bureau
chief, I worked in police headquarters and I mostly dealt with Ray Kelly and the
top people. But I went out on a couple of ride-alongs and I thought the New York
cops were outstanding. I feel the same way about Philly cops.
DAVIS:
Do you think that newspaper reporters have an adversarial relationship with the
police and if so, is that a good thing?
LAKER:
I don’t think we have an adversarial relationship with police.
RUDERMAN:
We have an adversarial relationship with dirty cops.
DAVIS:
Good answer.
LAKER:
Yes, with dirty cops, but with the rest of the police force I don’t think we do
at all. I talk to Commissioner Ramsey a lot and we could not have done this book
without people like Ray and lots of other cops like him. Good cops who wanted to
help expose corruption. If there were a reporter here in the newsroom that was
making up stories and people in every story he or she wrote, I would not want to
be associated with that person and I would want that person fired because it
taints the whole industry. Good cops out there want to expose corruption for the
very same reason. It taints them and it taints the police department and then it
erodes the trust that police officers need to do their job in the community. If
people in the community don’t trust cops, they are less apt to help them.
RUDERMAN:
But that said, I do think that there is tension between reporters and police
officers and the hierarchy. But I think that is good, because a smart police
force is one who knows how to bring the media into the tent. One of my favorite
stories I ever done in my entire career was on a group of officers in New York
City whose sole job it was to talk people out of committing suicide. We scaled
the Brooklyn Bridge and I got to know these officers who literally saved
people’s lives. It was great press for the New York police
Department to have this story in the New
York Times. It was a heart-rending, wonderful story and I think that police
departments who don’t tout what they do best are doing a disservice to the
community. I think there is an unnecessary wall between the police force and the
press and I just think that wall sometimes needs to come down for the benefit of
the community.
DAVIS:
Have you received any movie offers?
RUDERMAN:
No, not yet.
DAVIS:
If you could cast yourself, who would you want to portray you in a
film?
RUDERMAN:
I’m very tiny, so people say Holly Hunter would be good for me, but I think
she’s too old.
DAVIS:
What are you guys working on now?
RUDERMAN:
We are doing a series about social security fraud, people who game the system.
In Philadelphia there are people who take advantage of the elderly and people
with intellectual disabilities and take their SSI payments from them and
mistreat them. In the worst cases, they hold them hostage. We’ve gotten some
great help from the detectives in the units who deal with these special victims,
so it is rewarding to kind of work together and not against one another.
LAKER:
The series is called Perfect Prey and we have done two big take-outs on it.
DAVIS:
I
have to check that it out. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me and good
luck with the book.
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