Busted (22 page)

We both came from zany Jewish families that instilled a strong, often obsessive and neurotic work ethic. Karl summed up the Ruderman motto as “Work till you drop, then go out to a restaurant.” I was surprised Karl, who came from a reserved Catholic family, married me.

A few months before our wedding, Karl went with my family on a trip to Martha's Vineyard. It was my mom's idea to go to a bathing-suit-optional beach. She stripped naked, wearing only sneakers and white tube socks, and slathered sunscreen all over her body. Karl averted his eyes. “Take a good look,” she told Karl. “See these raisin boobs—this is what Wendy will look like in thirty years.”

Barbara's mom was a rebel. Instead of settling down with a nice Jewish boy, she fell in love with a smooth-talking British goy. When the couple married, Barbara's grandmother sat shivah and threatened suicide; she refused to meet her daughter's new husband, never even spoke his name. Years ago, Barbara's dad worked on a cruise line, entertaining elderly women. He later described his job title as “cruise ship gigolo.” Barbara wasn't sure he was joking.

People like Omar had nothing on Barbara's dad and my mom. Now,
they
were scary; they were uncorked and unfiltered, and Barbara and I were sometimes more afraid of what would fly out of their mouths than of getting hurt—or killed—while in pursuit of this mystery woman. But we also feared failure—and at times, that fear blinded us.

“You're putting this story ahead of your own safety,” Hutch told Barbara. “You're losing touch with reality. You're all consumed with this story, but you're gonna knock on a door and get assaulted, raped, or robbed.”

Hutch worried constantly about Barbara and gave her unsolicited advice on how to stay safe. Some of his suggestions made sense—carry Mace and step back, out of reach, after knocking on a stranger's door. Of course she did neither. Hutch also doled out advice that made us chuckle. “Before you go out, call the district cops, tell them you're a reporter for the
Daily News
and let them know where you are and what you're doing, and see if they can send someone by to check on you.”

I worked so much that when I headed out one morning, Brody smirked and said, “Mom, it was so nice having you for a visit.” He knew how to twist the knife.

When Karl went shopping or out for a jog, Sawyer asked, “Mom, are you babysitting us?”

I had largely relinquished my parenting role to Karl, but I still wanted control. I left Karl notes on the refrigerator or front door: “Don't forget to give Brody and Sawyer fruit.” “Brush their teeth.” “Make them eat carrots.” I often added, “I love you,” so Karl wouldn't be too mad.

Karl began to talk about getting a vasectomy, and I suspected that he wanted to get snipped just so he could veg on the couch for a weekend and get a break from the kids.

Barbara and I realized we were driving the people in our lives nuts, but we just couldn't stop. We kept coming back to the same search warrant. A raid that took place on October 16, 2008—the exact date Tolstoy was pulled from the street.

IT WASN'T JUST THE DATE ON THE SEARCH WARRANT THAT DREW OUR ATTENTION; IT WAS THE ADDRESS. THE COPS RAIDED AN APARTMENT—ON ORTHODOX STREET
.

The apartment wasn't anywhere close to Torresdale, but Barbara and I had a strong feeling that this particular raid was key to our search for the woman. We repeatedly swung by the apartment. Sometimes we went together, other times separately. Each time no one was home, and we left business cards and notes, only to find them still jammed in the door seam when we returned.

The search warrant offered scant details. The cops were looking for a drug dealer named Beamer, whom they believed sold crack out of the apartment. During the 7:45 p.m. raid at the apartment, the cops found a gun and drugs, but they couldn't arrest Beamer because he wasn't home and they didn't know his real name.

“Beamer.” That was all we had to go on.

Beamer no longer lived there, so Barbara and I canvassed the blocks around his old apartment, asking if anyone knew where we could find him.

The neighborhood was in the heart of a once-robust retail mecca of family-owned pharmacies, hardware stores, diners, florists, and shoe and clothing shops. The shopping district started to lose its luster in the late 1990s, when dollar stores and cash-for-gold pawnshops elbowed out the charm.

Despite the area's decline, many of the homes, including Georgian-style structures built in the late 1700s, retained their grace. Most homes were boxy free-standing, three-story twins separated by alleys. From the street, Barbara and I could see the Philadelphia skyline in the distance.

By now, a lot of the people we approached on the street knew who we were. All we had to do was mention
Daily News
and police corruption and they'd say, “Ohhh! You're the ones doing Tainted Justice.” They were eager to help and loaded us up with first names of women who had lived in Beamer's apartment building: Latifa, Kia, Keiana, Tonya, Dashay, and Nicole.

Barbara and I were convinced that Beamer had some kind of connection to this woman. To find him was to find her. But no one seemed to know where Beamer had moved.

Then on a warm, sunny afternoon, I met Shante. When I first approached her as she sat on a front stoop, I wasn't sure if she was a man or a woman. Her head was shaved, and she reminded me of a black Sinead O'Connor. She wore knee-length jean shorts, brown Timberland boots, and a wife-beater, or ribbed white tank top, that showed off her muscular biceps.

Shante was a twenty-one-year-old convicted drug dealer, openly gay, with a sexy, raspy voice. She'd been locked up at least six times, beginning at age sixteen, when she was found guilty of attempted murder in a bloody shootout. Shante's street name was Pop, and Barbara and I wondered if the nickname sprang from the shooting, though Shante claimed Pop was a reference to her old soul ways. She was fiercely loyal to family and friends, a street lioness who protected and provided for her loved ones.

On her Facebook page, she posted photos of herself holding wads of cash, getting high, and wearing designer Air Jordans. Shante was proud of her plum-shaped lips and poked fun at her gut, calling herself “fatboy shit.”

Tattoos covered Shante's neck, upper chest, arms, and hands. The designs were rudimentary, inked in one color, either black or navy. Some of Shante's tattoos were the work of a guy named Skinny who made house calls, like the Fuller Brush man. Shante wanted to get rid of a tattoo that read
DANGER
. “This is gone,” Shante said, rubbing her neck. “It was a girl I used to mess with.” Two teardrops, tattooed in black ink, were etched under her left eye, just above her cheekbone. On her right arm she sported a tattoo of comedy-tragedy theater masks, with the words
GOOD GIRL BAD GIRL
. That about summed her up.

Shante not only knew Beamer, they were close friends, and she had his cell number programmed into her phone. She wouldn't give me Beamer's number, but she promised that she'd tell him we were looking for him. When I didn't hear from Shante, I called her—a lot. “I'm so sorry. I know you must think I'm the biggest pest, but . . .”

A week or so later, late in the evening, I called Shante yet again. She picked up, and I could hear music and laughing in the background. She sounded giddy, and I wondered if she was high. I took a deep breath. “Shante, I haven't heard from Beamer yet. Can you please just give me his number?” To my amazement, she did.

Barbara offered to call Beamer, and I agreed that was a good idea. Barbara had a knack for cracking tough nuts. She could have broken Al Capone.

But each time she tried Beamer's number, no one answered, and Barbara decided to stop by Beamer's old apartment for the fourth time. A teenage girl answered the door, called her mom at work, and handed Barbara the phone. The girl's mom was furious. “Listen, I'm tired of you and that other reporter coming around here. I told the police the same thing—‘The woman doesn't live here anymore. I don't know who she is, and I don't know where she went.' Just leave us alone.”

Barbara zoomed back to the office. “Wendy, this has got to be the right place. The cops had been there. They were looking for a woman.” We decided to play our last card. Barbara called a source on the FBI–internal affairs task force. Barbara knew to ask a narrow question, one with a yes or no answer. This way, the source wouldn't feel too exposed.

“I'm going to give you three addresses. All you have to do is tell me if the address is familiar to you. Okay,” Barbara asked.

“Okay,” the source said.

Barbara gave him the Orthodox Street address first. “Yes,” he said, “that's familiar.”

The task force was looking for the woman, too, and at this point, the source figured Barbara and I might have a better chance of finding her. He knew we were tenacious; he also knew that people on the street often felt more comfortable talking to us than to police investigators.

“If you find her, can you try to convince her to contact us?” the source asked, and Barbara agreed.

Beamer. Beamer. Beamer. We had to find him. I was giving up hope. It was about 8:30 on a Friday night. I rolled a chair next to Barbara, and she dialed Beamer's number. I heard a muffled hello, and Barbara stiffened and gripped my arm. I clenched both my fists and pumped them up and down, wearing an alligator smile. Go, go, go, go, Barbara. C'mon, c'mon, do it.

“I'm soooo happy to finally talk to you. You just don't know,” Barbara cooed, her moss-colored eyes bulging as she glanced at me and nodded like a bobblehead.

Barbara explained that she was looking for a woman who'd been sexually assaulted by a cop during the raid at his apartment. “We know he's done this to other women. . . . This is your chance to do the right thing and see justice.”

I rolled my eyes. Barbara stopped talking, and Beamer said he'd help us. He knew the woman and thought he might see her over the weekend. He promised to call Barbara back.

“Thank you. Thank you so much, Beamer,” Barbara gushed. “You're my hero.”

I gently punched Barbara in the arm. She was incorrigible. I later teased Barbara about her new hero after we learned that Beamer was a twenty-eight-year-old pimp who ran a brothel.

Because Barbara had been editor for a few years, the
Daily News
hadn't given her a work cell and she hadn't thought to ask for one. So she used her personal phone for the Tainted Justice series. But now this was becoming a problem. Unfamiliar numbers popped up on Barbara's cell at all hours. She was never sure whether the caller was a pimp, drug dealer, crackhead—or a suitor from Match.com.

Barbara kept her phone within earshot all weekend, even while gardening or bathing. At a dinner party, Barbara placed her phone in front of her on the table. “I'm really sorry. I'm expecting an important call from Beamer.” Her friends just looked at her.

He never called. Early Monday morning, Barbara couldn't take it anymore. She paced around her back deck and dialed his number. “Yeah, I talked to her,” Beamer said casually. “She's really scared, but . . .”

Beamer gave Barbara the woman's first name—we'll call her Naomi—and her number.

Barbara called me right away. “Wendy, Beamer came through. My hero came through,” she said, tickled with delight.

NAOMI AGREED TO MEET WITH BARBARA AND ME, BUT SHE WAS PETRIFIED OF THE COPS, TERRIFIED THAT TOLSTOY AND HIS CRONIES WOULD
harm her if she talked. We picked her up about a block from her new apartment. She slipped into the backseat and slid down, obscuring the side of her face with her right palm. Barbara drove us out of the area.

Naomi was twenty-four and eight months pregnant with her fourth child. She supported her kids—ages four, two, and one—and her out-of-work father with a part-time job at a child day care and help from public assistance. Her black hair, which she straightened, fell like a smooth, velvety sheet down her back. A thick curtain of bangs stopped just above her eyes, the color of coffee beans. She was reticent by nature, her emotions enclosed within eggshell-thin walls. She had a regal air about her.

Naomi had been living on Orthodox Street for about a month when the cops raided the apartment building. Beamer wasn't her pimp or her boyfriend; he was her landlord, or so she thought.

She had bumped into Beamer, an acquaintance, on the street while looking for a place to live. Beamer was a slickster who never missed an opportunity to make some extra cash. The tenants who had lived on the second floor got evicted, and the apartment sat empty. Beamer, who lived in the first-floor apartment, masqueraded as the building's landlord and duped Naomi into paying him $200-a-month rent for a room upstairs. She was essentially a squatter, though she didn't realize it at the time.

Barbara and I offered to take her to lunch. Naomi picked a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint where she ordered a single slice, eating only a few bites, and no drink.

She spoke in whispers, recounting in a flat, detached voice what Tolstoy had done to her, as if the assault had happened to a stranger.

The night of October 16 was unseasonably warm, and Naomi was getting ready for a night out with her live-in boyfriend, Raheem. Naomi's kids were spending the night at her mom's house. She stepped out of the tub and began to towel off. Suddenly, a loud boom from the downstairs apartment rattled the floor beneath her, and Naomi flinched. The sound startled her, and she quickly dressed, pairing a pink and white spaghetti-strap top with a mini jean skirt. Her skin still warm from soapy bathwater, Naomi walked to the stairwell and inched gingerly down the steps to see what was going on. One after the other, cops powered upstairs toward her.

The cops ordered Naomi and Raheem to go to the first floor, where they cuffed them with plastic restraints. The couple couldn't understand why the cops were there, and so many of them—ten in all.