Busted (7 page)

When Jeff and his squad raided Jorge's house, they found three bundles of heroin on top of a china cabinet in the dining room. They were stamped
GAME CRAZY
. In the back of a black dresser drawer, in a rear second-floor bedroom, cops found six clear plastic baggies of cocaine. Just shy of his twentieth birthday, Jorge was sentenced to two to four years in prison.

People like Jorge and his family almost always expected cops to lie, to be dirty, like pigs. They understood corruption. What they didn't understand was snitching.

“I'd rather someone stab me and let me bleed out before I'd become a fuckin' snitch,” said Jorge's brother, Ricky, hate blazing from his eyes.

“He's a rat. And a rat should get poison,” Ricky said, his lip curled as he almost spat out the words.

Ricky lived with Dolores and on this day, as Barbara interviewed her, Ricky sat by his mother's side, listening intently, interjecting frequently, as if Barbara was taking Dolores's deposition and he was her legal advisor.

Benny knew that we were going to talk to Jorge and drug dealers like him. He knew we were going to print that he was an informant, an informant who helped lock up dealers based on lies. And after we heard the venom spewed at Benny, we were surprised no one had killed him yet. It was then that Barbara and I realized that if Benny ended up dead, we'd be to blame. By talking to the dealers whom Benny had set up, we were salting the wounds.

Barbara sat across from Ricky at his dining room table and wondered what, if anything, he'd do to Benny. Ricky was shirtless, with low-slung black pants. He had a goatee, combed his short hair forward, close to his scalp, and had a space between his two front teeth. His arms, chest, and back
were adorned in tattoos. Stretched across the top of his back were the words
ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME
above an unfinished cross.

Ricky seemed more upset that Benny played a role in his mom's drug arrest than in Jorge's. At fourteen, Ricky went to Dolores's sentencing, prepared to beg the judge for leniency. “I would have told him she did what she had to do. I don't blame her. People may see it as she was introducing me to drugs, but she raised four kids on her own, and how you gonna pay for all that? DPA don't pay for that.”

Ricky was fiercely protective of Dolores, and he took care of her. Late at night or early in the morning, he slipped into her room, careful not to wake her, and placed food, usually a fruit yogurt, by her bed.

Dolores's life was unlike lots of others in the Badlands. She was born in Puerto Rico in 1965 and lived in a wood house with her parents and seven brothers. She was the only girl—“Daddy's little girl.” Life was hard for her dad, who delivered Coca-Cola by truck. The family moved to Paterson, New Jersey, when she was four or five. “We came for a better life.”

As a girl, she bounced around with her family, mostly back and forth from Camden and Philly. Dolores hooked up with a high school boy, got pregnant with Sofia at sixteen, and dropped out. She met another man, Diego, when she was studying to become a nursing assistant. They had three children together, but had a turbulent, violent relationship. In the beginning he worked at a body shop, but he lost his job because he smoked crack all the time. He never worked again.

“I wanted to go back to being a nurse, but he didn't want that, so I didn't,” Dolores told Barbara.

When he got mad or hallucinated, he hit or punched her,
threw lamps at her. Even as a young kid, Ricky was her protector.

“I got in the way once. He cracked my head open. Here, feel this,” he told Barbara, as he bent down and put her finger on his thick black hair. He wanted her to feel the bumpy scar tissue on the back of his head.

Dolores mustered enough courage to leave Diego when her dad got sick. “Poppy” was a diabetic with high blood pressure who endured heart surgery and suffered from Alzheimer's. She slept on a cot beside him in the hospital. When he couldn't walk, she stayed with him in rehab. She was the only one who shaved his face to his satisfaction. “He said his face had to feel like a baby's bottom.” When he came home, she cooked him anything he wanted—hot dogs, boiled eggs, oatmeal, rice, and chicken.

He died on May 3, 1998, a Sunday. He opened his eyes, smiled at Dolores, then took his last breath.

Barbara understood Dolores more than she knew. Barbara's mom died of pancreatic cancer in November 2000. After she was diagnosed, Barbara did everything to save her. She begged a Mount Sinai Hospital researcher to include her in his coffee enema experiment. She knew it sounded ridiculous, but she was desperate. Her mom was seventy-three. She wasn't a candidate for surgery, and she refused chemo, said it would make her sicker. Barbara knew it wouldn't help anyway.

She wanted to die at home, even though she couldn't say the word
die
. “I want to go home,” she told Barbara. And Barbara knew. She took a leave of absence from the
Daily News
and flew back and forth to Florida every week to sit beside her in bed all day and help her dad. Then she came home to take care of her two children because her husband needed to travel for work.

Barbara cooked her mom's favorite meal of roast chicken, boiled potatoes, and green peas. She spoon-fed her in bed while they watched her favorite reruns of
Law & Order
. When she could no longer chew, Barbara gave her broth, milkshakes, and Ensure. She sponge-bathed her, washed and brushed her thinning hair, and put lip gloss on her lips. As she slipped away, weighing not more than seventy-five pounds, Barbara stroked her cheek to trick her into opening her mouth so Barbara could slip in the painkiller Oxycontin. Barbara gave her more when she moaned. She changed her diapers. When her mom lost consciousness, she gave her Oxycontin in a dropper. Water in a dropper. Anything to keep her alive. Until the day Barbara knelt on the floor, held her limp hand, and told her it was okay to go. She'd take care of her brother and dad. Barbara didn't know if she heard her.

“How can my heart still be beating when hers isn't?” Barbara cried when her mom died two days later.

Soon after Dolores's dad died, she started selling drugs. When her mom died, Barbara fell into a deep depression that she tried desperately and unsuccessfully to hide. It was the beginning of the end of her marriage.

Death wasn't all Barbara shared with Dolores. Barbara's mom's mom was a four-foot-eleven Orthodox Jewish bootlegger who stashed cash under her mattress in her tenement at C and Eighth Streets on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Barbara's mom hid under the bed each time cops busted into their apartment and hauled her grandmother off to jail.

Her grandmom had a mission—her three sons and daughter would claw their way out of poverty and land careers to make her proud. When New York University had already filled their quota of Jewish medical students, her grandmom stormed down to the university with wads of cash
in her purse.

“What does it take to get my son in?” she asked someone in the admissions office, in her Yiddish accent, plopping twenties on the counter. Barbara's uncle was accepted into med school and became a pediatrician. Another uncle became a rabbi; the other, an engineer.

Dolores and Ricky knew they came from a different world than Barbara. Ricky seemed curious about her home, her neighborhood. “When am I going to come see your land?” he asked her.

He told Barbara she must be comfortable. He thought Barbara lived in a mansion. She told him she lived in a three-bedroom home, nothing fancy.

“Don't bullshit me. Your three-bedroom home is different than my three-bedroom home,” he said.

Ricky was right. She lived in a leafy, affluent Philly suburb just west of the city. The heart of her town was lined with trendy restaurants, with names like Plate and Verdad, and boutique shops that sold swimsuits year-round to rich housewives who went on winter cruises to tropical islands. Barbara's house, a three-bedroom brick colonial with blue shutters, sat on an ivy-manicured hill.

Unlike more than 90 percent of kids in Barbara's neighborhood, Ricky didn't have a high school diploma. “I didn't graduate, but I got brains like I did.”

Ricky, who described himself as a “hard-core Christian,” was cryptic about how he earned money, saying that he sometimes worked “off the books.” He asked Barbara if she knew of any jobs.

Every so often, the conversation was interrupted by a knock on the door. Ricky would get up and furtively step outside for a minute or so. Dolores froze and lifted an eyebrow cautiously each time someone pounded on the door.
The only person whom Ricky introduced to Barbara was “the Movie Man,” an obese guy in a white T-shirt and jeans with a kind smile. Ricky sifted through his stack of pirated movies and chose some for himself and his mom—the street version of Netflix.

After the Movie Man left, Ricky brought the DVDs to Dolores and sat down at the dining room table. Barbara noticed he was staring at her hands.

“No ring?” he asked. “You're not married?”

“No. I'm not married.”

“No?” he asked with a coy smile. “How could that be?”

“I'm divorced.” Barbara still cringed when she said that word.

He asked about her children. She told him that her son, Josh, was in law school and her daughter, Anna, had just graduated from college and was working.

He stared at her, locking into her eyes. “You're still suffering from your divorce,” he said.

The words took her aback. She didn't tell Ricky, but she still kept photos of her ex-husband in her wallet—one family portrait and one by himself.

“You need to get out more and live your life,” he told Barbara. “You have your whole life ahead of you.”

He paused. “You know what? We should go on a cruise.”

“What?” she asked.

“You and me. A cruise.”

In the span of an hour, Ricky asked Barbara to touch the back of his head, acted as her fortune-teller, gave her relationship advice, and asked her to sail away with him on the Love Boat. This was a typical day of street reporting for Barbara. On the other hand, when I went out on a story, people asked me if I came from a family of midgets or told me that I reminded them of Steve Urkel, the bespectacled nerdy cha
racter from the TV sitcom
Family Matters
. I'd think, Huh? But I'm white!

OF ALL THE PEOPLE BENNY BETRAYED, HE FELT THE WORST ABOUT HECTOR SOTO. HECTOR WAS LIKE A FATHER TO BENNY, MORE SO THAN HIS OWN DAD
.

Benny's dad, Ventura Martinez-Perez Sr., was a local celebrity. He made Philadelphia history in 1971 when he became the first Latino officer on the city's public housing police force. He earned his FCC license at Temple University in 1976 and moonlighted as a Spanish-language radio announcer. On the airwaves, he talked sports, music, and politics. His on-air name was El Coqui, a type of frog in Puerto Rico that makes a racket.

Benny craved his father's affection and approval but knew he was a disappointment, even an embarrassment.

“My father always told me that I was a loser,” Benny said.

Benny said his father once chased him down the street after he spotted him selling drugs on the corner. He kicked Benny out of the house and tossed all Benny's designer clothes—the Sergio Valente and Jordache jeans, leather blazer, Adidas sneakers—because he knew that Benny had bought the high-end threads with drug money.

Benny went to middle school with Hector's son, Noel, and Benny spent a lot of time over at their house. Hector and his
wife, Lucy, were fond of the boy they knew as Flash. Benny and Hector shared a love of salsa music. Hector was a record producer who worked with some of the biggest names in Latino music; Benny took up the timbales and got regular gigs as a DJ.

When Hector wasn't recording music, he dabbled in drug dealing. He drove nice cars, wore neatly pressed slacks and Panama-style hats, and raised tropical birds. He was everything Benny wanted to be, and Hector took him everywhere in his 1976 Cadillac Seville, a two-toned light and dark blue beauty. They cruised through the neighborhood, driving past row houses with aluminum awnings draped with Puerto Rican flags. Brassy salsa music bubbled from front stoops, where old men sat talking or playing dominoes, flyswatter in hand, on folding chairs on the sidewalk.

Benny brought his girlfriends around to meet Hector, whom he introduced as “my pop.” When Benny needed money to take a girl to a hotel, Benny called Hector, sometimes waking him in the middle of the night. Hector often gave Benny money for a hotel room, a movie, whatever. Hector's own son grew jealous. Noel couldn't understand why Hector never gave him money. The reason, Hector told Noel, was that Benny pestered him and whined until Hector opened his wallet.

Benny always spent Christmas Eve with Hector and his family. Lucy made her famous Puerto Rican soup, a stew of black beans and garlic, and her shrimp
pastelillos
. Benny got drunk and spent the night on Hector and Lucy's couch. Lucy adored Benny. She would have let him move in, if he had asked.

In 1990, around the time that Benny was hustling $10 bags of coke on the corner, the cops nabbed Hector for selling cocaine out of his house. They confiscated twenty-nine grams
of coke, a grinder, pestle, heat sealer, and scale. Hector landed in jail on felony drug charges. He posted $50,000 bail. While awaiting trial, he jumped bail and became a fugitive. At forty-three, Hector went on about his life, lying low but not hiding. He probably would have avoided prosecution and remained free—if not for Benny and Jeff.

When Benny turned police informant after Jeff busted him for selling marijuana and threatened to lock him up if he didn't, he didn't just flip—he transformed. He grew to like the power and got a rush from knocking on doors and conning his way into drug houses. He emerged from houses, drugs in hand, and strutted over to Jeff, bragging, “Man, I got these guys. They were supposed to be untouchable.” Benny began to see himself as a cop, and Jeff grew to rely on Benny and treated him like a brother, or so Benny thought.