Busted (9 page)

And no one—not even Bochetto, this hardscrabble bully with his commonsense argument—could convince us otherwise. This was why Bochetto was worried. He knew we were
trouble. We lacked the skepticism and doubt that Bochetto had seen in other seasoned reporters. He sensed our enthusiasm, our energy. He could tell we were enjoying this fight, though he was convinced we'd lose.

He leaned forward, his arm extended over a Civil War–era sword—a gift from a client—that sat in the middle of his desk. He jabbed his index finger, first at me, then at Barbara. “I'm going to sue you—and you—personally!”

We stood up to leave. I whipped my scarf over my left shoulder and shook his hand. “It's been a pleasure,” I said, rolling my eyes. My sarcasm elicited a little snort, almost a chuckle, from Bochetto.

We climbed into a cab and looked at each other, wide-eyed.

“Do you think he can sue us? Personally?” I said.

“Geez, I hope not. We'd lose our houses. Wendy, we'd be homeless,” Barbara said.

We began to giggle nervously.

“Nahhhhh!” I said.

Barbara and I did cede some ground to Bochetto. He had chastised us for not contacting officers and supervisors who could vouch for Jeff's character. We realized he was right. Bochetto agreed to e-mail us names and numbers of Jeff's colleagues, and we agreed to send him a list of our questions for Jeff.

Bochetto sent over the list of people he described as “more than willing and anxious to provide you with direct, firsthand knowledge of important facts relating to your article.” We hit the phones the minute we got the list. Richard Eberhart was the first name. Eberhart was Jeff's former partner. He had retired a few years earlier and now, along with Jeff, owned J&R Dunk Tank Rentals, a company that rented moon bounces and carnival games for kiddie parties.

Barbara called Eberhart on his cell. Not surprisingly, Eberhart described Jeff as “an excellent police officer, a straight shooter, a hard worker, an all-around good guy.” She asked Eberhart if he thought Benny was credible and reliable. When Eberhart said, “Yes,” Barbara began to feel the endorphins of a reporter's high, a blend of panic attack, sugar rush, too much caffeine, and great sex.

“Did you know that Jeff rented a house to Benny?” she asked, and threw in, as if a casual afterthought, “What did you think of that?”

“Would I have done that? Probably not. But who am I to judge?” Eberhart said. “I thought he was helping him out. It didn't seem inappropriate at the time, but looking back, maybe it was.”

Barbara hung up and zoomed over to my desk, flapping her arms like a seal just before the zookeeper tosses a fish. “You're never gonna believe this,” she said.

“Get the fuck out!”

We sent Bochetto our questions, fourteen in all, and to tweak him further, we gave him a deadline—highlighted in bold—of 5:00 p.m. the following day. He must have wanted to box our ears.

Bochetto didn't answer a single question, but he gave us a colorful and snarky quote: “It is overwhelmingly clear that, when the hard facts are put on the table, your story falls apart and your questions become empty vessels of naïveté. What you have, and what you apparently want to rely upon, are nothing but a self-serving series of fictionalizations by professional liars, felons, and drug addicts, each of whom are looking to avoid more jail time by playing the
Daily News
for a patsy.”

Barbara and I labored over writing the story. We spent hours together in front of the computer, surrounded by docu
ments, interview notes, and empty coffee cups. The floor underneath my desk was littered with Rice Krispies Treats wrappers. At ninety calories apiece, the marshmallow sponges were the only junk food that Barbara allowed herself to eat. I bit my fingernails and gnawed at the cuticles until they bled. I would have salted myself and chewed off my fingers—if I didn't need them to type.

The story was a sprawling tale about how Jeff and Benny met, their rental arrangement, and Benny's allegations that Jeff fabricated evidence to get into drug homes.

OUR IRASCIBLE CITY EDITOR, GAR JOSEPH, WAS HOLED UP IN HIS CLOSET-SIZE OFFICE FOR WHAT SEEMED LIKE HOURS. WE WEREN'T SURE IF THAT WAS
a good thing or bad; we just knew that he was in there reading a draft of our story. Actually, it was draft number four.

Gar had declared our first version “a fucking mess.” He wasn't the type of editor to tiptoe around reporters' fragile egos. He got impatient, sometimes unapologetically rude, with reporters who couldn't pitch a story idea in one sentence or less.

“I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about,” he'd say. “Can you tell me again—in English.”

As city editor, Gar was the first stop for rough drafts, and often the last. “This story ain't gonna run, unless you can figure out a way to make it unboring.” The sixty-year-old former City Hall reporter with a salt-and-pepper goatee had been around so long that he didn't think anything was story-worthy. Here's an e-mail he sent to editors assigned to work on Thanksgiving: “I don't give a shit about the [Thanksgiving] parade unless a small child is entangled in the ropes of the Mighty Mouse balloon and choked to death, so don't waste a reporter on it.”

Gar walked toward Barbara and me with his trademark limp, the result of running too many marathons.

“I think you've got something really good here,” he said, waving us into his office. A sticker that read “Easy Sucks” was taped to the glass panel beside the door. We sat on his ratty, gamy-smelling couch as he called up the story on his computer. His idea of a motivational poster hung on the wall: “Despair. It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black.”

“The story's way, way, waaaaaay too long. This section here veers off a cliff,” Gar said.

Gar despised long stories. He believed the Bible could be boiled down to six words. “Old Testament: ‘God is great.' New Testament: ‘God is love.' Bam, done. Of course, you lose some of the metaphors,” Gar liked to say.

He also hated stories written in esoteric geek-speak.

“This part doesn't make any fuckin' sense,” Gar told us, as we stared at the blinking cursor on his computer screen. “It's written in mumbo-jumbo police jargon that no reader's gonna understand.

“Other than that, it's pretty good. Fixable,” he sniffed.

After a two-hour-long journalistic colonoscopy on a cold, rainy Friday night, Gar leaned back in his swivel chair, adjusted his eyeglasses, folded his arms across his chest, and said, “Now let's see what our lawyer has to say.”

We weren't sure the story would ever run, or when the lawyer would read it.

Thinking we had done all we could do before the weekend, Barbara left work at about 6:30 p.m. to go on yet another blind date.

She'd been divorced for more than three years and was tired of being alone or stuck in relationships that she knew, deep down, weren't quite right. She signed up for Match.com
and spent hours crafting her profile. She began, “I'm the kind of woman who likes to pack a lot into each day so I can go to bed at night with a smile on my face, knowing I truly live.”

When she showed me her profile, I blurted, “Oh, Barbara, that's soooo schmaltzy. You gotta change that.”

She looked crushed and later went home and rewrote the top. Not surprisingly, Barbara's profile generated dozens of electronic “winks.” She quickly realized that winkers fell into two camps: shy, insecure types who were interested but wanted her to return the wink before they wrote a note; or fishermen daters who cast a huge net and winked at hundreds of women to see who bit.

Some nights after work, we'd sit at Barbara's desk and she'd pull up the latest dating prospects. We scanned their photos and bios. Some made us laugh, others made us cringe, and a few went in the “not bad” category. One with a username something like “sexyfunsmart77QX” looked neither sexy, fun, or smart. Another resembled a wild-eyed Charlie Manson who might stuff her body in a trunk. He wanted to meet for a drink. She visualized her blood in a glass. Two more were not much older than her twenty-two-year-old son, Josh. “We'd be great together, gorgeous,” one wrote. We knew where he wanted to be “great.” The last one had an anger-management problem: “The LEAST you could do is write back. Your loss!”

The guy she planned to meet on that Friday night sounded promising. He had told her that he was a fifty-four-year-old manager for a computer company, had two adult kids, and loved to run. She met him at a coffee shop.

This couldn't be him, she thought, as she saw this man, mostly bald, with a few strands of gray hair swept to the right in a comb-over, walk toward her. With tense, slightly
hunched shoulders and a slow gait, he looked close to Barbara's dad's age. Nothing like his Match photo. He said in his profile that he was six feet tall. Maybe thirty years ago, Barbara thought.

He stretched out his liver-spotted hand for her to shake, and they walked inside.

Within twenty minutes, he pulled out his wallet to show Barbara photos of his three grandkids. They were next to his AARP card. He told her he had retired from his job.

“So how old are you?” she asked curiously.

“Sixty-six,” he said.

“But your profile says you're fifty-four.”

“I know. I figured most women your age would dismiss me if I put my real age. And all they have to do is meet me.”

“But that's a big age difference. That's like twelve years,” she said.

“You know what?” he said, leaning toward her, clearly irritated. “Most women your age have no problem with it. I have a five-bedroom house, a pool. I drive a Mercedes, have a boat. The last woman I dated was forty-eight.”

Barbara looked at her watch.

At about 7:30 p.m., I was just shutting down my computer when Gar came over to my desk and said that our attorney, Scott Baker, and Michael Days, the paper's top editor, wanted to go over the story. Right now.

I thought about calling Barbara but didn't want to interrupt her date. Loaded down with an armful of documents, I trailed Gar, beetle-like, into Michael's glass-front office. Michael waved me in and I took a seat at the conference table. Scott had inked up a copy of our rough draft; he'd circled words and phrases that he deemed too loaded and scribbled notes and question marks in the margins. We went over the story, line by line. I slid documents—search warrants, interview
notes, Bochetto correspondence, the rental agreement, and the landlord-tenant eviction notice—across the table for Scott's review.

“Do you think we are going to get sued?” I asked.

“There's a fifty-fifty chance,” said Scott, who pointed to Benny's criminal record. “The guy is a convicted drug dealer.”

“Yes, I know,” Michael said, “but these are two fine reporters. Ultimately, you have to trust your reporters.” He turned to me. “What does your gut tell you? Do you believe him?”

“I do,” I said.

“To me, it passes the smell test,” Michael said about Benny's story.

Fear of a libel lawsuit, said Scott, is not a good enough reason to kill a story. “This is a newspaper. You're a reporter. We're in the business of writing stories.”

I felt the urge to hug this corporate lawyer, this unexpected ally and champion of journalism.

Barbara and I came into the office on Sunday to fact-check the story one more time. Barbara called Bochetto to let him know that the story was slated to run the next day. She asked if he had any additional comment. He had none. Gar gave the story a final read. Kevin Bevan, the editor in charge of the page-one design, who wore a down-on-the-farm plaid flannel shirt to work every day, showed us the headline he coined: “Tainted Justice?” The question mark was a hedge, the
Daily News
version of a wink, as if just askin'—“Hey, readers, do you think this cop is corrupt?”

“You can commit a lot of sins with a question mark,” Bevan once said, half joking. The
Daily News
was famous for slapping question marks on headlines. “Trish's Killer?” on a story naming a homicide suspect. “Armed & Angry?” on a story about cops arresting NBA star Allen Iverson on gun and as
sault charges. “A Veteran Kidnapper?” “Devil in Blue?” “Highway Robbery?” It fit when we believed a criminal, politician, or public figure was guilty in the court of public opinion, but not yet charged.

The front-page mock-up that Kevin showed us featured a grainy silhouette of Benny, with a hoodie pulled tight around his face. The photograph, filmed against the backdrop of the paper's dimly lit loading dock, had a sinister feel. The headline blared, “A Cop and an Informant Got Too Close and Bent the Rules. Now, the Informant Fears for His Life. Tainted Justice? Page 3.”

We believed Jeff was a dirty cop. No question. And every story we wrote after that first one carried the moniker “Tainted Justice.” Fact.

The next morning, we came to work prepared to take some heat for the story. We never expected the hair-singeing, ass-burning thermonuclear fireball that would soon unfold.

BARBARA AND I IMMEDIATELY LANDED ON THE FBI'S MOST DESPISED LIST
.

“Our investigation is in the toilet,” a miffed FBI agent told me the day our story ran.

The feds were mad that we had convinced Benny to tell his story and then pointed him in their direction. “I realize that you guys have a job to do,” the agent conceded, adding that he wished Benny had gone to the FBI first and not the other way around.

In the days before our story ran, Benny sat down with the feds and they wired him up in hopes of snagging Jeff on tape. They wanted Jeff to admit that he had phonied up arrest paperwork and perjured himself in court. Benny told Barbara that the feds had given him a keychain, rigged with a miniature tape recorder. When Jeff arrived at landlord-tenant court, Benny confronted him in the hallway and tried to goad him into a confession. Jeff was leery; he gave up nothing, and we didn't help matters. When Barbara approached Jeff after the eviction hearing, he knew Benny had sicced us on him. He wasn't stupid.