Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of the reporting craft.
The first article was doozy and, it turned out, only the surface layer of a very large and very corrupt onion.
Reported by Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News on Feb. 9, 2009, it exposed the troubling relationship between a Narcotics Field Unit Officer, Jeffrey Cujdik, and an informant, Ventura Martinez. They wrote:
For seven years, Martinez has worked as one of the city's most productive police informants, bringing down more than 200 drug and gun dealers.
But Martinez now says that some of the police jobs were tainted, rooted in lies and motivated by power, greed and money. He says he admitted fabricating evidence to the FBI, the police Internal Affairs Bureau and the Police Advisory Commission. Martinez's admission could reopen and potentially overturn hundreds of cases, legal experts say.
Martinez, 47, claims that he and Officer Jeffrey Cujdik, a narcotics cop, lied about evidence in at least two dozen cases to gain illegal entry into homes and make arrests, for which Martinez got paid. Martinez says he did it for money, to bring down drug dealers, and because he and Cujdik were tight. ... The Police Department pays confidential informants like Martinez for making drug buys or providing information that leads to drug and gun arrests. Martinez alleges that he paid at least $20,000 in informant cash to Cujdik for rent.
That living arrangement was a no-no. And when drug dealers learned that Martinez and his family lived in Cujdik’s house, the cop panicked and moved to evict his informant, “leaving [Martinez] nowhere to go and no money to relocate. As drug dealers called him a rat, leaving cheese at his front door, he turned to the Daily News, the FBI and Internal Affairs, in hopes of finding protection.”
In the process, the reporters would learn that Cujdik was not just a bad apple, but one member of a rogue Narcotics Field Unit whose misdeeds they would expose in a series of stories over the next four months.
On March 20, Laker and Ruderman described an apparent robbery by the Unit:
On a sweltering July afternoon in 2007, Officer Jeffrey Cujdik and his narcotics squad members raided an Olney tobacco shop. Then, with guns drawn, they did something bizarre: They smashed two surveillance cameras with a metal rod, said store owners David and Eunice Nam. The five plainclothes officers yanked camera wires from the ceiling. They forced the slight, frail Korean couple to the vinyl floor and cuffed them with plastic wrist ties. … The officers rifled through drawers, dumped cigarette cartons on the floor and took cash from the registers. Then they hauled the Nams to jail. … The police said they seized $2,573 in the raid. The Nams say they actually had between $3,800 and $4,000 in the store.
On April 9, the reporters told readers that the tobacco shop episode was part of a larger pattern:
The Police Department’s elite Narcotics Field Unit is supposed to go after big fish - kingpins who package mounds of drugs behind closed doors. But Officer Jeffrey Cujdik and the officers who worked with him spent a lot of time shooting fish in a barrel. Day after day, they busted mom-and-pop store owners, most of whom were immigrants with no criminal records, on misdemeanor charges for selling little ziplock bags, which police say are used to package crack cocaine and marijuana.
On June 17, the followed up their articles of Feb. 23 and June 1 with a third account of sexual abuse by members of the Unit:
Burly narcotics officer yanked down the young woman's underwear as they stood in the doorway of her second-floor Frankford apartment, she said. The officer - one of 10 who participated in a drug raid of the apartment downstairs - allegedly jammed his fingers into her vagina. When she tried to pull away, he grabbed her hard enough to rip her shirt, she said. The penetration of his fingers was so forceful that she began to bleed. She said she thought he had scratched her - or worse, caused internal damage.
The final story in their series, which would win the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting, described some of the reforms prompted by their work.
No sexual relationships. No gifts. No "social, financial or business" dealings. No undocumented meetings or telephone conversations. Those are just a few of the rules spelled out in a new police directive that places tighter controls on officers and their confidential informants. The directive - issued Sept. 11 - comes in the wake of a Daily News series detailing allegations that narcotics officer Jeffrey Cujdik improperly rented a house to one informant, provided cash to bail another out of jail, and gave gifts, including cartons of cigarettes, to at least three informants.
Much of that sound like common sense. But the fact such conduct needed to be expressly prohibited is perhaps the best evidence of the depth of the scandal Laker and Ruderman uncovered.
