Cops Dealers Writers

Book Review - Busted: A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly Love / By Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker

A little more than a month after the release of Busted: A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly Love and five years after the incidents described by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker, a stunning update was released about four of the books key players.

But first, Busted: a taut, fast-paced journalistic detective story in the tradition of All the Presidents Men. Written in the no-nonsense style of Dashiell Hammett or Mickey Spillane, Ruderman and Laker steer the reader through a dangerous world of dishonest criminals and even more deceitful cops who rob, bribe, harass and sexually assault the public with impunity.

In December 2008, Ruderman and Laker met a drug dealer named Benny Martinez who had a story to tell that seemed ripped from a Hollywood screenplay. For the previous seven years he had secretly operated as one of Philadelphias most prolific police informants, working hand in glove with respected narcotics officer Jeffrey Cujdik. But now Cujdik was out to kill him, Martinez claimed, because the two of them had conspired to fabricate evidence in dozens of cases. In the process, their lives had become dangerously intertwined.

[Jeff Cujdik] allowed Benny into his life and routinely helped him out. When Benny told Jeff that he needed money for child support, Jeff gave him the cash, Ruderman recalls. When Benny needed a job, Jeff got him a gig working for a cop friend who owned an air-duct cleaning business. And when Benny needed a place to live, Jeff told him that he could help him out.

It was this final act of misplaced generosity that ruptured the lucrative and unethical partnership between Cujdik and Martinez.

Some of the cash that Benny earned as a police informant flowed back to Jeff in the form of rent money. This was against police department rules, and Jeff knew hed get in big trouble if internal affairs found out.

When a defense attorney made the link between Cujdiks property and Martinezs place of residence during a trial, Cujdik moved swiftly to distance himself from his confidential informant. In doing so, he inadvertently set Ruderman and Laker on a trail that not only led to the falsified drug arrests he had made with Martinezs help, but an increasingly complex web of police corruption that extended throughout Cujdiks narcotics team. Each step in their investigation led to another shocking exposure of corruption, and their initial article on Benny Martinez and Jeffrey Cujdik gradually expanded to a 10-month series, Tainted Justice, which ran in the Philadelphia Daily News in 2009.

Throughout their investigation, Ruderman and Laker faced opposition from authorities, including Philadelphia law enforcement, the FBI and the legal system. Cujdiks attorney, George Bochetto, spoke for many when he confronted the pair during an interview: He couldnt understand why we would even consider writing a story based on the word of a convicted drug dealer turned informant. What do you guys think you are going to do? Win a Pulitzer Prize? he sneered.

Though there are plenty of heart-pounding moments in Busted, the most fascinating aspect of the book is the internal struggle that Ruderman and Laker engage in as they antagonize police officers, befriend drug dealers and skate along the edge of journalistic ethics. In the end, just like Cujdik, Ruderman found herself becoming ensnared by Benny Martinezs needy allure.

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Cops Dealers Writers