Lytton and Hersing might as well have come from different planets. They had met over lunch with Lash and Anderson at the Moshulu, a floating restaurant at Penn’s Landing, and the whorehouse owner says he took an immediate dislike to Lytton because of the way the prosecutor talked to the waitresses. He regarded Lytton as a snob. As for Lytton, the most he will say about Hersing is: “He was a source, an informant, and as such he inhabited the world we were investigating. You get used to working with people like that when you’re a prosecutor. It’s part of the job.”
As evidence accumulated against the Philadelphia policemen, Lytton felt a mounting sense of outrage—a righteous, intellectual revulsion. He would find just the right expression for it in an old dissenting opinion by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis: “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”
As a law enforcement official, Lytton felt that the kind of corruption he was seeing in the Philadelphia Police Department undermined his own integrity, and that made him mad. “It is very difficult, I think, to deal with citizens and make them have faith in what you’re doing, when they know that other people doing exactly the same thing, perhaps for a different governmental level or structure, are corrupt. It’s an insidious, cancerous problem. Once the people out there start to think that people in law enforcement are corrupt, they tend, I think, to have a feeling that, well, maybe everybody is corrupt.” That was not the sort of world in which Bill Lytton wanted his son and daughter to grow up.
He also found the threat inherent in such corruption so chilling that he feared retribution from the police department. He made sure that his wife carried phone numbers of FBI agents with her at all times. He even went to his son’s school and spoke to his teacher. He wanted to make absolutely sure that the school would under no circumstances release his son to anyone without hearing from him first—especially if the person in question identified himself as a law enforcement officer.
Lytton had known for about a week that the Trenton Times was on to the story. After Meyer first phoned Anderson, the FBI supervisor had met Lytton for lunch outdoors in Independence Mall to discuss how to handle the reporter. They decided not to cooperate, but began preparing to move fast if the story broke prematurely.
When he got the word, on that Halloween evening, that the story was about to appear, Lytton was angry. At that point, with their hidden video camera and tape recorders, he believed that they had already gathered enough evidence to convict Inspector John DeBenedetto, Lieutenant John Smith, Detective Abe Schwartz, and four other officers. “They were dead in the water,” he says. But there was more they wanted to do with Hersing. Lytton knew that after the story had been published, their informant’s cover would be blown. Everyone involved was angry at Hersing, too. They knew it was his big mouth that had caused this.
But there was no time for recriminations. Lytton knew that he had to move fast. He went to work very early that Monday morning.
“It was sort of like being in the Situation Room,” Lytton recalls. “We were hoping to beat the newspaper, and I was curious to see what evidence we would be able to gather. It was a hectic time.”
Lytton had prepared subpoenas in advance in case of an emergency like this. There were certain pieces of evidence that he wanted to secure before the targets of the probe knew what was happening. One of the subpoenas demanded reports from the police department’s internal affairs division. Lytton didn’t want DeBenedetto and Smith to be able to claim that, in extorting bribes from Hersing, they had just been playing along with him because they were investigating him. If there were no Internal Affairs reports on such a case, then the inspector would have a hard time proving such a claim. He also wanted all the papers in John DeBenedetto’s desk. There were references on the tapes to the inspector’s “lists.” And Lytton wanted all the papers he could collect from the desks and lockers of Lieutenant Smith and Detective Schwartz.
He did not have any direct knowledge that they would find information inside the desks and lockers, so he didn’t call a judge to ask for a search warrant—which would have entitled the FBI just to seize the material outright. Instead, Lytton drafted forthwith subpoenas, which would order the suspects to deliver the contents of the desks and lockers immediately to the grand jury. Normally a suspect would have the right to challenge such a subpoena, and there would have to be a hearing to determine whether or not the suspect would have to comply. But in a conversation with the city solicitor’s office, Lytton had learned that the police department’s rules and regulations permitted the department to search individual lockers and desks. This meant they could proceed without waiting for search warrants if the department cooperated.
On the morning before the story broke, Lytton started making phone calls to recruit the assistance that Commissioner Solomon had promised.
Thompson and Lash’s first concern that morning was for their informant’s safety. They drove out to Hersing’s home in Levittown and rang the doorbell and banged on the door. There was no answer. Thompson recalls that both he and Lash were worried that Hersing might be lying dead inside the house, but, on the other hand, with the hours he kept they knew that he might just be dead asleep. They walked around to the back of the house and banged on Hersing’s bedroom windows. Finally, the bleary-eyed informant came to the window. They warned Hersing of what was happening, and urged him to be careful. He wasn’t unduly worried, so they left and returned to Philadelphia.
When they got back, Lytton handed subpoenas to the agents and sent them out to do their work. It was an exciting day for Thompson and Lash. A year and a half of work was riding on these cases. This was their last chance to collect evidence before their suspects were tipped off.
Lytton had alerted the city solicitor’s office. Lawyers there called the police department’s internal affairs division, so it would be ready to help. That afternoon, after returning from Hersing’s house, Thompson, Lash, and FBI agent John O’Doherty met Chief Inspector Robert Armstrong at the internal affairs division office at Third and Race Streets. Thompson and O’Doherty, along with an assistant city solicitor and a police inspector on Armstrong’s staff, drove across town to central division headquarters at Twentieth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. They carried subpoenas for the contents of John DeBenedetto’s desk and John Smith’s locker. Armstrong and another staff inspector from his division drove over in a separate car. In order to comply with departmental regulations, these police officers would actually conduct the searches as Thompson and O’Doherty stood by. Lash, accompanied by another lawyer from the city solicitor’s office and another Internal Affairs officer, drove east to Abe Schwartz’s office in east division headquarters, at Front and Westmoreland Streets.
Armstrong’s car arrived at Central first. According to Thompson, the city inspectors went upstairs in the building and told DeBenedetto that two FBI agents were on their way with subpoenas. Just as Thompson arrived at the door of DeBenedetto’s office, he remembers seeing “a five-by-seven, dark brown or black notebook” lying on top of the inspector’s desk. DeBenedetto was in the office. Thompson says he turned momentarily to say something to someone in the hall, and, as he did, DeBenedetto abruptly left through a side door to the same office. When Thompson entered, the notebook was gone.
DeBenedetto came back a few moments later as the Internal Affairs inspector was pulling things out of his desk. Thompson asked DeBenedetto about the notebook, which one of the other staff inspectors had also seen, but DeBenedetto said he didn’t know what they were talking about.
Thompson says, “He was a little shocked that we were there. His basic thing was, you know, talking to the other city police inspector saying, ‘What is all this about? What can I do?’ And he kept saying, ‘Sure, go ahead, go through my desk. I don’t have anything to hide. I
don’t understand all of this.’ I explained to him that he was under investigation and that if he would like to talk to the U.S. attorneys he could, that he should call, he could call me or anybody else and that we would be available to listen to him.”
Thompson says DeBenedetto had the desk of a pack rat. They filled two large boxes with the contents of his desk drawers. They found messages and notes from one and two years ago, old yellowing calendars, telephone numbers, business cards, and lists—lists that included names of people who Thompson knew were making payoffs. Beside the names were written numbers—“250, 300”—that corresponded to the amounts of protection money that the FBI agents suspected were being paid. At first glance, it looked like a good haul.
On this day, Thompson thought the inspector seemed supremely confident that there was nothing in the desk to incriminate him. DeBenedetto did not yet realize how much the FBI already knew. It was logical for him to assume that the bits and pieces of administrative detritus in his desk couldn’t add up to anything substantial. Besides, Thompson thought, with all the stuff packed in that desk, it was extremely doubtful that DeBenedetto had a clear idea of exactly what was in there.
Smith did not have a desk, so O’Doherty and one of the city inspectors collected things from the lieutenant’s locker, including a list of bars and modeling studios with figures written alongside each name.
As he returned to the federal courthouse with these cartons of new evidence, Thompson remembers pondering just how confident DeBenedetto had seemed that morning. For the first time it struck him just how much of a shock the Philadelphia police had coming. So far as he knew, there had never been a serious investigation of graft like this in the police department. Perhaps it was no wonder that DeBenedetto was so confident that he would not be caught, or that he could bluff his way through.
Thompson had no idea exactly how confident the inspector really was.
Because early that evening, DeBenedetto took Thompson up on his offer. In a move that would later make his defense attorneys groan, the inspector phoned Bill Lytton.
The prosecutor almost dropped the telephone with surprise when DeBenedetto identified himself. Lytton had been talking with Thompson about the notebook the agent thought DeBenedetto had removed from his desk. They were both disappointed that the inspector had been able to spirit it away. Then the phone rang.
“It was after five o’clock, which was why I answered the phone rather than my secretary,” Lytton recalls. “The voice said, ‘Mr. Lytton?’ I said, ‘Yes?’ ‘This is John DeBenedetto,’ and it was, in fact, the voice I recognized, having heard it so many times on the tapes. I said, ‘Yes, sir?’ And he said, ‘I’d like to come in and talk with you.’ And I said, ‘Fine. When?’ And he said he was going to go home and change, and he would be in around six-thirty. And I said, fine, I’d be there and I’d be glad to talk with him. He said he wanted to get this whole thing straightened out, implying that there had been some terrible mistake.”
Lytton hung up the phone and turned with the news to Thompson, Lash, and Bob Hickok, the other prosecutor assigned to the case. The four men were dumbfounded. They spent the next hour or so discussing how to handle the meeting.
“We decided not to tell him what we had,” Lytton says. “We would just ask him questions and see how much he hung himself.”
The four men were hungry. They had been running around so much all day that none of them had eaten. But they were afraid to leave. They didn’t want to miss DeBenedetto. Finally they decided that they had enough time to run out for a quick bite. But in the hallway, on their way out of the courthouse building, they ran into the inspector. He had come early.
DeBenedetto looked impressive and commanding in a gray business suit and a white shirt. From the inspector’s photograph, and from tape recordings of his voice, Lytton had pictured a much bigger man. In person, the inspector was decidedly shorter—under six feet—than the prosecutor, and weighed less than he did. He was hardly the threatening presence Lytton had expected. It seemed odd to be suddenly looking down on this brown-haired man with the wide, square face.
The inspector appeared calm and friendly.
“I’m here to clear all this up,” he said.
The four men turned around and walked back with DeBenedetto to the U.S. attorney’s conference room. DeBenedetto sat on one side of a long, narrow table and Lytton, Hickok, Thompson, and Lash sat on the other.
Thompson then advised the inspector of his rights. He was not under arrest, so there was no legal necessity for it, but the prosecutors and the agents had decided beforehand to do so, just to be careful. They told DeBenedetto that they were investigating police corruption. DeBenedetto said he understood. The agents asked if he would sign a standard waiver form, which is a formal acknowledgment that he has been informed of his rights to stay silent and to have a lawyer present. For the first time the inspector seemed leery. He refused to sign, but he repeated that he understood his rights.
Thompson and Lash brought into the room the boxes of material taken from his desk earlier that afternoon. The boxes had not been opened. Lytton asked DeBenedetto if they could open them and look through his things, and the inspector told them to go ahead.
“He said we could look at anything we wanted,” Lytton recalls. “He was very, very cooperative at that point, when he still thought he could probably talk his way out of it.” (Later, at a pretrial hearing, DeBenedetto testified that he had not given his permission for the boxes to be opened. Lytton calls the testimony “an absolute, outright, boldfaced lie, and DeBenedetto was not a very good liar, either.”)
So they opened up the boxes and went through the contents with him. He explained what a lot of the material was—much of it was legal papers pertaining to his ongoing divorce proceedings. Then Lytton began questioning DeBenedetto. He asked about his career, his assignment to the central division. DeBenedetto obligingly listed all the people working for him. He even said he would be willing to take a lie detector test.
Then Lytton began asking the inspector more specific questions—questions to which he already knew the answers. Inside a black binder on the chair next to him were transcripts of tape recordings and FBI reports going back to the origins of the investigation: to Donald Hersing’s 1981 meetings with George Woods and Ray Emery, the vice squad officers who first extorted protection money from him; to his phone calls and meetings with Detective Abe Schwartz, who had fixed Hersing up with the inspector; to the meeting where an angry DeBenedetto had first learned from Hersing that Woods was collecting money without passing it up to him, and the subsequent phone call in which the police inspector explained, with relish, how he had demoted Woods and Emery because they had been “disloyal”; to Hersing’s ugly encounter with the inspector and Lieutenant Smith at the Parkway Room after he had withheld payoffs from them for four months—the notorious “browbeating session” where DeBenedetto demanded more money than the $500 Hersing had brought along…. It was all there, in the black binder.
The prosecutor’s questions started with Woods and Emery. He asked why the inspector had transferred the officers soon after taking command. DeBenedetto explained that it was not unusual for an incoming inspector to replace members of his own squad with his own people. There was no problem with either Woods or Emery, he said. There had been no special reason for their transfer.
Lytton asked what DeBenedetto would mean if he called one of his men “disloyal.” The inspector seemed puzzled. He said “disloyal” meant disloyal. If somebody lied to him, he would consider that person disloyal. Lytton asked what he would do if he found out any of his men were taking payoffs. DeBenedetto said he would “put a man back if he were dirty.”
This went on for nearly two hours. At one point, as he grew more uncomfortable, DeBenedetto took a rubber band from his pocket and began twisting it in his hands. Lytton led DeBenedetto through a litany of questions drawn from the material in the binder. DeBenedetto said he had never been offered any money. If anybody had e
ver offered him money, he would have thrown him out, DeBenedetto said—it would have been the last time that person ever spoke to him. He presented himself as the image of an honest cop, even pointing out that, while he was a staff inspector with Internal Affairs, he had personally busted thirty-four cops for corruption. When Lytton asked about Donald Hersing, DeBenedetto acknowledged that he vaguely knew Hersing, referring to him as a “punk,” saying he was “crazy.” He said he had agreed to meet with this fellow—“Maybe his name was Hersing”—at a restaurant because he was a friend of Abe Schwartz’s. But as soon as this guy mentioned money, DeBenedetto said, he stopped him. He also said he had never had Lieutenant Smith meet with this man for any reason.
“At that point he probably figured we only had Hersing’s word against his, which wouldn’t have placed the inspector in too much trouble,” Lytton says. DeBenedetto told Lytton confidently that he would gladly return at any time to answer any further questions.
Finally, Lytton said, “Inspector, I’ve got some bad news for you. We’ve been tape-recording your conversations for eighteen months.” He put the binder on the table. “Here are the transcripts of those conversations, and you’ve been lying to us for two hours.”
DeBenedetto reacted angrily. He said, “You don’t have me on videotape.”
“We’ve got you on tape, Inspector,” Lytton said.
“Well, you can’t say that I’ve been lying. You haven’t asked me any specific questions.”
“We’ve asked you very specific questions,” Lytton said. “And you’ve lied to us about them.”
Agent Lash remembers that the inspector seemed to undergo a stark transformation when confronted with the evidence against him. Suddenly, the cool, commanding figure seemed nervous, shaken. DeBenedetto got up and began to pace, working the rubber band in his hands, as Lytton read to him from the transcripts. Lytton read the portion of the tape where DeBenedetto describes Woods as “disloyal,” and then he read the portion of the Parkway Room tape where the inspector tells Hersing, “You take that five hundred dollars and add something substantial to it.”