Pubdate: Fri, 20 Mar 2009
Source: Philadelphia Daily News (PA)
Copyright: 2009 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.
Contact: http://www.philly.com/dailynews/about/feedback/
Website: http://www.philly.com/dailynews/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/339
Authors: Wendy Ruderman, & Barbara Laker, Philadelphia Daily News

DRUG RAIDS GONE BAD

Shopkeepers Say Plainclothes Cops Barged In, Looted Stores & Stole Cash

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.

"I so scared," said Eunice Nam, 56. "We were on floor. Handcuffs on
me. I so, so scared, I wet my pants."

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 Nams were arrested for selling tiny ziplock bags that police
consider drug paraphernalia, but which the couple described as tobacco
pouches.

When they later unlocked their store, the Nams allege, they discovered
that a case of lighter fluid and handfuls of Zippo lighters were
missing. 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.

The Nams' story is strikingly similar to those told by other mom-and-
pop store owners, from Dominicans in Hunting Park to Jordanians in
South Philadelphia.

The Daily News interviewed seven store owners and an attorney
representing another. Independently, they told similar stories: Cujdik
and fellow officers destroyed or cut the wires to surveillance
cameras. Some store owners said they watched as officers took food and
slurped energy drinks. Other store owners said cigarette cartons,
batteries, cell phones and candy bars were missing after raids.

The officers also confiscated cash from the stores - a routine
practice in Narcotics Field Unit raids - but didn't record the full
amount on police property receipts, the shop owners allege.

In one case, the officers failed to document about $8,200, and in
another, about $7,000, the store owners said.

In all eight cases, Cujdik applied for the search warrant and played a
key role in the bust. The store owners were charged with possessing
and delivering drug paraphernalia, specifically the tiny bags. In the
cases that have been settled, judges sentenced the store owners to
probation or less.

As for those broken surveillance cameras, officers have "no reason to
cut camera wires or destroy cameras," said a high-ranking Philadelphia
police official, who requested anonymity. "None whatsoever."

"It would look like they're trying to hide something," the official
said. "It would look like they don't want to be on the surveillance
camera themselves."

George Bochetto, an attorney representing Cujdik, said the store
owners' allegations are false.

"Now that the Daily News has created a mass hysteria concerning the
Philadelphia Narcotics Unit, it comes as no surprise that every
defendant ever arrested will now proclaim their innocence and bark
about being mistreated," Bochetto wrote in an e-mail to the Daily News.

"Suffice it to say, there is a not a scintilla of truth to such
convenient protestations."

"They didn't do the right thing," said Moe Maghtha, who helps run his
father's South Philly tobacco shop, which was raided in December 2007.
"You're not allowed to sell those bags, OK. Just take them out. You
don't have to rob my store and steal cigarettes."

At least three former police informants who worked with Cujdik told
the Daily News that he often gave them cartons of cigarettes.

"When he raided a corner store, he'd give me cigarettes," said Tiffany
Gorham, a former Cujdik informant.

Cujdik is at the center of an expanding federal and local probe into
allegations that he lied on search-warrant applications to gain access
to suspected drug homes and that he became too close with his
informants. He rented a house to one and allegedly provided bail money
to Gorham.

After a Daily News report detailing the allegations, authorities
formed a special task force, composed of FBI agents and police
Internal Affairs officers, to investigate.

The store owners' allegations of theft and damage to surveillance
cameras could implicate, in addition to Cujdik, at least 17 other
officers and three police supervisors, all in the Narcotics Field Unit.

"Taking property and not reporting it and not returning it - that's a
crime," said Witold "Vic" Walczak, legal director of the state's
American Civil Liberties Union.

"It's like this unregulated little band of rogue cops, is what it
sounds like," Walczak said.

The store owners typically had thousands of dollars in cash on hand at
the time of the raids. The money came from lottery, cigarette and
phone-card sales. They also used cash to pay wholesale grocery vendors
and store rent or mortgages, they said.

Luciano Estevez, 39, a Dominican who co-owns the J R Mini Market in
West Philadelphia, which was raided in August 2008, told the Daily
News that he had about $9,000 in the store, but the police property
receipt documented about $800, he said.

"They take money and don't write it down. They [are supposed to be]
the law," Estevez said. "Taking money like that, I don't think that's
right. We pay a lot of taxes."

Estevez, who came to the United States in 1985, is a lot like other
store owners who were interviewed by the Daily News - immigrants who
live here legally and have no prior criminal records in Philadelphia.
They commonly open their shops just after dawn and close long after
dark.

"I believed in the American dream. I still do," said Emilio Vargas,
who owns the building that houses the Dominguez Grocery Store, on
Potter Street in Kensington, which was raided in March 2007.

"I believed that if you work hard, you get ahead. But everything
changed after this," said Vargas, 29, who came to the U.S. from the
Dominican Republic in 1996.

"I never had a drug in my hands. I never been in trouble. I used to
believe in justice in America. I don't know now. It makes me question
the justice system."

During the raid, Vargas said, Cujdik and fellow squad members
confiscated $700 in phone-card money that he kept in a cigar box,
$1,500 in a bag to pay vendors, $200 in the cash register and $1,400
from his pocket to pay the mortgage - totaling $3,800. The police
property receipt that the officers filed, however, reports that only
$1,456 was seized.

"They opened the fridge doors and took juices - energy drinks," Vargas
said. "They emptied it."

A judge dismissed all charges against Vargas after ruling that
prosecutors failed to present their case in a timely fashion,
according to court records.

Rattled by the ordeal, Vargas said he now works in another grocery
store, far from the rundown Kensington neighborhood of the Dominguez
Grocery.

"I didn't want to go back," he said. "It was too much for me. I didn't
want anything like that to happen again."

The store owners interviewed said they paid hundreds of dollars in
bail and legal fees after their arrests. They lost thousands more
because their stores were shuttered for periods of days or weeks.

"All my store was messed up," said David Nam, 62. "I found my wallet
and my keys thrown on the floor. . . . Cigarette boxes all over floor.
I think of this and get a headache."

His son, Steven Nam, said he found chocolate-bar wrappers on the
floor.

"While they [the cops] were walking around, they helped themselves to
Snickers and drank sodas," he said.

The ACLU's Walczak, who handles police-misconduct and immigration-
rights cases, said foreign store owners who struggle with English are
"easy targets" of police abuse because they're not likely to file
complaints or "raise a fuss."

"[The officers] seem to be preying on what is a particularly
vulnerable population," Walczak said. "It's really sad."

Danilo Burgos, president of the city's Dominican Grocery Store
Association of more than 300 members, said one member recently alleged
that police cut video-camera wires and stole $5,000 while searching
his store. The store owner told Burgos that he didn't want to report
it.

"Most of these people just want to earn a decent living and go on
about their business," Burgos said.

And many Dominicans often are afraid to speak up because they come
from a country where police are notoriously corrupt.

"Back home, police get away with everything, including murder," Burgos
said.

"They fear something similar could happen to them here."

Moe Maghtha, who moved to the United States from Jordan in 1999, said
his father's experience with Cujdik and the other narcotics officers
has left him too scared to operate his South Philly tobacco shop.

"If he sees cops now, he freaks out," Maghtha said. "My dad never been
in jail. My dad never been in trouble. Now he's like a little kid that
got bit by a dog. He won't go out."

Maghtha, 23, said he had to give up his job as a satellite-dish
technician to take over his dad's store. Maghtha's father, 53,
recently suffered heart problems and did not want to be interviewed or
allow his name or the name of his store to appear in this article.

The raid on the Maghtha shop happened on the afternoon of Dec. 7,
2007. Maghtha's father had just finished tallying about $14,000 in
cash. Maghtha said he was on his way to the store to relieve his
father, who'd planned to deposit the cash at a nearby bank.

Maghtha said he arrived just after Cujdik and six other officers had
burst into the shop. The officers told Maghtha to stay outside. He
watched through the window as an officer used wire cutters to clip
wires to all four security cameras in the shop, Maghtha said.

The officer, who wore a navy blue jacket and a baseball cap, kept his
head down as he cut the wires so the camera wouldn't capture his face,
Maghtha said.

Police arrested Maghtha's father for selling little bags that he had
ordered from a local tobacco wholesaler.

When Maghtha opened the store a few days later, he couldn't see the
floor because of the mounds of dumped coffee grinds, candy wrappers
and crushed cigarette cartons, he said.

Nearly 40 cartons of Newports were missing, Maghtha
said.

The officers left a copy of the property receipt, prepared by Cujdik
and signed by Cpl. Mark Palma, which stated that the officers seized
$7,888.

Palma did not return a phone message yesterday.

"My dad said, 'There is no way, because I know how much money I had
that day. I had counted it all up so I can take it to the bank and pay
the wholesaler,'" Maghtha said.

Last August, a judge found Maghtha's father guilty of possessing and
selling drug paraphernalia and sentenced him to nine months'
probation, court records show.

He appealed the case - and then narcotics officers came
back.

On Nov. 6, 2008, 11 months after the first raid, officers returned,
alleging that they witnessed three people buying drugs from Maghtha's
dad at the shop.

Police found no drugs in the store during the raid, court documents
show.

"My dad never seen drugs in his life. He don't know what drugs look
like," Maghtha said.

Maghtha and his uncle contend the officers raided the store to
retrieve video footage from the first raid.

Maghtha had saved images on a shop computer of an officer, wearing a
baseball cap, clipping the wires during the December 2007 raid, he
said.

When the cops returned, an officer put a gun to the head of Maghtha's
father and demanded the video, said Maghtha's uncle, Abdallah Sarhan.

"The first question that he asked was, 'Where is the videotape?,'"
said Sarhan, 33, who was helping out at the store that evening.

The same officer then slapped Maghtha's father across the face, Sarhan
said.

"I said, 'You don't have the right to slap him. Why you touch his
face?' " Sarhan said. "I never, ever, ever in my life see something
like this."

Four days after the raid and the arrest of Maghtha's father, he re-
opened the store and discovered the computer that controlled the video
surveillance system was gutted, Maghtha said.

"They took everything from the computer - the hard drive, the DVR
[video] card, the DVD and CD-ROM player," Maghtha said.

Maghtha's father was charged with drug dealing. The case is
pending.

Most store owners interviewed for this report said that when the
plainclothes cops barged through their doors, they believed they were
being robbed at gunpoint.

Sirilo Ortiz said that on the evening of Nov. 1, 2007, he had emerged
from the basement of Lycomings Grocery in Hunting Park to see a gun
barrel pointed at his face.

After Cujdik and his squad members burst into the store, they cut the
wires to the surveillance camera with wire cutters, he said, then
looted the store.

Ortiz, 39, who came to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic in 1996,
had owned the store just five days.

One cop took a Black & Mild, a slender cigar, from the shelf and
started to smoke, said Ortiz, speaking in Spanish through an
interpreter.

The officers took three brown boxes from his kitchen and loaded them
with food, he said.

"It was like they was shopping," said Maria Espinal, who was working
in the kitchen and saw the cops take boxes stuffed with packaged goods.

The cops put a gun to Espinal's head, too, she said, before
identifying themselves as police. "I thought I was going to die," she
said.

Ortiz said he had about $500 in his pocket and $700 in the cash
register. But the police recorded taking a total of only $918 on
property receipts.

Ortiz said he took a plea deal and served six months' probation and 25
hours of community service for selling the tiny plastic bags.

He was so depressed and anxious, he lost 25 pounds and could no longer
work in the store, he said.

"I couldn't take it no more," said Ortiz. "Every time someone opened
the door, I thought something bad would happen."

He gave the store to his brother and now drives a cab.

"Cops are supposed to take care of people and do the right thing,"
Ortiz said. "I don't trust them anymore. You're supposed to trust the
police, but they're the ones you can't trust.

"They weren't supposed to be the ones."
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake