It was around 8 o'clock in the evening of Feb. 24, 1991, and Arthur Colbert was lost. Most of the rest of the world was focused on the Persian Gulf, where the ground war had begun only hours earlier, but Colbert had a woman on his mind. His date for the night lived in a Philadelphia neighborhood known for its crime and poverty, and Colbert couldn't find her house. Then he got lucky--or so he thought. A police wagon was idling down the block, and Colbert got out of his dark blue 1985 Toyota Camry to ask directions. Inside the police van were two uniformed cops, a lean, square-jawed officer with longish yellow hair--known and feared on the streets as Blondie--and a short, dark-haired officer named Tommy Ryan. As Colbert recalls it today, "I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I probably would have been safer in Kuwait."
For both Colbert and the Philadelphia police department, a nightmare was about to begin. Before it was over, it would expose a pattern of corruption that would bring down nine Philadelphia cops, implicate scores of others and eventually lead to the freeing of 160 wrongfully convicted prisoners, all victims of a web of misdeeds masquerading as heroic police work.
The Colbert incident was neither as dramatic nor as horrendous as the recent brutalization of Abner Louima at the hands of New York City police. Cases like that grab national headlines, but they are aberrations. More systemic and infinitely harder to root out is a more common form of corruption: too many cops in too many places who routinely flout the laws they are sworn to uphold, cops who come to view the law itself as a maze of misguided rules that hinder their ability to "get the job done."
Cops like Blondie.
Cops who have created a world governed by an unwritten code of police conduct, a shadow set of rules that guide them as they go about the gritty daily business of tracking and then trapping bad guys. The shadow rules bear little resemblance to official police procedures, but in the real world of urban policing, they prevail.
This is a look into that world, a sort of parallel universe in which protecting "us" from "them" can cost "us" dearly, as Colbert--college student, aspiring FBI agent and a man free of any criminal history--was about to discover on that Friday night. Unwittingly, Colbert walked into a fiefdom commanded by a rogue cop so intimidating that he had cowed an entire neighborhood, and so clever that he had won 14 perfect job ratings in 14 years.
As Colbert, 24, approached the wagon that night, Blondie and Ryan emerged to greet him. "What are you doing here, nigger?" Colbert recalls one of the cops saying. As Colbert explained his predicament, the officers patted him down and searched his car. "What are you doing?" asked Colbert, who knew the law. "What's your probable cause to search me?" Neither officer responded. "I remember thinking that I was indeed in a bad neighborhood," Colbert says. "The cops have it rough in the real world. They never know if you're a bad guy, so I figured I could take a little abuse."