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When the search turned up nothing, Ryan and Blondie directed Colbert to his date's home on the next block. Within minutes, as Colbert and the woman were driving off, the same cops appeared again. After telling the woman to "get lost," they handcuffed Colbert and told him he resembled a drug dealer named Hakim. Procedure dictated that Colbert be booked at the 39th-district police headquarters, about a mile away. But Colbert wasn't in the land of official procedure; he was in the hands of Blondie. So, instead, he was taken to 1518 Ontario Street, a run-down three-story home and sometime crack house that served as a sort of hidden adjunct to precinct headquarters.
Once inside the building, Colbert was put in a chair in the middle of a 9-ft. by 12-ft. back room on the first floor. Still in cuffs, he was beaten with fists, nightsticks and then a long-handled black flashlight. "We were trying to get him to admit he was Hakim," says Blondie, who agreed to talk to TIME over several days at a federal prison far from Philadelphia, where he is currently serving 13 years for violating the civil rights of Colbert and dozens of others and for stealing money during searches and arrests.
In the 39th district, Blondie was notorious for a version of Russian roulette he used with those he arrested--evidence or no evidence. Colbert fit the bill. Blondie cocked the hammer on what he now says was an empty pistol. "If you don't tell us what we want to know, I'm going to blow your head off," he said. Colbert wouldn't budge. Even today, Blondie--who fears for his life in prison if his real name is disclosed--defends the tactic. "I viewed it as kind of a humane alternative," he says. "It was less hurtful than beating, and it usually got us the information we wanted." But not this time.
Still convinced they had Hakim, the officers took Colbert to the station house, where, in a detention room, they roughed him up some more. "We thought the change of venue might work," says Blondie. It didn't. Colbert wasn't Hakim and wouldn't say he was. So, with Colbert's house keys in hand, Ryan and Blondie then traveled outside their jurisdiction to search Colbert's apartment in the close-in suburb of Cheltenham. When nothing incriminating was found, the cops returned to headquarters and released Colbert--after six hours of terror. "Let us catch you around here again," Colbert recalls Blondie's saying, "and we'll kill you."
The cops made a tiny mistake that evening, a small error of the sort that brings down empires: they failed to return Colbert's driver's license. (Ryan had thrown it away.) Colbert was about to move to Detroit, where he is now employed as a social worker, and he needed his Pennsylvania license to apply for one in Michigan. So, frightened and trembling, Colbert returned to the 39th headquarters the next day. "Here was a black guy complaining about two white cops to a white lieutenant," recalls John Gallagher, the duty supervisor that day. "It took some balls for him to come in."