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"But it's a pain for several reasons," he says. "First, you risk having your agent exposed. Second, who's gonna sell to a white guy standing in line at a crack house? So you get some piper [crack addict] or some whore to make the buy. Or you just pinch someone coming out of the house and find out who's in the place, whether they're armed, and where the dope is. Then you go in. It's illegal that way, but then you go and get a warrant later [and falsify the report], saying you made the buy yourself." Or, adds Schoolboy, "you drop a dime, which means you call in a 'shots fired' alarm to 911. Sometimes you even fire your own gun. Then you wait for the shots-fired call to come over the radio, and you respond to your own call. It's all made up, but it makes the raid legal." It's so routine, says Blondie, "that sometimes we'd laugh and say, 'Gee, which story should we use today? How about No. 23?' You get punch drunk in this business."
Chinaman, a Blondie confederate, even rationalizes theft: "We didn't use our badges as camouflage just to rob anyone we met who we felt like robbing. We took from drug dealers. The way I look at it, that money wasn't theirs anyway, and we needed it more than they did, or than the city did, which was who we were supposed to turn it in to."
Like most addictions, the thievery grew gradually. It began, says Blondie, as "nothing more than reimbursement. Over time, as we got greedy, it became a kind of tax on the bad guys, a spoils-of-war kind of thing. But that's different than a scum-of-the-earth activity like taking a bribe to let a drug operation continue."
That may be a distinction without a difference, but not to Blondie. He's proud that once when he was offered $1,000 a week to let a drug operation flourish, he reported the bribe attempt and the dealer was convicted. Yet over time, according to the charges to which they pleaded guilty, Blondie and his fellow officers stole $100,000.
In Philadelphia, as in most big-city police departments, there is little or no money for informants. Yet cops on the street routinely pay $10 or $20 for information. "It adds up," says Blondie, who estimates that each of the officers in Five Squad was shelling out as much as $50 a week for tips. "I'd have more chance of being elected Governor than I would trying to get money out of the department for informants," says Blondie. "The bosses' view is that we had the best jobs. We wore soft clothes, worked our own hours and made tons of overtime. The brass viewed paying informants out of our own pocket as just a cost of doing business."
That cost, adds Schoolboy, was often seen as too high. "So when we hit a place, we'd take some money to reimburse our informant payments," he says. "After a while," he recalls, "with so much dough sitting around, you just take more, and then you begin to get used to it." But not too used to it. "Unless you're completely nuts," says Chinaman, "you're careful. If you find 10 grand, say, you take only three or four. You can't raid a drug house and come back and not turn in some money. That'd be a sure tip-off."