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    Jeff was going to try another tactic. Two weeks after the landlord-tenant court hearing, on a cold Friday afternoon, Jeff showed up at the rental house. Sonia opened the white aluminum screen door with an emblem of a black horse-drawn carriage on the front. Jeff handed her a letter: “I’m giving you $1,000.00 cash to vacate the property. . . . By accepting the $1,000.00 cash, you agree to vacate . . . by no later than January 31, 2009.”
    Sonia signed the letter and took the money.

5
    BENNY HAD COME TO THE DAILY NEWS AND CONTINUED TO TALK TO US BECAUSE HE WANTED SOMETHING—TWO THINGS, REALLY. IN EXCHANGE FOR HIS story, he insisted on being anonymous. And he wanted us to put him up in a hotel or pay for housing, like some kind of witness protection program.
    Barbara and I said no to both. Benny didn’t get it—he was a convicted drug dealer with questionable credibility. And Benny wanted to be anonymous? This was a time of increasing public mistrust of the news media. Journalists had come under attack for using anonymous sources too liberally, à la Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who was criticized for her stories about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction based largely on unnamed “American officials” and “American intelligence experts.”
    Of course we weren’t the New York Times , the great gray lady. We were the bawdy broad, a tabloid that lived—or died—off street sales. We never apologized for showing a little leg, in the form of a salacious sex story or a rubberneck tragedy—“grief porn,” as some reporters called it—on our front page.
    Still, we had our standards. There was no way we wouldagree to allow Benny, a convicted drug dealer, to accuse a decorated cop of wrongdoing without using his name. Benny had to go on the record.
    When we told Benny this, he balked and left the newsroom. A few days later, he was back. “You’re all I got,” he told us.
    Benny had gone to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division, but he didn’t think investigators took him seriously, nor did he trust them. He also shopped his story to Fox 29, but he didn’t even get past the television station’s front lobby.
    We explained to Benny that the Daily News doesn’t have a witness protection program, and certainly doesn’t pay people for stories. We thought the FBI might be interested in Benny’s story. We also knew that once the FBI started digging around, they wouldn’t want Benny talking to us. So we milked Benny dry, talking to him for hours, with a tape recorder running.
    When we were done, we steered Benny to the feds. We gave him the name and telephone number of John Roberts, the supervisory special agent of the FBI’s Public Corruption Squad.
    Roberts had a record of tackling police corruption. He was one of the FBI agents who investigated the Thirty-Ninth District police corruption scandal in the mid-1990s. In that probe, the feds charged five rogue narcotics cops with stealing money from drug suspects and covering up the thefts with phony arrests and search warrants.
    History had a way of repeating itself in Philadelphia. And Barbara and I suspected that what Benny was telling us could prove that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
    To tell Benny’s story, Barbara and I needed access to police search warrants.
    Each search warrant would be a road map: it would list theaddress of the drug dealer, the dealer’s name or street name, the amount and type of drugs purchased by the informant and how the deal went down, the badge number of every officer who participated in the raid, and what, if anything, police found in the house.
    The warrants would show us what Jeff said he and other officers had witnessed to persuade a judge to authorize a raid. The paperwork would tell us whether Jeff used Benny as an informant, and what