When Cops Turn Bad

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."

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."

This was not untrod territory for Gallagher, who comes as close as anyone to being the hero of the piece. "Over time," he says, "I've heard more than a few civilian complaints against cops. Most are grossly embellished, and some are just outright lies." But Colbert's detailed reconstruction impressed Gallagher. "I had watched a psychiatrist say on a TV program that if you put disturbed people in a pink-colored room, it calms them down," he says, "and I'd just had the detention room painted pink. There was no way Colbert could have known that unless he'd been there." The tale was "just too awful," says Gallagher. "Folks get whacked around a lot. You get used to hearing about that. But what happened to Colbert was far over the line."

Colbert didn't know the names of his assailants, and there was no record of his arrest or appearance at the station house, but it didn't take long for Gallagher to figure it out: Ryan and Blondie. Yet even with Colbert's testimony, it took time--and luck--to bust Blondie and his confederates. There was, after all, no paper trail.

What helped was another police beating, 3,000 miles away. Seven days after Colbert's encounter, the nation's attention shifted from Kuwait to Los Angeles, where Rodney King had been beaten senseless by a gang of vengeful cops. As weeks passed and police everywhere pondered the King horror, the Philadelphia department's internal investigation was leading commanders to a logical conclusion; this was no time for a cover-up. So they released photos of Ryan and Blondie, who had been suspended during the probe, to local newspapers. A flood tide followed. Complaints about the cops' behavior inundated the department and the press. The pattern of abuse was clear, and the stories from the neighborhood spurred on the investigation that would eventually result in the jailing of Blondie and four associates. The five pleaded guilty without a trial. The government urged leniency--the cops had confessed to more crimes than anyone suspected, and implicated more than 50 fellow officers in the process--but the judge was unsympathetic. "You've squashed the Bill of Rights in the mud," he said before sending the men to stiff prison terms.

As the first to admit wrongdoing, Ryan received only 10 months in jail, and is now free. The others, all of whom were sentenced last year, are currently in federal prisons. Three have spoken freely with TIME but refuse to be identified by name. "We need to keep low profiles," explains Blondie dryly. "Being known as a former cop to our fellow inmates is not exactly conducive to our life-styles, or to just our continued living."

In appearance, Blondie, who's now 42, fits no one's image of a bad cop; to the contrary, he bears a startling resemblance to a slim, hard-muscled Robert Redford. The son of a Philadelphia bartender and a clerk for the Internal Revenue Service, he coasted through Archbishop Ryan High School but never thought about college. "I didn't like school," he explains, "except for the girls and parties." He tried to become a fireman but failed the test. "The math was too hard," he says. "The police exam was easier; that's how I became a cop."