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THE NARCOTICS officers knew they were being watched on video surveillance moments after they entered the bodega.
Officer Jeffrey Cujdik told store owner Jose Duran that police were in search of tiny ziplock bags often used to package drugs. But, during the September 2007 raid, Cujdik and fellow squad members seemed much more interested in finding every video camera in the West Oak Lane store.
“I got like seven or eight eyes,” shouted Officer Thomas Tolstoy, referring to the cameras, as the officers glanced up. “There’s one outside. There is one, two, three, four in the aisles, and there’s one right here somewhere.” For the next several minutes, Tolstoy and other Narcotics Field Unit officers systematically cut wires to cameras until those “eyes” could no longer see. Then, after the officers arrested Duran and took him to jail, nearly $10,000 in cash and cartons of Marlboros and Newports were missing from the locked, unattended store, Duran alleges. The officers guzzled sodas and scarfed down fresh turkey hoagies, Little Debbie fudge brownies and Cheez-Its, he said.
What the officers didn’t count on was that Duran’s high-tech video system had a hidden backup hard-drive. The backup downloaded the footage to his private Web site before the wires were cut. Although Duran has no video of the alleged looting, he has a 10-minute video that shows the officers using a bread knife, pliers, milk crates and their hands to disable the surveillance system. Duran’s video bolsters allegations by eight other Philadelphia store owners who said that Cujdik and other officers destroyed or cut wires to surveillance cameras. Those store owners also said that after the wires were cut, cigarettes, batteries, cell phones, food and drinks were taken. The Daily News reported the allegations March 20. The officers also confiscated cash from the stores – a routine practice in drug raids – but didn’t record the full amount on police property receipts, the shop owners allege.
Six more store owners or workers, including Duran, contacted the Daily News after the March 20 article. All six described similar ordeals involving destroyed cameras and missing money and merchandise.
#20… It’s Philly, so let’s split the difference and correctly call it the Democrats’ fault?
Sociopaths in uniform.
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Philly has long been plagued with corrupt law enforcement. Every few years they get caught and straighten up for a while. Then they get lax and revert to their old ways.
Shouldn’t the FBI fix this?
Cops are pure scum.
Being from Philly myself, I can tell you I hear these kinds of stories all the time. Friends tell me of cop parties where copious amounts of drugs are being used used clearly taken from “evidence.” That being said this is a rough town to be a cop in, 3 killed in the last 6 months. On one hand I have a lot of respect for the job and I have met my fair share of awesome, down to earth cops. But clearly like anything else there has to be more stringent oversight to thwart these kinds of shenanigans. And that can only be blamed on the commish.