Philly narcotics officers raid bodega for mini Ziplock bags, disables surveillance system. Bodega left trashed, $10K missing.
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.
The officers didn’t “touch the money with the system looking,” said Duran, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic 15 years ago and has no prior criminal record in Philadelphia.
They touched “the money after they destroy all the system,” he said.
