Busted by Wendy Ruderman Read Free Book Online

1963, Trantino and a friend, Frank Falco, raged out of control at a North Jersey bar. Lodi Borough police sergeant Peter Voto and police trainee Gary Tedesco arrived to investigate complaints of rowdiness. Trantino beat Voto on the head with a gun, and then ordered him to strip. When Voto disrobed too slowly, Trantino pumped him full of bullets while shouting, “We are going for broke! We are burning all the way! We are going for broke.” Falco fatally shot Tedesco. New York police officers later shot and killed Falco while he was resisting arrest, and Trantino was sentenced to die in the electric chair. The US Supreme Court overturned the deathpenalty in 1972, however, and Trantino escaped execution. The state parole board, succumbing to public outrage, denied his parole nine times, making Trantino the longest-serving prisoner in New Jersey history.
    Trantino’s release in 2002, on his sixty-fourth birthday, was a big story for the Bergen Record . The slain cops had been from our region, and their relatives and friends still lived in our coverage area. The story was very competitive. Every news outlet in and around Manhattan wanted an interview with Trantino, the face of evil. Every editor wanted him first.
    My editors picked me for the task. I was the newspaper’s teeth-baring Chihuahua, but that’s not entirely why they picked me. Trantino was being freed from a halfway house in Camden—less than two miles from my house.
    My plan was to get to the halfway house ahead of the media horde. I set the alarm for 2:00 a.m., stopped at a WaWa for a large coffee, then parked my Honda Civic alongside a vacant lot across the street from the halfway house. The two-story brick building, surrounded by a tall metal fence, looked like a small jail. I sat in darkness, my coffee quickly cooling in the February air, and checked to make sure the car doors were locked. Camden had been ranked—yet again—among the top ten most dangerous cities in America.
    Pretty soon, I had to pee. Damn it. I unlocked the door, stepped out of the car, and looked around. My best bet was the abandoned lot. I tiptoed around the clumps of knee-high weeds and nearly slipped on an empty beer bottle. I yanked down my jeans and underwear and squatted, then sprinted back to the car.
    The sky turned from dark to pale gray, and by 9:00 a.m., I started to think the tip was bad. I didn’t see any other reporters or TV news vans. I felt frustrated. Tired. Hungry. Bored.
    Then I heard a rap on the car window. I looked up. An oldman stood there. He had neatly trimmed white hair, a slim build, and a wrinkled face, and wore a gray sweatshirt and brown corduroy pants. I rolled down the window.
    â€œI hear you’re looking for me. The security guard told me you’ve been out here all night,” he said.
    Holy shit. It was Trantino.
    â€œYes. Yes,” I said. “Get in. Get in!”
    I leaned over and unlocked the passenger-side door. Trantino sank into the passenger seat, using his sneakered foot to move aside a crusty cereal bowl, flecked with dried oatmeal. Yesterday’s breakfast. He dropped his black shoulder bag on the floor and eyed the dusty dashboard. A tangle of green, red, and black electrical wires hung from the car’s busted mechanical sunroof. The windows leaked during rainstorms, and the seats stank of mold. The check-engine light, which reminded me of an orange throat lozenge, was on, as always.
    â€œMan, your car’s a mess,” Trantino said.
    Oh yeah, and you’re a convicted cop killer, I thought.
    I didn’t want to piss him off. I also didn’t want other reporters to get a hold of him. Where could I take him? Instinctively, I drove to my house. I lived just outside Philadelphia in a working-class, mostly white New Jersey town, a slice of Wonder Bread, where local cops worked hard to keep Camden’s criminal element out. My Craftsman-style bungalow, with its leaky A-frame roof and