Game over

Here's an interesting update on some of the previous winners of our prestigious, world-famous Jack-Booted Thug of the Week award.

The above picture is from a Philadelphia Daily News article that details the latest developments in the case of the Philly PD narcotics squad, led by "Officer" Jeffrey Cujdik, that was accused of rousting multiple convenience stores with bad warrants obtained by trumped-up information.

The officers then allegedly disabled the stores' security cameras and proceeded to loot the businesses of cigarettes, money and food and drink for the officers' personal use.

Naturally, when the reports first surfaced, the denials from Cujdik's lawyer came fast and furious, attacking the credibility of the merchants themselves:

"George Bochetto, an attorney representing Cujdik, said the store owners' allegations are false.

'Now that the Daily News has created a mass hysteria concerning the Philadelphia Narcotics Unit, it comes as no surprise that every defendant ever arrested will now proclaim their innocence and bark about being mistreated,' Bochetto wrote in an e-mail to the Daily News.

'Suffice it to say, there is a not a scintilla of truth to such convenient protestations.'"

Yeah, not so much, George. We now have many scintillas of truth, thanks to one of the store owners, who had a hidden hard drive in place that streamed camera footage to an off-site location before the rogue cops trashed the system's wires. The picture shown above clearly shows a cop, knife in hand, preparing to cut the wires to a camera, an act that has absolutely no legal rationale for its taking place, especially at a supposed "crime" scene." A second picture in the gallery shows another officer reaching up to access another camera contained in one of those ceiling bubble housings commonly used in such setups, presumably to disable that camera as well.

Audio recorded from the feed also seems to be pretty damning to the officers' pathetic plea of innocence:

"'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."

I hope you've got eyes in the back of your head where you're headed soon, Mr. Tolstoy. There's more audio transcripts described in the story that leave no doubt that all of the cops present were in on the scheme.

The store's owner, Jose Duran, claims that $10,000 in cash and cigarettes were missing from the premises upon his return from jail, although the cops claim only to have recorded confiscating a mere $785 worth of stuff. After seeing the new evidence, I'm inclined to believe those accusations against the officers as well.

Oh, and the supposed reason for the raid in the first place, the alleged sale of small plastic bags commonly used for drugs? More baloney, if one could possibly imagine that. Turns out the time-stamped video doesn't show anyone buying such merchandise during the time when the officer applying for the warrant testified that it was sold. Actually, come to think of it, the identity of the officer who swore out the warrant is also very interesting:

"In a search-warrant application, Officer Richard Cujdik - Jeffrey Cujdik's brother - wrote that he "observed" a confidential informant enter Duran's store to buy tiny ziplock bags at about 4:30 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2007." (Emphasis mine)

Keeping it all in the "crime" family, I guess. Their parents must be so proud.

For completeness, here are the other "officers" who were named in the article as having participated in the profitable (for them) raid of Duran's store, to go along with the Cujdiks and Tolstoy:

Sgt.(!) Joseph Bologna

Thomas Kuhn

Anthony Parrotti

The article doesn't report if these larcenous, lying, pathetic excuses for officers are still on active duty while their despicable actions are being looked into by both federal and state investigators. For the sake of all Philadelphia residents, we fervently hope not. We aren't very optimistic about that, however, because the Philly police commissioner, Charles Ramsey, is himself a previous Jack-Booted Thug of the Week award winner, albeit for an unrelated story.

One hopes that these soon-to-be formers cops' first jobs after their almost-certain upcoming prison stint will be in the very type of convenience stores that they terrorized and treated as their personal piggy banks. Let them see firsthand what these innocent people, who are mostly hard-working legal immigrants, go through to make a living, even before they're preyed upon by authoritarian bullies and robbers.