Busted: A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly Love

This true crime book offers an impressive, crisply told account of the reporting of a police corruption scandal that yielded a Pulitzer Prize for Philadelphia Daily News reporters Ruderman and Laker. The authors present a conventional narrative of journalistic triumph, but contextualize their process of unraveling a web of corrupt cops in an elite narcotics unit with events of tremendous change and upheaval in Philadelphia, its police department, the local newspaper business, and in their personal lives. They weave a sympathetic portrait of a flawed drug informant protagonist and convey the excitement of unspooling shakedowns of convenience store owners by drug cops and ferreting out an officer accused of sexually assaulting women during drug raids. What keeps the book from becoming an overly familiar touting of the power of journalism to right serious wrongs is the authors’ awareness of the fragility of the whole enterprise. “The death knell of our industry seemed remote” when the authors garnered accolades, but one Pulitzer later, they have experienced job changes, a divorce, the bankruptcy of their employer—and none of the accused cops at the center of the scandal have faced charges. The book is a tough, lively lesson in how doing the right thing, the right way, may not be enough. Agent: Larry Weissman, Larry Weissman Literary. (Mar.)