Michael Cascioli, bent over the metal railing on the balcony of his eighteenth-floor apartment on City Line Avenue, could feel the police officers lifting him higher and higher off the ground. As they leaned him over the edge, his feet flailing beneath him, he could just make out the flicker of lights from the cars below, the outline of bushes he was convinced he'd soon be splattered across.
"This is 'Training Day' for fucking real," Cascioli recalled one of the cops saying, referring to a movie about dirty cops. But this was real life, and Cascioli thought he was about to die.
The forty-page Federal grand-jury indictment against six Philadelphia police officers accused of railroading, terrorizing, and shaking down suspected drug dealers refers to Cascioli's encounter as Episode Four.
To Cascioli, it's the night he thought would be his last at the hands of officers who told him nobody would blink if some drug dealer slipped and fell, so he better give them what they wanted.
What they wanted, Cascioli, 38, recalled at the Chestnut Street office of his lawyer, Evan Shingles, was anything they could get their hands on, including pizza money. Shingles plans to file a civil lawsuit against the officers, all of whom have pleaded not guilty, on behalf of Cascioli and about thirty other plaintiffs who have come forward since the officers were indicted in July of 2014. The following narrative is based on details in the indictment and a recent interview with Cascioli:
On 26 November 2007, Cascioli got a call from a regular customer who lived in his building. Something about the call seemed off, but Cascioli ignored his gut, and put two pounds of marijuana and one pound of hallucinogenic mushrooms in a black nylon laundry bag and headed to the man's apartment one floor down. He didn't get far. In the hall, he saw three figures wearing dark clothing and ski masks coming straight at him. When he turned to run, three more approached from the opposite direction and then more, yelling and tackling him to the ground. Until one officer briefly flashed a badge, Cascioli said he thought he was being robbed.
Cascioli says he asked for a lawyer. "It was the first thing I said: 'I want an attorney.'"
The ringleader of the bunch, whom Cascioli would later learn from photos was Officer Thomas Liciardello, yelled: "Fuck you, scumbag," before throwing him into the wall. The indictment also states Officer Perry Betts dragged him back into the apartment and threw him into a wall. Cascioli said Betts yelled: "I'm going to fucking break your face if you don't tell us where the fuck the money is." Cascioli says he told the officers the only money he had was the eight hundred dollars on his nightstand. But they didn't buy it.
Inside the apartment, Cascioli said officers tore through his belongings, breaking whatever they came across. One officer urinated on a pile of his belongings. In addition to the drugs they found in the sack, they found a large brown box in his bedroom, with thirteen more pounds of marijuana and nine pounds of mushrooms. Cascioli says no one ever showed him a search warrant. The indictment states that "members of the enterprise and their associates searched the apartment before they had obtained a search warrant."
Time to cooperate, the cops told Cascioli. For hours, the officers repeatedly assaulted and threatened him as they demanded he reveal his customers and suppliers, Cascioli said. Where were the drugs? they yelled. Where was the money? Where could they get pizza, Officer Brian Reynolds asked.
According to the indictment, "members of the enterprise and their associates took money from his nightstand and used it to purchase pizza" for several of the defendants.
They ate, they drank rum Cascioli said he'd brought back from a trip to the Caribbean. They swapped sexually explicit stories about another drug dealer's girlfriend. And they went in and out of his rooms. Window-shopping, Cascioli later realized, when he discovered he was missing jewelry, electronics, and clothing. The indictment states that officers Liciardello, Betts, Michael Spicer, and Linwood Norman "stole personal items belonging to Cascioli valued at approximately eight thousand dollars from his apartment."
When Cascioli refused to give the officers the password to a PalmPilot they were convinced held names of his suppliers and buyers, Cascioli says Liciardello asked him a question: "Have you ever seen 'Training Day'?" When Cascioli said yes, Cascioli says Liciardello looked him in the eyes and said: "This is 'Training Day' for fucking real," and then instructed officers Norman and Jeffrey Walker to take him to the balcony.
According to Cascioli and the indictment, Liciardello told them to "do whatever they had to do to get the password."
Out on the balcony, Cascioli says officers Norman and Walker lifted him up by each arm and leaned him over the balcony railing, pushing him farther and farther out, until he promised to cooperate.
Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey is out of town, but Lieutenant John Stanford, a police spokesman, said: "Our department has been a part of this investigation and supported the US Attorney's Office throughout the various stage,s and will continue to do so."
Liciardello's lawyer, Jeffrey Miller, said: "I think it's important to note that we're dealing with a bunch of drug dealers here who aren't worthy of belief. He's talking to you on the way to the bank, he hopes."
John McNesby, president of the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police, didn't buy Cascioli's accusations either. "That sounds ludicrous," he said. "This isn't a 'Lethal Weapon' movie."
But Cascioli said that's exactly what the encounter that lasted hours felt like, a really bad movie about really bad cops.
Cascioli, a scrawny guy you might expect to run into at some cannabis-rights protest, came to Philadelphia in 2001 to pursue a girl and culinary school. But when he started to make thirty to fifty thousand dollars a month selling weed, he put cooking on hold. He sold wholesale, he says, to lawyers and businessmen and suburban soccer moms who were selling to friends to pay for their kid's private-school tuition.
Before the incident at his City Line apartment, Cascioli had been arrested three times in Maryland for small amounts of drug possession. He received probation for all the incidents and weekends in jail for about a month in the last Maryland arrest. He had no record in Pennsylvania.
In news stories after the arrest, Narcotics Chief Inspector William Blackburn touted the bust as a successful takedown of a high-level drug dealer who took more than a million dollars worth of potent and dangerous marijuana off the streets and led to the seizure of nearly a half-million dollars in drug proceeds.
Cascioli says they stretched the truth there, too. "They said I was selling to kids and that I was causing them to OD and go to the emergency room," Cascioli said. "They made that up." Cascioli thought about fighting the charges. But after talking to his lawyer, Todd Henry, he had to face facts. It boiled down to risk management, Henry said: Take one or two years or face a mandatory sentence of more. It was a drug dealer's word against cops, Henry said, even if the squad's questionable reputation was already well-known in the courts.
The officer's threats that night echoed in Cascioli's head: Who are they going to believe? "I'm a scumbag," Cascioli said. "I'm a scumbag in people's eyes. It doesn't matter if I've never hurt anybody or done anything violent. I'm a scumbag because I'm doing something illegal and that's all anyone will see. They're not going to take my word over theirs. They're cops."
Cascioli took a deal and was sentenced to one to two years in jail, plus probation. He served thirteen months. After he was released, he'd often search the news for any word on the cops. The way they acted that night, he said, it was clear they had done this before. He wondered if their actions would ever catch up with them. In 2012, District Attorney Seth Williams said his office no longer trusted the officer's testimony in drug cases. Hundreds of prior arrests were dismissed; nearly a million dollars in lawsuits have been settled, so far.
And then, in October of 2013, Cascioli said he got a call from the Feds. They were building a case against the veteran narcotics squad, and they wanted to talk. Cascioli was scared, "I was scared for my life of these people. I still am." He testified but doubted anything would come of it.
In July of 2013, he got a call and was told to watch the news. On 0 3July 2014, six officers, including Officer John Speiser, were arrested on a two-dozen-count indictment including racketeering conspiracy, extortion, robbery, kidnapping, and drug dealing. Cascioli said all six were in his apartment that November night.
The bust resulted from one of their own— Walker, one of the cops who held Cascioli over his balcony— flipping on his fellow officers after he pleaded guilty to robbery and gun charges in a separate Federal case.
"Mike is not an angel," said Shingles, Cascioli's lawyer. "But for cops to engage in worse criminal behavior than the people they're going after makes these guys the real criminals here."
In March of 2014, Cascioli's conviction was vacated because of its ties to the indicted officers. He's applied to have his criminal record expunged. He no longer lives in Philadelphia.
But something about that night still bugs him. Six police officers were named in the indictment. But the night he was repeatedly assaulted and threatened in his apartment, Cascioli said there were a lot more than six cops acting as if they were above the law.
Rico says it's hard to tell the scumbags apart here...
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