19102 Review books

19102 Review: For the record

Busted: A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly Love
Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker
(HarperCollins, March 11, 242 pp.)

While investigating corrupt cops for the Daily News, Barbara Laker got asked by one source to go on a cruise, and was struck in the face by another. Wendy Ruderman was away from her family so often that her kids called her their babysitter. When they won a Pulitzer, Ruderman chugged champagne out of a smelly sneaker.  

Journalists aren’t supposed to be part of the story. But in their book, Busted, all bets are off: Ruderman and Laker are the story. 

In the book, two tales run concurrently. One tells (or, for locals familiar with their Tainted Justice series, re-tells) of the falsified warrants, sexual assaults and stolen cash.The other tells what readers wouldn’t have seen in DN’s pages: The women sacrificed their family lives, their sleep, their safety and sometimes their sanity in the name of shoe-leather reporting. 

 Written in Ruderman’s first-person voice, the narrative is straightforward, humorously self-deprecating and friendly, though at times overwrought (passages about how Laker can relate to victimized sources because of events in her own life seem like uneven equivalencies). 

Their enthusiasm for the industry is apparent, but they’re realists. After one press conference where the two were lauded for their work, they write: “At that moment, the death knell of our industry seemed remote.” On the last page of the book, though, there’s a resigned sigh in discussing the 2012 sale of the Daily News and the Inquirer. 

“The [new] owners promised to revive the papers, 21st-century style: online and behind paywalls,” it reads. 

And then, perhaps ominously: “Time will tell.”