By Jeremy Roebuck, Philadelphia Inquirer
Peter Bistrian, an orderly sweeping the solitary-confinement unit’s floor in the Philadelphia Federal Detention Center, picked it up.
A voice from inside the cell whispered instructions to deliver the message to another inmate on the row. And although he knew neither the sender nor the intended recipient, Bistrian did as he was told.
He couldn’t have known then that his simple, furtive act would entangle him with one of Philadelphia’s most notoriously violent drug lords — Kaboni Savage — and permanently upend his life.
Within days, the former Chadds Ford financial adviser, incarcerated after a 2006 fraud conviction, would find himself routinely ferrying communications between Savage and his lieutenants. He would volunteer to secretly share those messages with federal agents building a death-penalty case.
And when the high-stakes arrangement ended in calamity, its collapse would prompt a lawsuit and trial that opened last week in the same federal courthouse where Bistrian was sentenced 12 years ago.
But when he picked up that first envelope in 2006, stuffed it into his prison jumpsuit, and agreed to deliver it to Savage, Bistrian had only one question: “Who is that?”
Rest of story is here.
For more on Kaboni Savage, see this post and, of course, Black Brothers, Inc..: The Violent Rise and Fall of Philadelphia’s Black Mafia (Milo, 2007).
