They proceeded to write the story for air on a later broadcast, after station manager William Aber filed a complaint with the police department’s Internal Affair Bureau. Back at KYW headquarters, Meyer recalls the staff being shocked by their run-in and its accompanying evidence. Off-screen, the crew was allowed to leave the scene, with some busted cables and a load of prime footage in hand. After this failed to turn it off, Rizzo announces, “That’s all right, I’ll pull another wire!” The wire in question was the battery cables, which finally did the job. After learning that it was still recording video, Rizzo began swatting at it. The former mayor soon threatened to break the camera, which was left on. “So we had been dealing with Rizzo for two generations,” the younger Meyer quips. During this time, Rizzo was chief inspector. Their work led to 18 dismissals and suspensions throughout the department. In 1964, he and two other journalists won a Pulitzer Prize for Local Investigative Specialized Reporting for uncovering a numbers racket police officers were running in Queen Village. Meyer’s father Frederick was a still photographer for The Philadelphia Bulletin. Frank’s a pretty imposing guy, but I dealt with him for a long time and actually, my father had dealt with him.”
“There was Frank, there was his son Franny. “There was a lot of cops out there,” Meyer’s recalls. When asked now if he was nervous during the encounter, the usually unflinching Meyer admits he was. “We coulda shot ya,” the cameraman is told. Rand unlocked the van door, which was promptly thrown open. As you can see in the video, after handing over his press card, Meyer is interrogated by the group about his motives. With Rizzo himself now involved and leading the charge, the cops threatened to break in to see what was actually going on. In the video, as Meyer points out, “You can hear Rizzo’s son say, ‘He’s saying you got a dog in here!’” “For the longest period of time, he tried to put it off.” Rand’s on-the-fly explanation for the cops was that there was just a dog inside. Meyer radioed Rand to attempt to defuse the situation. “He hemmed and hawed with them,” Meyer remembers. I had done others where it was 111 degrees out, but it was kind of a nice day.” This calm wouldn’t last much longer.Īfter noticing the van, a group of police officers from the security detail approached the vehicle and began knocking on the door. It was a “just another stakeout” for Meyer, a pretty standard day’s work. Parked down the block from the house and on the opposite side of Crefeld Street, Meyer sat solo, while producer Robert Rand’s vehicle was parked around the block. The crew was then given the go-ahead to rent a van for video surveillance of the Rizzo property. The next day at the KYW offices, Meyer explained what he had seen to Tony Lame, head of the station’s I-Team investigative group. While the former police commissioner had a famously close relationship with the police department, if the allegations were true, it would mean that Rizzo was taking advantage of the city’s private security detail posted at his home by having officers do his personal chores. “I thought they were probably his security, but they shouldn’t be doing that.” While driving past the Rizzo residence in Chestnut Hill one day, Meyer noticed something strange - uniformed Philly Police officers raking the leaves of the former mayor’s lawn. More than three decades later, Philly native and KYW cameraman Greg Meyer remembers it exactly.
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