The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (11 page)

But the homicide detectives apparently didn’t want to hear any of it. From the start they focused on Drumgold and his pal, building a case on the backs of youngsters who were intimidated and pressured into providing incriminating testimony, all of which became pieces of the prosecution’s case. Without key physical evidence—the guns and Halloween masks were never recovered—witness testimony was everything.

“I’m just a dumb puppet in there,” one witness confessed later about how he folded under police pressure and agreed with his interrogators’ suggestions that Drumgold was armed and looking for trouble that night. Fourteen months after Tiffany was killed, in October 1989, Drumgold was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. His associate was acquitted. It didn’t matter that many in the neighborhood knew Drumgold couldn’t have done it, because he couldn’t be two places at once. He was not on Humboldt Avenue when Tiffany was shot; he was blocks away with a group of friends snorting coke. But, given their illegal drug activity and fear of police, those alibi witnesses went underground rather than risk facing the police.

Even Tiffany Moore’s mother was not sure. “It was very hard to tell if he was the right one,” Alice Moore told a neighborhood newspaper, the
Bay State Banner
, following the murder trial in October 1989. “It’s a big mess.” Fourteen years later, Drumgold’s conviction was overturned. Press accounts exposed the pattern of witness intimidation, possible prosecutorial misconduct, and the alibi evidence. In the “interests of justice,” the district attorney asked a Superior Court judge to let Drumgold go home.

With the St. Clair Commission’s explosive findings, 1992 was off to a terrible start for the Boston Police Department. But there was more trouble to come. That same January a trial began in Boston that served as a kind of appendix to the panel’s findings—a case of police brutality dramatically illustrating in real life the failings the panel had outlined clinically and statistically.

The case was the May 1988 beating of the coke-snorting John L. Smith, who, after running a red light, had led police on a fifteen-

minute chase through various city neighborhoods until his Cadillac broke down on Borland Street in Brookline. Smith’s arrest woke up the residents, mostly professionals living on the usually quiet street not far from nearby Boston University. One woman told authorities she looked out her bedroom window and heard a “wailing sound” from Smith, who was lying facedown with his hands behind his back, apparently handcuffed. “It was a very eerie sound. It sounded like the sound coming from an injured animal. It was quite loud,” she said. She watched officers casually walk over to stomp on Smith’s back and then walk away. The woman’s husband, a lawyer, was standing by her side at the window. He said he could hear Smith “whimpering and saying, ‘No, no.’ It was very loud, very clear and was obviously the voice of someone being hurt.” To make matters worse for the police, another Borland Street resident happened to be a state prosecutor. Not just any state prosecutor either—Stephen L. Oleskey was supervisor of the Public Protection Bureau, which investigated complaints involving consumer protection and civil rights. When Oleskey looked out his window he first thought officers huddled around a man on the ground were trying to help someone injured in a car crash. When he stepped outside and police walked past him with Smith, he realized his initial assessment was likely wrong. “When I saw the civilian go by, with the battered face and handcuffed, I revised.” Oleskey began thinking Smith might have been beaten. “But I wasn’t sure.”

Oleskey then talked to his neighbors. Before long the state attorney general’s office opened an investigation. The next year it filed a civil rights lawsuit in state court against the police department, the city, and the “Brighton 13.” Thirteen officers were accused of beating Smith or standing by and doing nothing to stop it. The January 1989 lawsuit was filed as a last resort—after state prosecutors had urged Boston police officials to discipline the officers but nothing was done. “When I became convinced that nothing was going to be done internally by the Boston police, I felt it was necessary to go to court,” Massachusetts Attorney General James M. Shannon had told reporters.

It was a historic moment—state prosecutors asking the judge to issue a court order against the thirteen Boston officers barring them from using excessive force and demanding they report police brutality. Never before had such an injunction been sought against police—either in Massachusetts or, as far as anyone could tell, in the country.

The attorney general continued to try to negotiate with the officers, their union, and police officials, but they would have none of it. The thirteen officers denied wrongdoing, saying any force that was used was necessary to subdue a “coke-crazed madman.” The police union attacked state prosecutors for meddling and second-guessing officers whose split-second decisions may mean the difference between life and death. Union lawyers called the court action outrageous. One argued, “If you start thinking twice about using force or your gun because of an injunction, your life is in danger.” The police department’s Internal Affairs probe, meanwhile, never got past “go.” The case was simply on file, with no action.

“The office felt no choice but to go forward,” one state prosecutor explained about taking the case to trial. “Our attempts to resolve the matter had been rejected over a long period of time and the City of Boston had never disciplined the officers.” Testimony began the same week the St. Clair report came out—a nonjury, civil rights trial before Superior Court Judge Hiller B. Zobel.

Eight of the thirteen officers were from the police district known as Area D, with five officers working in the D–4 station in the South End. This was Kenny Conley’s station, and January 1992 marked the seventh month Kenny had been on the street in uniform as a full-fledged officer.

“I didn’t know most of these guys,” Kenny said about the five officers going to court each day to attend the trial, as well as the other officers in his station. The politics and scrutiny of the department were swirling at levels far above his status as a twenty-three-year-old rookie. “I didn’t talk to many people. I did my job, and I went home.”

But the trial of the Brighton 13 was the talk of the police department—and especially in the D–4 station. Kenny overheard plenty. “The guys were just upset that there were injunctions getting put out against them.” Newspaper coverage typically triggered the talk. “Lunch, dinner, or breakfast, or whatever, the guys would be sitting around writing reports, and someone would have a paper.” That’s when the complaints, commentary, and existential questions began: What the hell’s going on?

It wasn’t pretty. “Guys were saying it was fucking stupid.” Most found the attorney general’s case traitorous, going after Boston officers for doing their job: “Getting charged with arresting a guy.” There was no debate about it—no opposing or cautionary point of view, where some other officer, sergeant, or supervisor was telling everyone to calm down. No one was making the point that brutality charges were serious matters and, if true, unacceptable. “Everybody was hostile towards it,” Kenny said. That consensus extended “throughout the department.”

The two-week trial featured some remarkable testimony. Ten officers took the witness stand and denied beating Smith or seeing him beaten. Two of them provided a rare and stunning peek inside their world. One officer testified that he would never report another officer’s misconduct or wrongdoing. When asked why, the officer talked about the job’s dangers and the need for brotherhood. The officer told the court he would not go against another officer because his own life depended on his colleagues.

The second officer, a veteran of more than three decades, unabashedly told the court that in all his years on the force, he had yet to see another officer commit so much as an infraction of the department’s regulations. When asked how this could be, the officer did not answer he’d simply never seen it happen. He said: “I never see it.”

The remark seemed a passage right out of the code of silence, or “blue wall,” where cops stuck together at all costs—turning a blind eye to any misconduct or worse—where cops refused to “rat” on another officer. This was true even though it was a police officer’s job to rat. Telling on people—ratting people out—went to the job’s core, the sworn duty to uphold the law. To catch lawbreakers, an officer must testify—inform on criminals, either as an eyewitness or by relaying evidence others have provided. But when the lawbreaker was a fellow officer, this principle collided head-on into the “blue wall.” It was all about bonds and ties—and ties that bind. With criminals, no such bond existed. With a fellow officer, it did—and so the culture’s code was one of see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.

The prosecutor cited the two officers’ words as part of the “evidence of the code of silence; that is, not that they sit around a darkened candle in a darkened room and make a pledge, but what we have from that witness stand…a plethora of evidence that these officers lived by a code which they will not testify against another officer.”

Judge Zobel wouldn’t go there—he neither agreed with nor rejected the attorney general’s claims of a police code of silence. Instead of drawing any broad conclusions about the police culture, he focused on the thirteen officers before him. In so doing, he hammered them. In a forty-page ruling issued on May 8, 1992, Zobel concluded that thirteen “frustrated, disgusted and angry Boston police officers allowed emotion to supplant their training.” They violated Smith’s civil rights, “from a shared belief that in staging his own version of
Smokey and the Bandit
, Smith had showered a platoon of Boston police officers with disobedience and disrespect, in the process endangering their safety and making fools of them all. Thus they set out to teach this scofflaw a lesson.”

The judge did not rule specifically that any one officer had “kicked or kneed” Smith, but found that officers had “hurled themselves on top of Smith” after hauling him from his car and that “no law-enforcement reason justified the piling-on.” Moreover, the judge said the officers’ demeanor in court and their sworn testimony did not reveal “the slightest remorse or regret about
any
of that morning’s events.” “They don’t get it,” the judge wrote. “They do not understand how improperly they behaved on Borland Street.

“Being forceful does not mean using excessive force. The pressure that society puts on police to apprehend criminals and deter wrongdoing cannot justify a misuse of the physical power which society entrusts to every police officer.” The judge then concluded that outside judicial intervention was necessary—and he granted the attorney general’s bid to impose a permanent injunction against the Brighton 13.

“I have determined that because police officers are not likely to regulate police conduct, an outside sanction here is necessary for the public good.”

The officers were angry. “For the first time, to my knowledge, a judge has issued an injunction against on-duty officers,” said one of their lawyers. “It virtually renders it impossible for the officers to function on the streets, with this injunction hanging around their neck.” They appealed, but Zobel’s ruling was upheld by the state’s highest court, the Supreme Judicial Court. The Brighton 13 were then ordered to undergo “extensive retraining” in civil rights, the use of force, and telling the truth.

For all the hullabaloo surrounding the trial, life inside the department for the thirteen officers barely skipped a beat. Throughout, they’d remained on the job. Some won promotions. From the inside, it was as if rather than losing the court case, they’d won. Kenny Conley, not one to pay close attention to the case’s legal twists, reached that conclusion. Nothing seemed to have changed. While riding around on patrol during the remainder of 1992 and into the next year, he figured the police had prevailed. “I would assume they ruled in the police officers’ favor because they’re all walking the street.”

CHAPTER 5

Mike’s Early Police Career

T
he Boston Police Department is the oldest department in the United States. In the early 1800s, the city’s growth on every front—land area, population, immigration, and commerce—gave rise to a more socially complex metropolis. The city was fast outgrowing its original town meeting form of government aimed at keeping power in the hands of many rather than concentrated in the hands of a few. The need for a professional, full-time force to replace constables reflected these changes, and in 1838 the state legislature voted that Boston should assemble a formal police department.

For more than a century and until the civil rights era, the force was largely a fraternity of white men. Then, in 1970, six black and two Hispanic men sued Boston and various state agencies in federal court after their applications at the Boston Police Department were rejected. The department’s racial makeup illustrated what they were up against: Only about 3.6 percent of the force was black—in a city where blacks made up about 16.3 percent of the city’s total population of 641,000 residents.

The men claimed that Boston’s hiring and recruitment practices—and those at every police department in Massachusetts for that matter—were discriminatory. They argued that the civil service examination was biased and violated their constitutional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The federal judge agreed, ruling in
Castro v. Beecher
that the exams “were discriminatory against minorities which did not share the prevailing white culture.” The bias may not have been intentional, the judge said, but it had nonetheless resulted in years of an “unconscious lopsidedness of the [police] recruitment.” Determined to come up with a strong remedy that would have an immediate impact, the judge in 1973 approved a plan known as the Castro decree.

The plan required the creation of two pools of applicants: One group contained blacks and Hispanics, and the second group contained nonminority applicants. The applicants in each group were then ranked—with rankings affected by several factors. The most obvious was the exam score: the higher the score, the higher the ranking. Being a veteran of the armed services and being a relative of a public safety officer killed or injured in the line of duty were other factors that boosted rankings.