The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (14 page)

For his part, Smut regarded the two cops as no-nonsense, but straight-up and honest. The two cops, meanwhile, saw Smut as principally a dealer who seemed levelheaded, “one of the more reasonable ones in the group,” Mike said. Mike and Craig were mainly after gangbangers who specialized in the lethal combination of drugs and guns. Smut Brown, said Mike, “was not a shooter, not a gun guy.”

Of course, that didn’t mean Mike and Craig were going to look the other way. The “Jump-out Boys” and Smut did eventually have a memorable clash. Mike and Craig were heading down West Selden Street one night. It was about eleven o’clock on March 23, 1993. Smut was driving up West Selden—fast—and he roared past the two cops. Mike guessed Smut was hitting about 50 mph, well above the speed limit for the residential neighborhood. He and Craig turned. Smut cut sharply down a side street and then turned onto another street running parallel to West Selden. Mike and Craig caught up, the lights on their cruiser flashing. Smut pulled over to the curb and jumped out. He ran across the street and was heading between two parked cars. Mike followed and caught up to Smut on the sidewalk near the parked cars. Craig joined them. Something on the ground between the parked cars caught Mike’s eye. He picked up a plastic bag. Inside was Smut’s stash—sixteen pieces of crack cocaine individually wrapped and ready for sale.

Four weeks later, Smut was found guilty of possession of cocaine with the intent to distribute by a judge in Dorchester District Court. The judge sentenced him to serve a year in the House of Corrections. Smut immediately appealed. His lawyer and the prosecutor then worked out a deal. Smut would plead guilty to the lesser charge of coke possession, and, in exchange for the guilty plea and dropping the appeal, the jail term would be suspended. Smut was placed on probation for two years—or until July 1995.

Once again, he’d managed to stay on the street. The stay-out-of-jail card meant when Smut walked into the club Cortee’s on the night of January 24, 1995, he was on probation from the Mike Cox bust.

Once he was inside, Smut never noticed that in back, Lyle Jackson was seated at a table playing cards, dressed in Boss blue jeans and a purple-colored Champion sweatshirt. Years had passed since Smut and Mama Janet’s son played together, either at Lyle’s house off Humboldt Avenue or at Smut’s Franklin Hill housing project.

Lyle quit the card game just after midnight and hooked up with a couple of his friends, one named Marcello and the other named Stanley. They drank and mingled around for a while, and by 1:30 or so, Lyle and Marcello decided they were hungry. One of them mentioned Walaikum’s, a tiny hamburger joint about a half mile away on Blue Hill Avenue in the Grove Hall section of Roxbury. Of the three, Stanley was the one with a car, a red Hyundai, so they asked him for a ride. Stanley said fine; he was hungry too.

Like Lyle and his friends, a lot of people at the club were starting to pull out, including Smut and his crew of Tiny, Tiny’s brother Marquis, and Boogie-Down. Closing time was approaching, and the club had stopped serving drinks. The music was winding down. Tiny was still on edge after seeing Little Greg. He might have recovered from the leg wound from the summer before, but there was no recovering from their beef. Smut tried his best to keep Tiny distracted. “I told him to chill.” The four discussed a nightcap. Smut suggested they head down to Mattapan where he knew an after-hours place. Tiny liked the idea because his mother lived in Mattapan and he wanted to swing by her house.

Meanwhile, Mike and Craig were outside turning their car around to resume their surveillance position on the hill overlooking the club. During the dustup with the girls, other members of the gang unit had not blown their cover. Donald Caisey, for one, was still in the decoy cab right on the street across from the club, while Joe Teahan and Gary Ryan were not far away in their unmarked cruiser.

But they were not the only cops waiting for something to happen. Unknown to the gang unit, another cop was nearby. Dave Williams also knew Hip-Hop Night at the Cortee’s might get interesting. On a typical night, his Dorchester station’s “batting order” for patrolling the district included four or five “service units” manned by a single officer, another two or three “rapid-response” units manned by two officers, and usually one “anti-crime” unit manned by two officers dressed in street clothes. Williams had begun the night working alone in a service unit known as the Harry 411.

Williams was assigned to patrol the Savin Hill neighborhood, a sector located on the east side of Dorchester, bordering Boston Harbor. It was several miles from the Cortee’s on Washington Street—basically from one side of the district to the other. But Williams was nonchalant about straying so far from the patrol sector his shift sergeant had assigned. “They pretty much tell you, you have the Savin Hill area, but you can go anywhere you want,” he said later. No one was really looking over his shoulder.

On the force, Williams was known as a “working cop.” It was a label to distinguish cops like him from those seeking uneventful shifts that might even include a nap. Williams was action-oriented—so much so that he’d actually drawn some supervisory concern about a tendency toward “physical abuse during arrests.” In fact, along these lines, Williams had had a rough few months. In September, a Dorchester woman complained to Internal Affairs Williams punched her out. She’d saved a clump of hair she claimed Williams had pulled from her scalp. The charge stemmed from a confrontation involving police and partygoers one Sunday morning over an illegally parked car. Williams admitted he hit the woman, but said he did so only after she and two of her friends attacked him. He’d met force with the minimum force necessary to subdue them, making the punch justifiable.

The next month his response to an “excessive noise” call led to another brutality complaint. Williams was one of three Boston police officers arriving at about 1:30
A.M
. to a party in a third-floor apartment. After talking to the party’s host, Williams walked past four young men hanging out on the front porch. One was a teenager named Valdir Fernandes, a seventeen-year-old high school student. As Williams walked down the steps, Valdir spat. Williams turned and demanded to know if the spit was aimed at him. Valdir denied any such thing. Valdir said later that Williams then bounded up the steps, pushed him against a wall, and “grabbed me by my throat, smacked me on the right side of the face.” Valdir’s mother rushed outside and confronted Williams. Williams insisted the boy had been disrespectful. He denied striking him at all. Valdir was taken by ambulance to Boston City Hospital, where he was treated for head trauma and for cuts and marks on the tracheal area of his neck. The family photographed the teenager’s battered face and soon after filed a complaint against Williams with Internal Affairs.

That made two abuse complaints against Williams in two months—or a total of four in just over two years. In theory, the two recent complaints should have triggered the department’s Early Intervention System, created in the early 1990s as part of a major reform effort. The intervention system was supposed to kick into gear when an officer received three complaints within a twenty-four-month period. But theory was one thing, the practices of the police department were another. By the night of January 24, four months had passed since the Valdir Fernandes incident and Williams hadn’t heard a word about any intervention or retraining requirements. For the officer the brutality complaints were more a nuisance than any real threat to his standing in the department.

Having abandoned his assigned patrol, Williams was parked alone in his cruiser down the street from the Cortee’s. He knew the club’s reputation for trouble; the club, he said, was a place “where gang members were going and they were having fights and shots were fired.” Initially he’d driven up a hill with the idea of watching the club from there, but then he spotted a gang unit vehicle. The unmarked car—which was Cox and Jones’s—was sitting in a driveway. He didn’t want to get in the way of an ongoing operation so he’d decided to keep moving. He’d driven down the street a few blocks past the club and pulled into an empty lot. He was out of sight and had his radio going.

“I just sat back,” he said. “I think I was reading the paper.”

Mike and Craig were back to their lookout on the hill when Lyle Jackson and Marcello climbed into Stanley’s car to head over to Walaikum’s. It was just before 2
A.M
. Moments later, Smut Brown, Boogie-Down, Tiny, and Marquis left the club. Smut and Boogie-Down walked toward Smut’s Volkswagen Fox around the corner. Smut had told the others the bar to go to was Conway’s, where he knew the manager. He told Tiny to follow him. Tiny and Marquis walked toward the parking lot across from the club where Tiny had parked a 1994 gold Lexus, a “loaner” from the dealer. Tiny had bought a brand new GMC Jimmy SUV—a birthday present to himself—but the truck wasn’t ready and the dealer had given him the Lexus to drive for a few days.

Smut pulled his car around the corner and was facing the club so Tiny and Marquis could see him. He and Boogie-Down sat there with the engine running and the heat cranked up against the sub-freezing cold. Smut noticed Tiny walking quickly toward them. He could see Tiny was agitated, moving in a jerking motion. Smut opened the window, and Tiny was stuttering about Little Greg, saying Little Greg was up to no good. Tiny pointed to the far side of the Cortee’s entrance, where Smut saw a group of Castlegate gang members. Tiny talked nonstop, explaining he and Marquis had noticed the group before they got to the Lexus. But when he couldn’t pick out Little Greg, he got suspicious. Where was Little Greg? Where was he? Tiny believed Little Greg was out to get him and planning to do something.

Tiny had given Marquis the car keys and gone to find Smut and Boogie-Down, all the while looking over his shoulder. He wanted protection. He ordered Boogie-Down to give him his gun. Boogie-Down resisted, but Tiny was adamant. He needed the gun. Boogie-Down handed it over, and Tiny turned to head back toward the club.

He was maybe two car lengths away when Smut detected a car moving slowly past his from behind. Smut saw the flame of gunfire first. Then he heard the pop-pop of gunshots. Tiny jumped sideways behind a parked car. Tiny was not hit. One bullet struck the black Isuzu Rodeo in front of Smut’s car, leaving a hole in the front door. The others went off into the night. Tiny stood up, gun raised high over his head, and he got off a few shots. The car sped up, driving past the club and up the street. Smut threw his Volkswagen into reverse. He backed into the intersection so he could turn the car around and drive away in the opposite direction. Tiny was running to the gold Lexus and jumped in so he and Marquis could follow.

Within seconds, the gang unit police radios exploded in noise. Voices collided.

“Shots fired! Shots fired!”

It sounded like the percussion section of an orchestra gone haywire.

“Shots fired! Right out front!”

Up on the hill, Mike and Craig exchanged looks of extreme frustration. “I’m like, Awww!” Mike said later. They’d just left the club and now the main event had started. This was the whole point of the night—guns and street gangs—and they weren’t there.

They raced back and found the street crowded with people running in different directions. Some were jumping into cars while other cars were already pulling away, including the Volkswagen Fox and the gold Lexus. Mike saw the other guys from the unit looking around and trying to talk to people. Donald Caisey was there. The unit’s supervisor, Sergeant Ike Thomas, was there. Teahan and his partner, Ryan.

“Everyone who was working in the gang unit that night,” said Mike.

The gunshots also drew other officers working in the area. One was Richie Walker, the officer known for wearing his hair in braids, who worked out of the Mattapan station. Walker activated his siren and lights and immediately began heading toward the club. But on his way he saw a Peugeot speeding toward him and then turn abruptly down a side street. His participation in the main event would have to wait. Walker chased the car and arrested the twenty-one-year-old driver. He found plastic bags in the front seat containing “vegetable matter,” or marijuana. The suspect was taken in by another officer, and Walker stayed with the Peugeot to await a tow truck. While he waited, he monitored the radio for updates on the shootings at the Cortee’s.

One officer who did make it to the club was Jimmy Burgio, who, like Dave Williams, worked in Dorchester out of the C–11 station. Burgio was from Southie, a sports jock. He was crazy about ice hockey and made up for a lack of skating finesse with a bullet-hard slapshot launched from his muscular, husky frame. Burgio was starting his fifth year on the force and brought his competitiveness to the job. For example, he was extremely proud of the seven binders he’d filled with photos and intelligence about street gangs and criminals. He was wary, however, about sharing the intelligence—especially with the gang unit—for fear his enterprising work would get ripped off and he wouldn’t get any credit.

He also viewed each night’s shift as a full contact sport between the good guys and the bad guys. He talked about police work in these terms—a high-stakes, hard-checking rivalry played out nightly. Some nights, he won. Some nights, the bad guys won. He got charged up looking ahead to work—each shift being a competition with the suspense of not knowing who was going to come out on top. He loved the cop life.

No surprise that, like Dave Williams, Jimmy Burgio was known as a “working cop.” No surprise either that, like Williams, Burgio strayed from his assigned patrol district when he heard the screaming voices on his radio about shots fired outside the Cortee’s. Burgio raced to the scene. But once he saw plenty of police were already there he headed up the nearby hill to watch, taking up the overlook Mike and Craig had abandoned.

Burgio could see a combination of unmarked units used by the gang unit as well as marked cruisers. Blue lights flashing. Cops in uniform and in street clothes milling about. Young people were scattering quickly into the night. Burgio recognized some of the cops. He knew the gang unit team of Joe Teahan and Gary Ryan. He was recently engaged but had once dated the woman who ended up marrying Ryan. He knew Donald Caisey from work. Burgio did not know Mike Cox, but he did know Mike’s partner, Craig. He had little use for Craig, considering him “an arrogant bastard,” a glory hound.