The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (2 page)

It took nearly an hour for Kimberly to sort it all out. That’s when Joe Teahan and his partner, Gary Ryan, pulled up in front of the red-brick house. The two officers had first met as classmates in the police academy and had worked side-by-side for most of their four years on the force. They could see that fellow officer Mike Cox was living in the middle of it all. Walking a block in any direction landed you on a street where guns and drugs were the name of the game. In fact, for Mike and the dozen or so gang unit officers on a special operation that night, the trouble had begun only three blocks away.

Kimberly and Bertha Cox came down the brick front steps, hurried across the cement walkway of the tiny front yard, and climbed into the backseat of the cruiser. The two officers stuck to the script. They told Kimberly that Mike had head injuries. They said he likely slipped on a patch of ice, hit his head, and “split it open pretty good.” Gary Ryan did not share what he’d thought when he first saw Mike on the ground, his head so bloodied and swollen, “it looked like a gunshot wound.” The sergeant had said not to alarm her. Little else was said during the short drive to the hospital about a mile away.

The two women were taken to the emergency room entrance. They rushed through a double set of automatic doors. The entry-way’s linoleum floor was covered with a carpet rolled out in winter-time to absorb wet snow and slush. Nurses steered them through the trauma unit’s two heavy wooden doors that swung outward.

For a weeknight in the winter, the emergency room at Boston City Hospital was a busy place. Surgeons and nurses in the operating room were working furiously on a man named Lyle Jackson. Jackson, twenty-two years old, had been shot three times in the chest by two gunmen at a small take-out restaurant on Blue Hill Avenue, where he’d gone to munch on chicken wings and a hamburger. The young Roxbury man had been in the ER less than an hour. Meanwhile in the acute care unit, two other Boston police officers were receiving treatment. Jimmy Rattigan occupied one of the thirteen bays, and his partner, Mark Freire, was in another. Both had been injured while chasing Lyle Jackson’s shooters. Their cruiser was demolished when it hit a parked van on a narrow Roxbury street.

Kimberly and her mother-in-law found Mike in one of the other bays that circled the unit, each enclosed by a cloth curtain hanging from the low ceiling. When she first saw her husband, Kimberly said nothing. She walked up to where he lay on a gurney and studied him. It was as if in these surroundings, Kimberly, anxious up to this point, switched gears and assumed the detachment of the budding physician that she was. Observations she made were clinical: hematoma, the size of an egg, on the patient’s head; a swollen face; swollen nose; one laceration on his scalp that would require sutures, another on his lip. Multiple abrasions and scratches.

Kimberly Cox was confused. She was looking at someone suffering from multiple injuries—serious injuries. She thought, “It didn’t look like he had slipped and fell.”

When Boston police officer Craig Jones stepped through the curtain and into the tiny ten-foot by twelve-foot bay, Kimberly recognized him right away. Craig was Mike’s partner and good friend. Kimberly saw that Craig was agitated, even upset. There were other officers with him whom Kimberly did not know. One or more of them crowded inside too. Kimberly and Bertha Cox were seated by Michael’s side.

Then another police officer, a black officer, tall and dressed in uniform, appeared at the curtain. He did not actually step inside, but poked his head into the bay. The officer was addressing Craig Jones, but Kimberly heard him say, “I think I know who did this.”

Craig Jones and the others stepped outside. To Kimberly, the talk was mostly in covered, hushed tones. But this she was able to hear: “I think cops did this.”

Kimberly was speechless. Bertha Cox was not.

“What?” she asked. “Police officers did this?”

The question hung in the air.

“Oh my God,” Bertha Cox said.

By dawn, the morning TV news stations in Boston were broadcasting reports about the shooting of Lyle Jackson, the high-speed chase that followed, and the dramatic capture of four men suspected in the shooting. The city’s leading newspaper, the
Boston Globe
, also ran a story in its morning edition about a shooting that turned into a homicide case when Lyle Jackson was pronounced dead at Boston City Hospital. The newspaper stories mentioned officers Rattigan and Freire and the injuries they had sustained.

But no story mentioned anything about Michael Cox.

PART I

Two Cops and a Drug Dealer

CHAPTER 1

Mike Cox

B
oston police officer Mike Cox directed his partner to swing by his house before heading over to check out the scene at the club Cortee’s. The apartment at 52 Supple Road in Dorchester was only about a mile from the club. Mike ran inside and pulled off his black nylon Windbreaker, the one with his unit’s patch stitched on the left breast beneath the Boston PD emblem. He changed and hustled back outside.

It was just before midnight. The below-freezing weather wasn’t the reason for the clothing switch. Mike needed to fit in, and within minutes he and his partner were walking into the low-slung building with its unwelcoming dirty brick exterior. The club resembled a warehouse about to be condemned. The three windows in front were so narrow and smeared that inside they guaranteed darkness, not light. The only touch of style was the rooftop sign—with the name, Cortee’s, written in a swirling red script across an orange background.

The club was smack in the middle of a neighborhood known as Four Corners, which was targeted periodically by city leaders and neighborhood advocates for urban renewal. The newspaper article announcing one such effort described Four Corners as “a neighborhood where mothers do not let young children play in front yards. Where nearly 40 percent of families with children under age five live in poverty. Where teenagers keep their eyes open and routinely throw furtive looks over their shoulders. Where empty lots and ‘for sale’ signs scar almost every block. Where street justice is the law of the land.”

At the club on a Saturday night two months earlier, a near-riot had broken out; a young Dorchester man was stabbed in the butt and the back and taken by ambulance to Boston City Hospital. When police arrived they found a crowd outside shoving and fighting and throwing bottles. Three men were arrested in connection with the stabbing, and police caught two other men slashing the tires of a cruiser.

Mike Cox squeezed past patrons to make his way deeper inside. Next to him was Craig Jones. Right away they liked what they saw: The club was running at full throttle, the music blaring across a large room jammed with at least a couple hundred people. Hip-Hop Night guaranteed a crowd, even on a weeknight in January when the temperature was 29 degrees and Boston’s inner-city streets were mostly vacant.

No one noticed them as cops. Craig was dressed in blue jeans and a black-hooded sweatshirt underneath a black leather jacket, while Mike wore a three-quarter-length black coat—the kind of puffy, hooded, goose-down parka popular in the ’hood. Underneath he had on black jeans and a black sweatshirt. A black Oakland Raiders wool hat was pulled over his head. Mike had assembled the outfit for assignments like this, borrowing the parka and skullcap from a teenage nephew.

Mike’s getup was the more elaborate of the two, which was no surprise. He was clothes-conscious—and always had been. Craig had certainly noticed this during the five years they’d been partners. There was another cop in their unit who sold jackets, sweatshirts, T-shirts, and hats featuring Boston police patches and logos. Mike was a regular customer. The Windbreaker he wore most nights while on patrol had come from this guy. “Mike liked those police clothes,” Craig said.

They walked to one side of the club to sit in a couple of empty chairs. Together they made quite an impression. Mike was six feet, two inches tall and weighed 215 pounds or so, and Craig was even taller, by two inches. They were both strong and fit and athletic. Mike’s parka was long enough to conceal his handcuffs, badge, and semiautomatic handgun, a gun smaller than the one issued by the department that fit snugly into a tiny holster.

The two were members of the department’s elite Anti–Gang Violence Unit, or AGVU, a collection of forty cops who roamed the meanest streets of the city in pursuit of street gangs, drugs, and guns. “You had more freedom to investigate much more serious crime,” Craig once said about why he found satisfaction in the role as street-gang fighter.

Their call sign, for police radio purposes, was Tango K–8, or TK–8.

“Tango” stood for the gang unit.

“K” meant they worked in plainclothes.

“8” stood for them—Cox and Jones.

By 1995, Mike had been on the force for six years, Craig for eight. Mike was twenty-nine and Craig was thirty. Through work, they’d become close friends. Craig brought his daughter to Mike’s house for his son’s birthday party, and Mike went to Craig’s house for his daughter’s party. Sometimes they’d go out together and shoot pool, and, for a bit, they played basketball on the same team in the police league. In fact, Craig was probably the only one in the gang unit who knew anything about Mike’s background and personal life—that Mike, for example, had grown up in Roxbury a few blocks from the gang unit’s offices at 364 Warren Street. Or that Mike had attended a private high school in western Connecticut. Mike was especially sensitive about that. On a police force where the officers were mostly working class, white, and mostly educated in urban high schools, no way he wanted to be seen as a black prep-pie. Indeed, when it came to his personal life, Mike went mute.

They worked as a team in plainclothes. The public often confused working in plainclothes and working undercover. The two were vastly different. Undercover meant assuming a phony identity to infiltrate a criminal organization. Plainclothes work meant simply not wearing a uniform on the job. It also meant driving an unmarked car—a police vehicle without the blue bubble on the roof and the blue-and-white coloring and lettering on the exterior. Mike and Craig drove a dark blue Ford with no blatant police markings. But it was equipped with a siren; blue lights concealed in the front grille; wig-wag, or blinking lights, in the rear; and a blue light on the front dashboard.

By blending into the street, Mike and Craig were looking for an edge. It was unrealistic to think street-smart gang members would not spot them or their unmarked car. But what they were looking for was a few extra beats before the click of recognition. “It helped me, you know, you’d be right on the scene, or very close to someone before they recognized you as a cop,” Mike said. The gang unit cops valued those extra seconds, whether during a routine patrol of a housing project or during a raid.

Mike and Craig were inside the Cortee’s to perform some quick reconnaissance near the end of their regular shift. It was part of a larger plan. To cops, Hip-Hop Night might as well have been called Gang Night. The music attracted the gangs, and, Mike said, “wherever they go, there is going to be trouble.” He and Craig had gotten “intelligence,” or word from informants, there was conflict in the air. Mike and Craig wanted to size up the scene and make certain the club was humming. They and a handful of other teams from the gang unit then planned to return and set up outside before closing time—2
A.M
.—when the crowd would begin pouring into the street.

The unit had high hopes for a rich return on their investment.

Seated at the table, Mike and Craig looked around. Even if they’d wanted to talk, the music was too loud to be heard. The only light was over by the bar area. Neither was too worried that anyone would make them. “They’d really have to get right in your face to recognize you,” Mike said. But it was their look that was mostly the source of confidence in not being identified. “Craig is a good-sized guy, and I’m a good-sized guy, and we’re dressed up like that. Most people are
not
thinking, Oh, cops.

“They’re thinking, Whoa! Like, stay away from them.”

Mike saw gangbangers from a number of different street gangs—Humboldt, Castlegate, and Corbett, to name a few. “Craig would see somebody, hit me, and I’d look, and I’m like, yeah, yeah, I see.” They both felt the combustibility in the room. The two stood up, walked back across the floor, and left. They’d seen enough and would be back, confident closing time would be the right time for the gang unit to be hiding nearby in the dark.

The civil rights movement made itself heard in Boston in 1965 with a legal blockbuster. The Boston branch of the NAACP sued the city’s school committee in federal court seeking to desegregate public schools. The lawsuit marked the formal beginning of legal and civil conflict, building nine years later to court-ordered busing.

Two days after the court filing, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. flew into Logan Airport to tour Boston and then lead an estimated twenty-two thousand protesters from a playground in Roxbury to the historic Boston Common downtown. In the rain on April 23, King said, “The vision of the New Boston must extend into the heart of Roxbury. Boston must become a testing ground for the ideals of freedom.” The crowd roared with approval.

Two months later, on June 17, 1965, Michael Anthony Cox was born to a family living in the heart of Roxbury. He was the youngest of six children. His parents, Bertha and David, had lived in Boston for a decade. They were from Tennessee, where they’d met, married, and started a family. Their move north was part of the great migration of blacks during the 1940s and 1950s. They had followed Bertha’s mother, Rosa, the first to come, who found work as a maid for a wealthy Jewish couple, Norman and Helene Cahners. Norman Cahners oversaw a publishing empire he built from a single magazine, and he was known for his generosity and philanthropy. They owned homes in the city and in Brookline, just west of Boston, and Mike’s grandmother Rosa moved between the different homes. The Cahnerses also purchased a house in Roxbury for her to live in: 62 Winthrop Street, which was half of a large, side-by-side two-family home.