The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (28 page)

But then came his beating. The code’s underlying rationale—“us versus them”—did not fit. Mike was not one of “them.” He was not a drug dealer. He was not a gun-toting gangbanger. He was not Rodney King. Mike was a cop—one of legions of “us” that made up the Boston Police Department. If the beating had been posed to him as a hypothetical scenario, Mike would have said that the code did not apply—not when the crime victim was another cop. But that hadn’t happened. Instead, Mike watched good cops—good guys, friends of his—not wanting to get involved because doing so meant testifying against another cop. This included black cops—when he would have thought a racial solidarity among the black officers would have kicked in to override the silence. But that hadn’t happened either. The code had a power Mike never imagined. It even trumped race. While a second investigation began in the ashes of the first, Mike was seeing that the reach of the blue wall extended beyond concern for any one individual. “And I just happened to be the individual.”

In June, the
Boston Herald
reported that District Attorney Ralph Martin and the police department’s Anti-Corruption Unit had taken over the investigation of Mike Cox’s beating. “This was nothing but another Rodney King situation—only this time there was no video camera,” one of the paper’s unnamed police sources was quoted saying. Since it was located inside the tabloid, the casual reader might easily have flipped past the story. But interested parties—meaning the police world—would certainly notice, and for those readers there was more: The story named names. “Two officers from Area C–11,” it said, “James Burgio and David Williams, have been questioned in connection with Cox’s beating, but no formal charges have been brought against them, sources said.”

The account was brief, only 408 words long—hardly headline coverage. The rest of the Boston media barely blinked. In fact, the report was only the fourth article since the January 25 beating. Such a low story count was surprising. For one thing, the chase was considered the longest in Boston anyone could remember, involving the most cruisers ever. Then a high-ranking police official began referring to the assault as “singular” in the department’s history. Police Commissioner Evans’s chief of internal investigations, Ann Marie Doherty, based her characterization on the combination of “the type of injuries that were sustained and the fact that medical attention was not immediately provided.” The newsworthiness of the case was crystal clear. It was a no-brainer: Journalism 101.

But the story hadn’t gained any traction. It wasn’t as if the local press was not busy covering the police department—good news and bad. Commissioner Evans and Mayor Tom Menino, along with a number of city officials, posed for photographs at the ground breaking for a new police headquarters in Roxbury to replace the seventy-year-old building in the Back Bay that was obsolete. It would take two years to complete the new $62 million structure Evans boasted would house state-of-the-art ballistics and crime labs, and the relocation to Roxbury was viewed as improving the department’s community policing programs along with its accessibility to residents.

There was the bad press Evans and the mayor continued to get over Accelyne Williams’s death during a raid the year before. Negotiations with the elderly minister’s widow, Mary H. Williams, had broken off, and she’d sued. One of her lawyers called the bungled drug raid that led to the minister’s death by a heart attack “a crime that the city of Boston and the police department have to be punished for.” Mayor Menino’s press office released a statement calling the suit “regrettable.” It noted the city’s proposal to pay $600,000 was “the largest litigation settlement the city has ever offered.” But that response only infuriated columnist Derrick Z. Jackson of the
Boston Globe.
“Rodney King,” wrote Jackson, “collected $3.8 million.” Mayor Menino, he wrote, was Mayor Scrooge. “Williams vomited and died of a heart attack. Williams was a pristine victim, with not a scintilla of warranted suspicion. One could not possibly imagine a more obvious case to settle quickly, not just to ease the pain of the family but also to send an expensive signal to police that they had better learn to tell black people apart.”

Then, of related interest, there was the resolution to the police brutality case in nearby Providence, Rhode Island, that had been making news since the week before Mike Cox’s beating. Four months after his suspension the rookie cop who’d been caught on tape kicking a black concertgoer was allowed back to work. There were strings attached to the reinstatement. The officer was required to repeat his training at the police academy and would not be allowed to work on the street until he did. He had to take a course on cultural diversity. He forfeited $12,000 in pay. Finally, he was required to write an essay. The topic: what it meant to be a police officer as it related to human rights.

But all of those were breaking news events that the media then reacted to and covered. The Cox case was different. No one was holding press conferences or handing out press releases. In fact, no one connected to the scandal wanted any coverage—not the police commissioner, not the mayor, not the police union, not even Mike Cox, given his nature. Boston did not have its own Reverend Al Sharpton, the New York Baptist minister and vitriolic activist, to inflame public interest. Instead, the Cox case belonged to that category of news story the media uncovered by being investigative, enterprising, or “pro-active” in its reporting—and in this instance the Boston media had dropped the ball.

Bob Peabody, the assistant district attorney leading the new criminal investigation, was just returning to the office, fresh from finishing a special assignment working alongside federal prosecutors in winning the racketeering convictions against a number of gangsters from the city’s Charlestown neighborhood. The verdict on March 22 followed a grueling five-month-long trial, and an investigation that had taken several years. The outcome was hailed as a major break in the largely Irish neighborhood’s notorious “code of silence,” where residents, or “Townies,” were loath to testify against one of their own for fear of retaliation from neighborhood thugs. Deeply embedded in Charlestown’s insular ways, the code was a key factor behind a shockingly high unsolved murder rate. In two decades, nearly 75 percent of the fifty murders remained unsolved—far exceeding the rate in any other section of Boston. It gave credence to the local slogan: In this town you could get away with murder. But the trial verdicts now suggested otherwise. Led by a young, aggressive federal prosecutor named Paul V. Kelly, investigators convinced residents to cooperate and even persuaded some gangsters to turn against their cohorts. The government spent nearly $1 million to protect and relocate up to eighteen witnesses. “We’re not going to turn around 100 years of history with one case,” Kelly said afterward. “But hopefully we have dented the code.”

Bob Peabody was on trial with Kelly when he’d first read about Mike’s beating in the newspaper in late February. Once the trial ended in late March, he began working his way back into the district attorney’s office, and during his transition one of Ralph Martin’s top aides asked about his interest in taking on the Cox case.

“Yeah, absolutely,” Peabody said. He liked the idea of digging deep into a new investigation, and he hoped to apply some of the tips he’d picked up during the federal investigation. “I’d had practice and experience on the federal side doing this long-term investigation in the Charlestown case, so it actually was a great chance to do it again.”

In a way, he was going from one “code of silence” case to another. The two worlds were obviously different in so many ways—an entire neighborhood, on the one hand, compared to a police force. But both were tightly knit, insular, and seemingly impenetrable. Police officers here and there had offered tidbits, but the blue wall of silence was proving durable. Police Superintendent Doherty, the department’s chief of internal investigations, acknowledged as much, writing at one point in court papers that Boston police officers weren’t talking “because they fear retaliation, harassment, intimidation and unfavorable decisions on promotions and assignments.”

Peabody chose not to dwell on comparisons between the two cases or reasons that police officers had not come clean. He viewed Mike’s case as a straightforward investigation of an assault and battery. “Our job was to try to figure out how he got hit and who hit him. That was our objective.” He considered instead the other obstacles—such as the nearly four-month delay in getting started. The first twenty-four hours after the beating, he knew from experience, had been the best chance “for people to figure it out and cut to the chase, and to be big about it.” Once lost, “It was every man for himself.”

Then the Internal Affairs investigatory materials were off-limits. “We were barred from obtaining any of the information from Internal Affairs.” Peabody and his Anti-Corruption investigators would be unable to challenge any changes in the officers’ tape-recorded statements—known as prior inconsistent statements. But it was more than comparing content. Interviews were about body language too, and experienced investigators studied words and body language in assessing an officer’s credibility. In this regard, the IA interviews were tantamount to dress rehearsals—a practice round for testing statements and delivery. Peabody’s interviews were not going to be fresh.

Despite his role in the Charlestown affair, Peabody was also the first to admit his own relative inexperience when it came to using the grand jury as an investigatory tool. Ordinarily prosecutors went before a grand jury to seek indictments based on evidence already assembled by the police. Typically, this legal step was brief and uncomplicated. In the Cox case, Peabody, as the lead prosecutor, would be trying to
develop
evidence in front of the grand jury, where he’d be calling witnesses to the stand and attempting to build a case by “probing and digging and pushing.” But if he lacked the sure-footedness of his later career, when he would run a number of investigatory grand juries, Peabody entered the Cox case eager and undeterred. He attacked the case with the same determination he showed while playing tackle on the offensive line of the Harvard College football team. “We’d start from scratch, ground zero, and build our own case.”

The game plan wasn’t fancy or revolutionary. Peabody began by reading the stack of police reports about Woodruff Way, underlining certain statements and jotting notes in the margins. As he began to reconstruct the night, he couldn’t help but get swept up in its high drama—the wildness of the high-speed chase for the four shooting suspects followed by the “fucking chaos” at the dead end. “The adrenaline was pumping like you wouldn’t believe.” It reminded him that life for street cops was “God-forsaken work. You’re working on the edge. Your life is in your hands. It’s scary. People don’t get that.”

Peabody was teamed up with the head of the police department’s Anti-Corruption Unit, Lieutenant Detective Paul J. Farrahar. The two men knew of each other but had never worked together before. Farrahar, about to turn fifty-four, was a commanding figure. Like Peabody, he stood more than six feet tall. But Farrahar exuded a physicality that Peabody did not, despite Peabody’s history as a college football jock. Peabody was a blue blood, with an Ivy League polish and hint of the Boston Brahmin in his voice. He was no snob, for sure; he was down-to-earth—he’d eaten his fair share of turf as a lineman—but his earth was different from Farrahar’s. The balding cop’s background was working class. His handshake was firm, driven by powerful forearms, and he possessed an unflappable demeanor. The inscrutable look, however, did not mask a hard interior. He had seen it all during his twenty-five years on the force—or thought he had until the Mike Cox beating. The more he learned, the more worked up he got. The silence that followed was beyond his comprehension. It turned his insides that cops had run from a fallen cop.

Together, Peabody and Farrahar began scheduling the interviews in the case officially known as “ACD Case 95–12: Sergeant Michael Cox, Assault and Battery.” Farrahar typed up a list of nineteen questions to serve as a guide. The list began with the basics. “State your name, rank and ID number.” It ended with the heart of the matter: “Did you see any person assault Michael Cox?” They decided to ask key officers to draw by hand a diagram of the cul-de-sac at Woodruff Way, marking the locations of cruisers and officers, an exercise that resulted in a collection of wildly different pictures. For their use, Farrahar prepared a rough drawing of Woodruff Way—a diagram he then taped to a piece of shirt cardboard from the cleaner’s—so they could position the cruisers and people based on evidence they developed during the course of the investigation.

Unlike the Internal Affairs Division, the BPD Anti-Corruption Unit was housed “off campus,” or away from police headquarters on Berkeley Street in the Back Bay. Just recently, the unit had moved into new offices in the Fort Point Channel neighborhood. For much of the 1800s and into the 1900s, the area was a vibrant shipping and industrial center, bustling with ships, warehouses, and brick and granite factories. More recently, Fort Point Channel had become an afterthought, known for its funky studios and small start-up businesses, as artists and entrepreneurs took advantage of the rundown warehouses and cheap rents. But change was afoot again. Since it bordered the financial district, developers increasingly had their eye on the neighborhood’s potential. It was officially an area “in transition” when Farrahar set up shop on the fifth floor of a red-brick building on Congress Street. The offices, freshly painted and newly carpeted in a speckled gray-blue pattern, were in the building’s rear. The idea behind having such a nondescript location was to provide some privacy, so that police officers summoned to meet with investigators could come and go without fanfare.

Both Peabody and Farrahar joined the investigation well aware of the simmering bad blood between the DA’s office and many rank-and-file cops over Ralph Martin’s track record of going after cops. Peabody wasn’t going to let politics affect his work. Indeed, Martin had told him as much. “Ralph said, ‘Just do it.’” But that didn’t mean Peabody had no appreciation for the pressures at play. He was clear-eyed. “You’ve got to win these.” Losing a corruption case against a cop, he said, “would be devastating.”