The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (29 page)

Peabody’s first interview was with Mike Cox. The session on May 11 fell a week after Mike was diagnosed by his psychiatrist with depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. Once again, Mike shared what he remembered about Woodruff Way. Peabody, Farrahar, and a third prosecutor listened quietly, occasionally asking questions. They had him look at some photographs of Dave Williams’s cruiser. Taken by a police photographer to document the cruiser’s damage, the photos also showed the rear trunk streaked with Mike’s blood. Mike talked about Ian Daley nearly arresting him. When they were done, Peabody was struck by how “mild mannered” Mike was. He also sensed Mike’s despair. “He’s an island unto himself at this point.” The second prosecutor scribbled notes as Mike covered a span from when he joined the police department to his treatment in the hospital emergency room. On the last of seven pages the prosecutor highlighted two names: “Bergio,” which was spelled incorrectly, and “Dave Williams.”

Peabody wished Mike could have given them more. In the ideal case, Mike would have been able to tell him the identity of the beaters. “He couldn’t pin the tail on the donkey,” Peabody said later. “He just couldn’t.” But Peabody was satisfied Mike had done the best he could, taking his injuries into account, and he launched his investigation feeling confident. He would proceed methodically with the grand jury, working out from the victim and moving from car to car and from cop to cop. “You investigate…you explore, you probe.” He was in no rush. “We had plenty of time. We were going to do this painstakingly.” He was also under no illusions. The investigation was going to be a long haul. But he was hopeful about the prospect of bringing the beaters to justice, about developing enough evidence—a mix of direct and circumstantial—where the only “reasonable inference” was to convict Mike’s assailants.

“That’s not a bad way to go to court—it
has
to be them!”

Nearly a year later, Bob Peabody would feel otherwise.

Its newsworthiness notwithstanding, the probe of the Cox beating continued below the Boston media’s radar under a cloak of darkness, talked about by police in rumor and whispers in station house locker rooms, out on patrol, or in the bars after shifts, often crackling with a tension that, on occasion, erupted.

Craig Jones, for one, had trouble containing his anger—and he targeted Ian Daley as an outlet for his frustration. “After Mike told me about Ian Daley trying to handcuff him, I’m like, ‘That’s got to be the one guy that knows exactly what happened, the guy standing there with the handcuffs.’” Late one night Craig happened to walk into the Roxbury station house and spotted Daley already in the front lobby. Craig sat down near the front desk to write up a report about an arrest. Daley stood not far away.

Craig looked over. “Why don’t you come clean?”

Daley said he didn’t know what Craig was talking about.

“Just come clean, Ian. You know what happened.”

Daley again said he didn’t know what Craig meant.

Craig couldn’t take it. “You’re a liar,” he yelled.

Heads turned. Craig swore at Daley and Daley yelled back. The sergeant on duty got up and came around from behind his desk, “Hey! Hey! Knock it off!” He then ordered the two officers into a side room, where he kept them until they cooled off.

But it didn’t end there. The two had a second run-in. Both responded to a late night shooting several weeks later on Lawrence Avenue in Dorchester. Craig, working in plainclothes, was walking up the street when he saw Daley walking in the other direction. Immediately Craig began gesturing theatrically—raising his arms over his head and crossing his hands at the wrists in mockery of the new identification signal implemented by the police commissioner for plainclothes officers to give to uniformed officers. “I’m a police officer!” Craig yelled melodramatically. “Don’t hurt me.”

“Fuck you,” Daley said.

Daley complained to his supervisors at the Roxbury station, and, once again, Craig was told to knock it off. Craig got no satisfaction from the run-ins, but couldn’t help himself. “When I encountered Ian Daley,” he said, “I’m upset about what happened and how all the officers who were there
for some reason
never saw a damned thing.”

Jimmy Burgio and Dave Williams, meanwhile, were carrying on as usual. They showed up for work and performed their regular shifts. To earn more, they worked paid details. For Burgio, the extra money was welcome. On Saturday, June 24, he married a Dorchester woman he’d met earlier in the year. Williams went, toasting Jimmy’s big day, while Burgio’s longtime partner, Lenny Lilly, served as one of the ushers. For Burgio and Williams, the probe was little more than background noise.

Around the time of his interview with Bob Peabody, Mike and Kimberly headed over to Franklin Park one sunny weekend to take advantage of the warmer weather. The park, the city’s largest, with 527 acres, could be a dangerous place after hours. Rape and murder on the park’s grounds were an unfortunate and dark side to its history. The night of the beating, Mike, Craig, and the other officers had chased the gold Lexus along the park’s east side, roaring down Blue Hill Avenue. But the daytime was entirely different. The park was home to a zoo, a golf course, and playing fields for baseball and soccer. Families picnicked on weekend days. Joggers and bicyclists dotted the pathways.

The long walk was a chance for husband and wife to be alone and to get out of the crowded, densely built street where they lived. Kimberly’s graduation from medical school was only weeks away, and Mike was going to travel to Philadelphia with their sons in June to attend this milestone in his wife’s career. Kimberly wasn’t going to be able to sit on her laurels for long, however. On July 1 she would begin a one-year internship in internal medicine at the Carney Hospital in Dorchester. It was the same hospital where Mike, Craig Jones, Richie Walker, Dave Williams, and others sometimes met for a meal in the hospital cafeteria after coming off an overnight shift.

July was also looking to be a big month for Mike. It was when he was scheduled to return to the force. Physically, he’d been coming around. He no longer wore the splint to stabilize the damaged ligament in his right thumb. With therapy, the thumb was feeling stronger. He could hold his service revolver okay. The thumb still swelled easily if he used it a lot, so he quit playing for the gang unit’s basketball team in the police league. He usually began playing tennis at least once a week during the spring, but at this point he didn’t give playing even a passing thought. His urine was still brownish in color, and the severe headaches dogged him. Taking Advil or Motrin was part of his daily diet. But his amnesia was wearing off, along with his dizziness and occasional disorientation. He’d not had another freaky episode like the one when he was driving home from a doctor’s appointment and “I just drove by my house. I don’t know where I was driving, but I had gone past my house, way past my house, and I realized, you know, Where am I going?” In five months, he’d had more than thirty visits with a dozen or more doctors.

Mike wasn’t going to be rejoining the gang unit. He had a new assignment—and of all places, the newly promoted Sergeant Mike Cox was headed to the Internal Affairs Division. It seemed surreal: joining the division that had failed to solve his own beating. But the transfer had been in the pipeline well before the night of January 25. It was generally believed career-minded officers—officers who aspired to high-ranking positions on the force—needed to rotate through Internal Affairs or Anti-Corruption. With that in mind, Mike had actually sought the assignment. But now Mike no longer felt so ambitious. He no longer knew what to think about his career. He wasn’t ready to quit, which was what Kimberly and others in his family wanted. But his career seemed in shambles to him. His mind was preoccupied around the clock with the case. He didn’t know what to do, except to go ahead and report to work in July and see what happened.

The couple had all this and more on their minds as they were making their way through the park. Then they heard someone calling out Mike’s name.

Mike looked and recognized Dave Williams.

Hey, Mike. How you doin’?

Mike was surprised to see Williams, but Franklin Park was also a familiar destination for him. He jogged in the park if he skipped his early morning workouts in the gym. Mike realized it had been a couple of months since he and Williams had talked. Kimberly strolled ahead and left the two men alone on the path.

Williams took the lead by asking a question: I hope you don’t believe that stuff that they’re saying in the paper? Mike didn’t answer. He listened. Mike, I know you, Williams said, I know you
.
Williams repeated the line, or a variation of it, more than once:
You know I know you, Mike. You know I wouldn’t hit you.

The refrain had the sound of a talking point. Then he delivered a second line: He switched subjects from himself to Jimmy Burgio, and when he did Mike noticed something. “He was talking to me face to face,” Mike said, “and then when he got to that part—‘And as far as Burgio, ah, well, ah’—he wouldn’t look at me.” To Mike, Williams was not acting like the guy he’d known for almost four years: confident, direct, up tempo. “He said, ‘As far as Burgio, well, I don’t know how they, you know, could say that because, ah, well, he was kind of…You know, he was right behind me.’”

The gist of the halfhearted rambling was to back up Burgio, and Mike couldn’t stomach listening to any more of it. “Dave, c’mon,”

he interrupted.

Williams stopped. Mike continued. “This thing is not going to go away,” he said. “It’s not going to end any time soon. It’s only going to get worse.” Mike then began his own talking point, telling Williams several times, “Just tell the truth.”

When Mike finished, Williams didn’t try to pick up where he’d left off. Nor did he respond to Mike’s challenge by insisting he was telling the truth, as he had to Jim Hussey during the interview with Internal Affairs. Williams just didn’t say anything more about that night at the dead end, and the accidental meeting between the two ended there.

Mike turned the exchange over and over in his head, looking for meaning beneath the surface of the word choices and elliptical sentence constructions, the repeated
You know I know you, Mike
, and so forth—all part of a haunting puzzle to him. It seemed more fitting for a code breaker working intelligence in the world of international espionage. By his interpretation, Mike decided the faint defense of Burgio—delivered in a stutter and humility uncharacteristic of Dave Williams—was his former friend’s way of signaling Burgio was culpable but that he was bound to cover for him.

It all left Mike feeling empty.

Two months later Mike again unexpectedly ran into Williams. The occasion was the funeral in July of a fellow officer, Sergeant Diana Green. Dee Green had committed suicide. The news came as a blow. The last time Mike had seen Dee was when they’d stood proudly together on the stage during their promotions to sergeant. She was a friend, and Mike had always respected her accomplishments. When she did not show for work, her captain had gone to her condo in Roxbury. He got in and discovered her body on the floor. Her dog, a German shepherd named Buddy, stood by. There were no signs of forced entry. In the
Boston Herald
, columnist Peter Gelzinis wrote a tribute. He quoted one of Green’s former supervisors. “Her courage was a given,” the supervisor said. “I watched Diana make a stop of two guys in a car with machine guns. Held them at gunpoint. But it wasn’t her guts I admired most. It was her heart. Her wisdom. The life she lived…She survived KKK attacks as a child in the South. She endured the sight of her father’s accidental death. She conquered scoliosis to become a runner. Diana taught me a helluva lot more about life than I ever taught her about police work.”

Mike usually tried to avoid large gatherings of police officers, but nothing was going to keep him from the funeral. He did, however, manage to get a seat without really talking to anyone else. Then, during the service, he found himself feeling raw and vulnerable. The feelings caught him off guard; he wasn’t usually the emotional type. He had to work to keep from choking up. Once the service ended, he was hoping to leave as unobtrusively as he’d arrived, but he bumped into Williams on his way out.

“He came up and asked me how I was doing.” Mike, on automatic pilot, summoned what had become his stock answer. “What I always say. ‘Fine, thank you.’” They were making only small talk, but Mike felt weird. “I didn’t feel like I normally felt.” He couldn’t put his finger on the feeling—a little bit of anger, maybe, but more like his mind could not stay focused on Williams’s chatter and was instead trying to land on a thought just beyond his mental reach. It was most like the experience everyone has had at one time or another—when you see someone you know but for an instant you can’t recall the person’s name. There’s a gap, a space in time, before the click of recognition. That’s how it felt to Mike, although he was grasping not for a name but for a memory.

Mike took the feeling home with him. He had little to say to Kimberly or the boys. He was brooding, trying to make a connection to the nagging but unconscious thought. “I was up most of the night. I really wasn’t sleeping.” Then, without warning, it came. It gushed out in a rush of sounds and flashing lights. “I heard sirens blaring and people yelling.” He was reliving the beating. He remembered standing at the fence and getting hit from behind. He remembered being on the ground, huddled, the blows coming down on him. “I remembered it in more detail than I ever remembered before.”

New details surfaced. The most telling was this: Mike, as he was balled up on the ground, heard a voice in the cloak of darkness all around him. “Stop, stop, he’s a cop!” It was a voice Mike recognized, a voice he knew well: Dave Williams’s.

Kimberly awoke and found her husband shaken and agitated. Mike could not turn off the voice ringing around inside his head: “Stop, stop, he’s a cop!” He told Kimberly what had happened, about this new information. And the next day he drove to the courthouse. He walked into Bob Peabody’s office and told the prosecutor. Mike didn’t exactly know what it all meant. Maybe Williams was a beater who called off the attack after recognizing him under the bulky hoodie and coat he wore. Maybe Williams was not a beater and had stopped the others from hitting him. Either way, Mike was convinced Williams was a key witness. He had a new twist to Williams’s own jangle of
You know I know you, Mike.
It was now Mike’s turn:
Dave, I know you know something.