The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (40 page)

Indeed they would—come December with the start of Mike’s case.

Mike Cox had never thought much of the diagnosis made soon after his beating that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He didn’t much believe in psychiatry, and, to him, the best therapy would be winning his federal civil rights case. Even so, his lawyer Steve Roach took him to a second psychiatrist for another opinion—both for Mike’s own well-being and for the purposes of the lawsuit. Roach personally drove Mike twice to the doctor’s office in the bedroom community of Chelmsford, thirty miles north of Boston. Mike and the Harvard-trained forensic psychiatrist spoke privately while Roach waited outside. The doctor also met with Mike and Kimberly together.

The psychiatrist found Mike friendly and cooperative, but a bit guarded. He assessed Mike’s intelligence in the “superior range,” with no indication of delusions, hallucinations, obsessions, or compulsions. “His insight is limited, however,” wrote Dr. Ronald P. Winfield in a report prepared in May 1997, “in that he continued to feel and to state that he did not believe that he had a psychiatric disorder.”

Mike’s views notwithstanding, Winfield affirmed the earlier diagnosis for PTSD, a disorder he determined was “directly due to the beating which he suffered at the hands of fellow Boston Police Officers.” Observing that Mike’s symptoms had persisted in the several years since the beating, Winfield said his condition was “chronic.”

Of particular interest, the psychiatrist found that Mike’s “pre-existing psychological makeup made him particularly vulnerable.” He cited a study showing that Vietnam War veterans who’d been gung-ho about the war prior to combat were more susceptible to developing PTSD. “The destruction of one’s beliefs is an intensely painful emotional blow,” the psychiatrist noted.

Winfield then compared that dynamic to Mike’s experience. Before he was beaten, “Michael Cox believed in the American Dream; he believed in the goal of a color-blind society. Michael’s personal and professional demeanor reflected these values, and he incorporated them into his life: He sought success through education, perseverance, and hard work.”

The pummeling at the fence—and his abandonment by fellow police officers—had changed all that. “To him, it was a violation and a repudiation of the Dream by which he had directed his life.

“Like Vietnam Vets, Michael was exposed to a trauma that at once endangered his life and undermined his beliefs.”

The psychiatrist also minced no words in emphasizing the singular power race played in his assault. Trauma, explained Winfield, was defined clinically as the experience of being made into an object. While a beating of this sort would be difficult for anyone to process, “objectification has a special depth of meaning, and emotional resonance for black Americans.” During two centuries of slavery, the psychiatrist noted, blacks were considered objects, “chattel; i.e., an item of property.”

For Mike, concluded Winfield, the trauma as a black man “being made into an object” was therefore “especially intense, destructive and psychologically malignant: psychological ghosts of night riders, lynchings and Jim Crow were resurrected.”

During the evening after Kenny Conley’s conviction in June, the crank calls resumed at the Cox household. “You’re an asshole,” a voice told Mike. Mike hung up. Later in the night the phone rang again, but Mike hung up as soon he recognized the gravelly voice. It made him furious that even though he was the one who’d been beaten, somehow, in the perverted logic of the cop culture, he still was the wrongdoer for pushing for justice. Now a cop had been convicted of perjury and it was supposed to be his fault.

He didn’t know Kenny Conley, but he resented the support Conley was getting, whether nefariously—as with the crank calls—or above board: the fund-raisers, the “Time for Kenny,” and the media interest in his plight. No one had staged a rally or fund-raiser for him.

“The support I received has been quiet support by good friends and family, you know, a few people within the department,” Mike said. “His support has been overwhelming.”

In truth, some of the reasons for the disparity were less about the men and more about their neighborhoods. Roxbury was a neighborhood splintered socially and politically, while Southie’s cohesiveness was legend. Roxbury had nothing matching “Southie pride.” Early on, too, Mike had rejected the few overtures made by some of Roxbury’s political and religious leaders; he was private by nature and wanted no part of turning the incident into a political or racial cause. Kenny Conley, meanwhile, with his friends’ help, had gone public unabashedly with his insistence of innocence.

Importantly, part of Kenny’s public crusade was to make clear he was no cover boy for the police cover-up. He railed against the assault and the mistreatment of Mike Cox—and that included harassing telephone calls, tire slashing, or any form of ostracizing Mike. Kenny couldn’t control anonymous cops who mistakenly thought he was standing tall for the blue wall. What he could do was openly criticize the inability to get to the bottom of the beating. “I’d like to get across to Michael Cox,” he told reporters, “that I had nothing to do with it and if I could have helped him I would have.”

Cox and Conley: They’d become an odd couple. One from Roxbury, the other from Southie. Prior to January 25, 1995, they were young cops with nothing but bright futures ahead. Then they “met” at the fence on Woodruff Way chasing Smut Brown. The utter failure to solve Mike’s beating had derailed both their lives: Mike was the pariah—he’d protested too much; Kenny faced thirty-four months in prison due to a misguided federal prosecution. Both outcomes resulted because the beaters and eyewitnesses went mute. Cox and Conley were now unlikely allies against the blue wall of silence.

It was unbelievable to Mike, the glares he’d gotten from the off-duty cops in the courtroom while he testified at Kenny Conley’s trial, the cold shoulders he got when walking the halls of police headquarters. When he supervised a detail of officers working a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, he got looks from some of the cops under his command. He’d overhear bits of their muffled talk. “He’s the one,” or, another time, “That’s the one, Cox.” Mike used to like doing the games; he’d work an average of about four a month. But no more. Even though the Sox, led by their ace, Pedro Martinez, opened the 1998 season on fire, going 18–8 in April, Mike quit signing up for the Fenway Park details. They made him too uncomfortable.

His wife and family wanted him to quit. One sister-in-law living in Michigan who worked at the Ford Motor Company mentioned she could help him find work with the automobile giant; a sister who worked at Gillette headquarters in South Boston said the company often hired former police officers in corporate security; the father of one of his son’s teammates on a youth baseball team was a senior executive at Fidelity, and he offered to help land him a position with the financial services company. In police circles, he was approached about joining the Massachusetts State Police or the FBI. Each time Mike said, No, thank you. His dream about police work in Boston may have been shattered, but he wasn’t going to walk off the job. First, he needed the paycheck—he had three kids and a wife just starting a medical career—and while he couldn’t quite explain it or say it made sense, he felt “being a police officer I’m also a lot safer.”

So Mike stayed on, although his work performance was on a steady decline. He struggled to keep up with the cases assigned to him in the Internal Affairs Division, and he was regularly apologizing, he said, “for lagging behind.” It wasn’t just the stress and distraction of the looming civil rights case; persistent headaches dogged him, and he had trouble concentrating. It seemed to take forever to write up his reports. Looking for relief, he was taking daily doses of Duradrin, a powerful prescription painkiller for migraines. By the summer, Jim Hussey, his boss, decided to lighten his workload.

When one of his mentors tried to recruit him to apply for an opening in the homicide unit—to work on a new squad looking to solve cold cases involving the street gangs—Mike said no way. The old Mike would have jumped at the choice assignment, but he’d decided he couldn’t work again on the frontlines. “It has to do with my ability to trust the individuals that I work with,” he said. “Trusting people with my life.” Too much had happened, and he avoided police officers and police talk. “I’m not the person you would want to hang out and be around if you want to improve your career.”

He was looking to lower his profile, not raise it. Instead of the prestigious homicide unit, he expressed interest in an opening in an obscure, pencil-pushing unit within the IA division—the audits and review section. “They go around and do audits of the drug unit, the seized money section, the tow log,” Mike said. It was the antithesis of the old Mike to prefer paper over street action. The audit section was buried inside a division that was already isolated from mainstream policing. But that was its very appeal. “It involved, I’d say, less contact with police officers and their supervisors, less people,” Mike said. “More isolated.” Mike was trying his best to be the invisible man.

Not all the calls to the house after the Conley conviction were hateful. Jim Hussey checked in to see how Mike was holding up. He wasn’t surprised by Mike’s reticence. “He’s not a man of many words,” Hussey said later. The two chatted, and Hussey said he wanted to resume surveillance of Mike’s house for a few days. Hussey was well aware of the crank calls and other harassment, and he wanted to take “all precautions necessary, just in case there was a loose cannon out there.” Hussey was hoping to make Mike and his family feel more comfortable. What did he think?

“That will help me sleep better.” The line was more an attempt at dry humor than the truth. Mike never slept well. He stayed awake worrying about his family’s safety.

In the more than three years since his beating, he still had not explained to his sons what happened at the fence. Police officers are “good, they’re your friends,” he’d always told his boys. “How do you explain to a child that you were beaten and basically left for dead by other police officers? And then other police officers witnessed it and no one has said anything.

“How can you tell a child that?”

No one knew better than Kimberly the continued toll on Mike.

“Before,” she said, “he was this nice, easygoing person who enjoyed doing things with his family. You know, he would joke a lot, he had fun. We did things together.

“I’m referring to the person that he once was. I’m referring to the fun-loving person who wasn’t paranoid, wasn’t depressed, wasn’t irritable, wasn’t difficult to get along with.”

Kimberly’s comments came during her own deposition. The session began at 9:23
A.M
. on August 6, a sunny morning with temperatures in the mid-70s, and ended six hours later. The questioning was conducted in the plush downtown offices of the private law firm hired by the city and the police department.

It marked the first time Kimberly had spoken extensively about Mike, and before the first question was asked, Steve Roach sought to assert the ground rules. Given the “abusively long deposition with her husband,” Kimberly was “only going to be here one day. We feel one day is enough.”

“Let’s see how we do,” replied the city’s attorney.

Kimberly began by summarizing her upbringing in New Orleans, her meeting Mike in Atlanta, their marriage, family, and respective careers in Boston. Most of the six hours then became a chronicle of a troubled Mike Cox after January 25, 1995.

He was different now, she said, and seemed depressed: “Lack of appetite, always feeling exhausted, wanting to sleep, not wanting to have company over. Wanting to be alone. Just not participating in daily family life like he used to.”

He used to coach his boys in sports, but had stopped. He used to read to them at bedtime, but now rarely did. “He was much more physical with them before,” she said. “They’re boys, they like to be tough, they like to wrestle, and he doesn’t do that anymore.”

In January they’d celebrated the birth of their first daughter, Mikaela, but, she said, “When he walks in he takes her and hugs her and kisses her, and then usually he gives her back.”

It was all such a sharp contrast to the early days of their marriage, when she was commuting to Philadelphia to attend medical school and they’d not only successfully met the challenges of work and home life, but had grown closer.

Now Mike seemed only partly there. “If we’re having a conversation he’ll walk out of the room in the middle of the conversation. I’m talking about one thing and he’ll leave that subject and go to something else, or he’ll pick up the phone and he’ll, you know, start dialing, calling someone on the phone and, like, Hey, we’re talking.”

He could be quick-tempered and unpredictable. “I hate to seem trivial, but just last night I went to the mall to buy some stockings, and that was a big deal.

“He said, Why did you need to do that? Well, I had to go get some stockings, and he had to have a fifteen-minute, you know, argument over the stockings. To me, that’s crazy.

“Every little single thing, every single day.” Mike was always turning off the kitchen ceiling fan with its four bright lights. “You know, we argue every day about sitting in a semi-dark house because the lights hurt his eyes.”

Like Mike, she worried about their safety, but she thought Mike had become obsessed and hypervigilant. “Worrying about what time I get to work, what time I come home from work, what time the kids get home.

“He’s preoccupied with making sure the doors are locked, re-checking them at night.”

She certainly had her opinion about the source of her husband’s struggles. “He feels abandoned, and basically there’s been no real way for him to feel that he’s received justice about what happened to him.

“I feel that in his mind, if someone had been identified, if there was someone who would take responsibility, you know, for their actions for what was done to him, he could at least have some of—well, there’s closure to this.”

The lawyer finally asked, “Do you and Michael have any plans to separate.”