The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (7 page)

Mattie, a light sleeper, heard her son outside her bedroom door. “He came into the bedroom and then walked back out into the hall, pacing.” Smut was afraid to tell his father what had happened until Mattie yelled, “What’s the matter, Robert?” Smut blurted out about the fire; his parents leaped from the bed. Smut grabbed Shanae. Everyone got out safely. But by the time firefighters extinguished the blaze, the house was uninhabitable. The smoke damage was extensive. They had to move out while the house was repaired. Smut’s family moved in with his aunt’s family in Hyde Park. Indira moved back with Shanae into her mother’s.

Smut’s troubles were now not the kind his mother, Mattie, could be expected to straighten out.

This was especially true for the pile of criminal charges he’d amassed while on bail in the Coleman’s burglary. There was no longer a way out. One year after the break-in, Smut stood in court on October 17, 1989, and admitted his guilt. The judge sentenced him to serve two and a half years in the House of Corrections. If there was any good news to pleading guilty, it was the resolution of the other seven criminal cases. That’s the way the system worked—once Smut pleaded guilty in the big case, the other cases were eventually disposed of with little additional damage. Some charges were dismissed, while Smut pleaded guilty to others. The new sentences ran concurrently to the time he was already serving. Still, the cleanup came with a price. To pay for her son’s legal bills, Mattie took out a second mortgage on their house in Mattapan in the amount of $50,000.

Smut entered the prison system at age eighteen. He was released in July 1991 after serving twenty-one months of his thirty-month sentence, shortened for good behavior. He was now a twenty-year-old ex-con. But little was changed—in him, in his world. He moved back into the house on West Selden Street, which had been renovated. Indira rejoined him in the basement bedroom, and their second child was born on March 13, 1992. They named the boy Robert Brown IV, and soon he was nicknamed “Little Smizz.”

Smut resumed the livelihood he knew best—dealing coke. He spent his days getting stoned and dealing the drug on the streets of Mattapan, Dorchester, and Roxbury, though he had a knack for getting out of the trouble that inevitably came his way. He was soon arrested by Boston police, but was later found not guilty of the drug-dealing charge in Dorchester District Court. In early January 1992, he was arrested again, but he beat that drug-dealing charge too, winning another ruling of not guilty.

Hosting Hip-Hop Night was a display of business acumen by the Cortee’s. Generally speaking, Boston was not a destination for rappers and hip-hop shows. The shows that did make it to New England took the stage at the Centrum in Worcester or the Providence Civic Center in Rhode Island.

Walking inside, Smut and Boogie-Down were swallowed by the club’s darkness. The dance floor in the center of the room was full. The bar along the right side was deep with patrons. The few tables were all taken. The DJ in a booth straight across the room was playing everything—from Notorious B.I.G., the king of hip-hop, to Wu-Tang Clan to Nas, the street poet. Lots of “gangsta rap,” vicious and raw, violent and drug-fueled.

Smut spotted Tiny Evans.

Tiny was with Marquis—or Jimmy—Evans, Tiny’s younger brother. He was the biggest of them all—more than six feet tall and weighing 220 pounds. Smut hardly knew Marquis, who was his age, twenty-three. And Marquis had just gotten out of prison—convicted at age seventeen of using a sawed-off shotgun in an assault case. The one thing Smut knew was Marquis could be a hothead, which Tiny sometimes manipulated to his advantage.

Tiny saw Smut and hurried over. Tiny had spotted a kid named Little Greg who was affiliated with the Castlegate Street gang. “Tiny was saying, ‘Little Greg is in the club, Little Greg is in the club,’” Smut said. “He was talking a mile a minute.”

Tiny and Little Greg had a beef going back a couple of years—beginning when Tiny ripped Little Greg’s chain right off his neck and kept it. Then the previous summer Little Greg got some revenge. Tiny told Smut he was getting his hair cut when Little Greg burst into the barbershop and fired a shot. The next time Smut saw Tiny he was walking with a cane. “He got hit near his scrotum.” Not surprisingly, neither event was reported to police. They were matters for the street. Now inside the Cortee’s, Tiny and Little Greg exchanged looks. Smut saw that Tiny was monitoring Little Greg’s whereabouts. Smut reminded Tiny it was his birthday. “Leave it alone,” Smut said.

Looking around, Smut observed friend and enemy alike. But among the foursome—Smut, Tiny, Marquis, and Boogie-Down—he felt secure. The group stood at the bar. Boogie-Down spotted his girlfriend and snuggled with her. Marquis was broke but wanted to buy a round of drinks in honor of his brother’s birthday. He had the gall to ask Tiny to loan him $20. Tiny couldn’t believe it, but dug into the pocket of his blue jeans, where he had a roll of more than $700 in cash. Drinks were on Marquis.

The songs worked loud and hard on Smut. He ordered a drink, another smooth Cask & Cream. Smut loved rap. He saw himself as a budding lyricist and eventually would go from toying with words and beats inside his head to writing them down on paper.

They were mostly autobiographical lyrics like:

I had a Daddy who was crazy so I lost my patience

That’s when I hit the street, searchin’, hurtin’, wantin’ salvation.

My occupation was me cuttin’, puttin’ rocks in a bag….

It was a verse from a song “Our Hoods” by Smut Brown, whose hook went:

Ya’ll don’t know what it is

To grow up in our hood (our Hoods!)

Ya’ll don’t know what it is

To see the things that we would.

CHAPTER 3

Kenny Conley

W
hen Kenny Conley arrived that night at the station in the South End of Boston to work the overnight shift—known as the “last half,” from 11:45
P.M
. to 7:30
A.M
.—he first went to his locker on the second floor to get his equipment squared away. Then he walked back downstairs to read some reports and talk to the guys coming off duty to see what kind of night it had been. That’s when he learned he was without his regular partner, Danny McDonald, who was out on an injury and not available for duty.

Kenny wasn’t all that surprised. McDonald had injured his knee the night before while the two worked an anti-crime unit—the Delta K–1 car—patrolling the district in an unmarked cruiser looking for trouble: drug dealing, prostitution, crimes in progress. “You’re out there hunting,” Kenny said. The anti-crime cars were considered more pro-active than the “service units” that were directed by a dispatcher to respond to calls for police assistance, ranging from a disabled vehicle to more serious crimes.

The anti-crime units were also different from the police department’s elite units that also worked in street clothes. Kenny patrolled only in his district, known as Area D–4, which covered parts of the South End, Back Bay, and Fenway neighborhoods. Officers assigned to either the drug unit or the Anti–Gang Violence Unit—such as Mike Cox and Craig Jones—had citywide jurisdiction and were free to roam.

The night before, Kenny and McDonald had driven slowly down one of the narrow alleys running behind the townhouses and red-brick buildings that made up the Back Bay, the historic neighborhood that was home to a mix of students, young professionals, and the well-heeled. Kenny was driving when they noticed a car ahead of them, occupied and idling. They watched as two men approached the car, textbook “suspicious activity” for that hour of the night. The officers ran the car’s plate. When it came back as a stolen vehicle, McDonald opened the cruiser’s door, climbed out, and began walking to the car. That’s when the car lurched forward. Instantly, Kenny hit the gas pedal and looped around to cut the car off. Other police units responded in time to catch the two men who fled on foot. The suspects were taken into custody, while McDonald was taken for treatment. He’d been hit in the knee by the lurching car and would eventually undergo surgery to repair the ligament damage.

Kenny learned during roll call that McDonald would be out. His supervisor asked whom he’d like to work with that night in the Delta K–1 car. Kenny looked around the guardroom full of officers ready to go on duty. He spotted Bobby Dwan. He’d never worked with Dwan before, but they were friendly. Bobby had come onto the force in 1990, a year before Kenny did. He was a second lieutenant in the National Guard who had served for six months in the Gulf War in 1991 as a platoon leader in the military police. Like Kenny, Bobby was from Boston, although Bobby grew up in Mattapan on the opposite side of the city from Kenny’s South Boston. Bobby was a jock; he was a three-sport varsity athlete in high school—football, hockey, and baseball—and played center for the first line on the police department’s hockey team. He was married, with a baby girl and another due any day now, and he lived just outside the city. There was no pretense about Bobby—nothing fancy and no bull—and Kenny liked that.

How about Bobby Dwan? Kenny told the supervisor.

It was done.

Bobby had been scheduled to work a one-person service unit, so he had to run to his locker and change back into the clothes he’d worn to work—blue jeans, sneakers, and the L. L. Bean barn jacket with the green corduroy collar his wife had bought as a gift. He joined Kenny, who already was set to go—dressed in jeans, sneakers, a black turtleneck, an off-white Carhartt jacket, and a corduroy baseball hat with a shamrock on it.

They headed out to the Delta K–1 anti-crime car. Side by side, they were an odd couple: Kenny towered at six-four and weighed 215 pounds, while Bobby was five-three and barely topped 150 pounds. In the city, the big news at the time was the nationwide manhunt for Boston’s most famous gangster, James J. “Whitey” Bulger. Under investigation for years, the aging crime boss from Southie had hit the road at the beginning of the month after a corrupt FBI agent tipped him off to a pending federal indictment. Whitey disappeared with a girlfriend, and soon enough the sixty-six-year-old killer made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List alongside Osama bin Laden.

Whitey was the talk of the town, especially in Southie. But for twenty-six-year-old Kenny Conley, another son of Southie, all the Whitey talk was background noise to personal anguish. His mother had died—on Thanksgiving Day. She’d fallen ill suddenly in October, was hospitalized, and fell into a coma. She never recovered. She was fifty-two.

“I took that hard,” Kenny said. He and his mother had been very close. “It was the toughest thing I ever went through.” He thought about his mother every day. But he was not about to talk to Bobby Dwan about her. “When I’m on the job, I focus on the job.”

The first-time partners left the D–4 station after midnight. Within minutes, the Delta K–1 unit was heading to East Newton Street in the South End to investigate a report that prostitutes were working a street corner despite the sub-freezing cold.

Growing up in South Boston, Kenneth Michael Conley always wanted to be a cop. His uncle Russ—his father’s oldest brother—was on the force and worked for years at the same station where Kenny was eventually assigned—Area D–4. As a boy, he had been impressed by his uncle’s uniform. “I’d see my uncle coming home, in his uniform with his partners, coming to see my father, and it excited me.” In addition, Kenny’s boyhood perspective on his uncle’s duties neatly fit with the Southie virtue of help thy neighbor. “I like to help people,” he said. To a question in his eighth-grade yearbook asking what he would be doing twenty years later, Kenny’s answer was: “Boston Police Officer.”

His modest upbringing was one of the typical Southie stories unfolding within a few blocks of home. When he and his twin sister, Kristine, were born on December 11, 1968, his parents lived in a third-floor walk-up at 599 East Fourth Street with their first-born, Cheryl. His parents, Ken and Maureen, or “Moesie,” were both from Southie. They’d met when their respective “crowds” crossed paths. Maureen; her oldest friend, Peg O’Brien; and their other friends hung out at Frank and Rosie’s on N and Sixth Street. Kenny and his pals hung out at a spa one block away, on N and Fifth. Maureen and the girls would go to the spa for pizza and to play the jukebox, and the guys in Ken’s crowd would follow them back to Frank and Rosie’s. “Before long it was one crowd,” said Peg O’Brien. Ken, who was four years older than Maureen and a high-school dropout, worked as a truck driver and later as a track worker for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, or “the T.” Maureen worked for an insurance company, but quit when Cheryl was born. Within a couple of years, though, Maureen and Peg got part-time jobs at Gillette, headquartered in Southie, testing new deodorants. They’d sit with a “panel” of other women in hot rooms with pads under their sweating armpits to test the effectiveness of the deodorant. The two friends worked as a tag team, alternating between work and home. While Maureen worked, Peg watched Cheryl; when Peg worked, Maureen watched Peg’s daughter.

“Kind of like Lucy and Ethel,” Peg O’Brien said. “I think it was for about ninety minutes a day. We got paid about $35 a week.” When the twins Kenny and Kris were born, Maureen decided to stop working again and stay at home with her three kids.

The Conleys lived in a four-bedroom apartment with a single bathroom, one block from East Broadway, which, along with West Broadway, was Southie’s main commercial street. The two Broadways ran the length of Southie, from Boston Harbor on the east to a bridge on the west side that connected the neighborhood to the city. For a third-floor apartment, the Conleys’ home did not have much of a view. They looked out onto the asphalt parking lot of the telephone company building that occupied the entire block from East Broadway to the side street—H Street. The far side of the parking lot actually rose uphill, an incline leading to the back entrances of some retail businesses on East Broadway. Kenny Conley called the tiny hill Tar Hill. In the winters after a fresh snowfall, he and his pals used it for sledding. The “trail” began atop a sliver of grass, ran under an iron railing, and then across the asphalt lot. The chain-link fence at the sidewalk served as a safety net, stopping their sleds from shooting out onto the street.