The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (9 page)

He was a freckle-faced boy of five, with a big smile and a mop of hair, when the buses began rolling in 1974. They carried black students from Roxbury to South Boston High School, and they transported white students from Southie to other city neighborhoods. It turned Southie into a war zone. State police patrolled school corridors, riot police flooded the streets, and police snipers took up positions atop three-deckers to enforce the law against the often violent anti-busing protesters. Many in Southie did not deny the school system was segregated, but they found unacceptable a solution that forced students out of neighborhood schools. But to a national television audience the angry confrontations between blacks and whites made Southie seem a hotbed of intolerance. Some of the ugliest moments showed Southie women shouting, “Niggers go home” at buses filled with black children trying to get to school.

The clash of politics, law, and educational equality was over Kenny’s head. But the high school was only a few blocks from his house, and the protests and street fighting were all around. Kenny, Kris, and their mom were eating dinner at a neighbor’s first-floor apartment one evening when the front door flew open and a teenager came running through the house. “No one locked their doors back then,” said Kenny, “and this kid came in and ran through the kitchen and out the back door. There were a couple of cops right behind him. It was crazy. We watched and went back to dinner.”

During the early years of busing some of Kenny’s peers were swept up in the anti-busing fervor and joined the demonstrations. Not Maureen Conley’s son. “I was the kid, when they were egging buses, I was always coming home.” Fourth Street was a route protesters took to the high school for a demonstration, and Kenny, his sister, and their friends were sometimes hauled off the street by a watchful parent. “I can recall being told to hurry and get inside,” Kris said. “But I didn’t really know why at the time.”

For high school Kenny wanted to follow his pal Mike Doyle, who was a year ahead of him, to the Don Bosco Preparatory High School in Boston. Never a star academically, Kenny went to summer school in 1982 so he could get in. He took courses in English and math. It worked. He began attending the Catholic school in September, catching the number 9 bus each morning at the corner of H Street and East Broadway for the ride through Southie and across the bridge into downtown Boston.

The extra effort may have gotten Kenny into Don Bosco, but starting out he was at best a mediocre student. Freshman year he got mostly low B’s and C’s. Then during sophomore year Kenny began to click—his grades improved steadily. That year and the next he earned mostly B’s and A’s. He peaked his senior year, both in class and on the playing fields. He played varsity basketball and football, and his grades were so strong he made the National Honor Society. “It felt good being able to come home having a 100 on an exam,” Kenny said. His perfect grades—100s across the board—in his religion class earned him the Religion Award at graduation in the spring of 1987. He also was named a Golden Bear, one of the school’s highest honors, awarded for character and leadership. The previous year’s Golden Bear was none other than Mike Doyle.

The awards left Kenny feeling a little dizzy. To be sure, he enjoyed them, but he was not used to the attention and did not consider himself “an awards or medals guy.” Glory-seeking was not what made him tick; instead, like his mother, he was a “doer.” Kenny Conley saw himself as one of the guys who got the job done without fanfare.

Kenny was coming of age in the long aftermath of busing and shifting sands in his hometown—namely gentrification. Slowly, young professionals were discovering the neighborhood’s proximity to downtown, its sea breezes, and its water views. But even as the outsiders arrived, Southie’s public image remained largely negative. The tumult of busing in the mid-1970s might have long subsided, but Southie had been scarred deeply.

“Although the crisis over busing was a relatively brief episode in South Boston’s 300-year history,” the historian Thomas H. O’Connor wrote, “it was an unusually bitter and violent period that stereotyped the neighborhood forever in the minds of people throughout the nation as a place where beer-bellied men and foulmouthed women made war on defenseless black children.” The stereotype was ripe for exploitation and would be used against Southie—the sense of loyalty made into a vice, not a virtue.

Kenny would someday experience this firsthand. But in 1987 he was riding on his own modest-sized version of cloud nine. Following the strong finish at Don Bosco, he spent the summer hanging out with friends, driving a delivery truck, and enjoying himself. He lived at home and had few expenses. His parents’ marriage was unraveling, but they had stayed friends. Kenny began playing basketball in a new adult CYO league at Gatie. One of the other teams, called the Evans Club, consisted of the Evans brothers, including Paul, a high-ranking officer in the police department who was twenty years older than Kenny and eventually became police commissioner during the 1990s.

Kenny also was accepted into Suffolk University in Boston. He registered for classes and lined up financial aid and grants. But when September rolled around, Kenny was a no-show. “I just didn’t want to go.” He decided he’d had enough of school and was talking to his father and Uncle Russ about the Boston Police Department. With their guidance, he filled out an application. He took a police cadet exam. Then, one day in November 1987, Kenny got the call to be a cadet, the first step in his dream of becoming a full-fledged police officer. Kenny was told to report for duty on December 5, 1987—six days before he turned nineteen. Mike Doyle was also accepted into the cadet program.

Kenny’s first assignment was working in the traffic division. He was on the job only two months when tragedy struck the department. Heavily armed members of the Drug Control Unit had quietly made their way up the stairs to an apartment on the third floor of 104 Bellevue Street in Dorchester. It was around 8:30 on the night of February 17, 1988. Using what was known as a no-knock search warrant, the plan was to surprise a cabal of drug dealers known to be working out of the apartment. The cops paused outside the bolted steel door and then began smashing their way inside using a battering ram and a sledgehammer. That’s when the whole thing went awry. Shots were fired from inside. One of the officers, Sherman Griffiths—thirty-six years old, married, and the father of two little girls—was hit in the head. His partner, Carlos A. Luna, and other cops hauled him out of the line of fire. They tried desperately to treat the wound and resuscitate the burly, bearded eighteen-year police veteran. He was rushed by ambulance to Boston City Hospital and was pronounced dead a few hours later. The police world mourned.

In the aftermath of Sherman Griffiths’s death, Police Commissioner Francis M. Roache called the drug unit officers “highly trained and very professional.” But as time went on the tragedy erupted into scandal. When it came to prosecuting the man charged in the cop’s death, Detective Luna could not produce the confidential informant cited in paperwork to obtain the search warrant. Luna had written on the warrant application he’d obtained probable cause for the raid because “John” had provided him with firsthand intelligence about the drug den. But it turned out there was no John; he did not exist.

The drug unit’s unlawful practice of lying on search warrants—a practice that amounted to a violation of the constitutional protection against unwarranted searches under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution—had been exposed. Luna and his supervisor, Sergeant Hugo R. Amate, eventually admitted they had routinely made up informants as a way to cut corners. The two disgraced officers were convicted of perjury and lost their jobs.

Kenny Conley was a new cadet at a time when the Boston Police Department was under fire, when its long-calcified culture of lying and cover-up was spilling increasingly into public view. Commissioner Roache and his top brass found themselves on the defensive, insisting publicly the corruption was isolated. But the rank-and-file privately knew otherwise: Luna and Amate were scapegoats for a broader pattern of corruption. A diary entry by the chief of homicide, made public years later, reflected this. The chief noted the commissioner was angry about the fallout created by the drug unit’s missteps. But, the cop noted, “no blame can be attached” to Luna and his supervisor because concocting fake informants and cutting corners was “the way the system operated.

“Because the acts of the drug officers imperil the police commissioner it appears that he is upset with us. If the case happened the same way tomorrow we would have to do the same thing. It looks like a case of wanting to shoot the messenger.”

When Kenny and Bobby Dwan responded to their first call the early morning of January 25 and arrived at 36 East Newton Street, the street corner was barren. Nobody was around, never mind prostitutes. The durability of prostitutes always amazed Kenny—the idea they’d be out on a weeknight in 29-degree weather. “If they need the money they go out there in their little skirts, whatever,” he said. On the other hand, the cold did put a chill into the level of illegal commercial activity. In that way, Mother Nature was an ally, an anti-crime initiative. Kenny and Bobby hung out for a bit, and then by one o’clock cleared the scene—calling in an “8-boy,” police code for no persons found.

Kenny had become a full-fledged police officer after serving four years as a cadet. He had directed traffic during rush hour, he had worked in operations on a night shift answering 911 emergency calls, and, lastly, he had worked in the commissioner’s office as a gofer. “Paperwork,” Kenny said. “I was basically a secretary.” On January 14, 1991, Kenny entered the police academy, and six months later, he was assigned to Area D–4.

Kenny was twenty-two years old. Graduation from the academy on June 19, 1991, was one of the most important days of his life. His family gathered for the ceremony, and Kenny proudly posed for photographs in his uniform with his mom and dad, and with Mike Doyle, who was also sworn in and was now on the force. Several nights later, Kenny, Mike Doyle, and other new officers hosted a celebration in Southie at the teachers’ union hall. Father Toomey showed up to see his former crew and to congratulate Kenny and Mike.

Kenny was living at home on H Street. His father was gone, but his twin sister, Kris, was there, as she attended Emerson College in the Back Bay. His older sister, Cheryl, lived in the house with her two kids, too. Kenny no longer slept in his boyhood bedroom on the third floor. He made the basement into a makeshift bachelor’s pad, laying down carpet and installing a separate entrance in back.

Kenny worked hard—both his regular shift out of the Area D–4 station and details to earn extra money. In his free time he’d work out and play basketball in a couple of men’s leagues, including Gatie’s. For a few years he played football on Sundays. He hung out with the same friends from the corner of H and Fifth. They’d bring a beer cooler to the basketball games. Or, after games, they’d go home and shower and grab beers at The Cornerstone in Southie, which was owned by a family friend, or the Corner Tavern at K and Second Streets. Kenny’s sandy-brown hair began thinning prematurely, and he became a “cap guy” with a growing collection of Red Sox, hockey, and other caps.

The mega-blow to the Conley family came in the fall of 1994. No one saw it coming. Maureen Conley had been working her shifts as a banquet waitress without incident. She had not had a drink in more than a year. “She was doing great,” Kenny said. Kenny was out working a detail that October 19, 1994, Kris was leaving for work when her mother said she did not feel quite right. Their aunt came by and saw that Maureen was in trouble. Kenny was called and rushed home. He called an ambulance. His mother was taken to the New England Medical Center, where doctors discovered she had acute kidney failure due to hepatorenal syndrome, along with liver disease.

“She went into a coma,” said Kris. “She had surgery, but never recovered.” Five and half weeks later, Maureen Conley was dead. “It was so sudden,” said Kris. “Boom.”

Two months later, Kenny was still shaken but kept his grief to himself.

Kenny and Bobby Dwan had barely cleared the East Newton Street area when they were called back, this time to talk to a man who lived in an apartment above a restaurant. The man complained nervously about the goings-on in apartment 3, saying drug dealers lived there. “He said there was supposed to be a drug shipment coming in,” Kenny said. Intrigued, Kenny and Bobby stuck around to see if the man was right.

They began the stakeout at 1:09
A.M
. By 2:07
A.M
., they’d had enough. Bobby called the dispatcher and they pulled away. “Nothing happened,” said Kenny.

Meanwhile, in another part of the city, Mike Cox and the gang unit had high hopes for the club Cortee’s, where an assembly of hip-hoppers included Robert “Smut” Brown and his friends. For Kenny Conley, though, the shift was shaping up like another ordinary night in what so far had been an ordinary career. In his four years on the force, Kenny had never been shot at. He’d never had to shoot at someone. He’d made plenty of arrests, but never a major one—such as a collar in a murder case. The absence of medals on his wall did not bother him. He was a young officer who did his job without fanfare.

But that was about to change, and despite what was in store for him, Kenny came up with a bit of gallows humor for that night. He would say years later that January 25, 1995, was one night “I wish I’d called in sick.”

CHAPTER 4

The Troubled Boston PD

W
hen Mike Cox and Kenny Conley were finding their footing during the early 1990s as neophytes on the force, the Boston Police Department itself was wracked by controversy. It seemed that with disturbing regularity a high-profile incident, involving tragic consequences, displayed the department’s weaknesses, corruption, and an impenetrable us-versus-them mentality. The 1988 shooting death of Detective Sherman C. Griffiths during a drug raid exposed entrenched corruption in Griffiths’s drug unit, where officers routinely and brazenly fabricated confidential sources to secure court-approved warrants. The department’s reputation took a huge hit, as the fallout spilled over into the 1990s.