Bob Peabody, the a.s.sistant district attorney leading the new criminal investigation, was just returning to the office, fresh from finishing a special a.s.signment 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 c.o.x 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, hara.s.sment, intimidation and unfavorable decisions on promotions and a.s.signments."
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 a.s.sault 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 a.s.sessing 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 a.s.sembled by the police. Typically, this legal step was brief and uncomplicated. In the c.o.x 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 c.o.x 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 "f.u.c.king chaos" at the dead end. "The adrenaline was pumping like you wouldn"t believe." It reminded him that life for street cops was "G.o.d-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 sn.o.b, 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 cla.s.s. 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 c.o.x 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 95a12: Sergeant Michael c.o.x, a.s.sault 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 a.s.sault Michael c.o.x?" 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."
Peabody"s first interview was with Mike c.o.x. 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 doc.u.ment 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 ident.i.ty 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 circ.u.mstantial-where the only "reasonable inference" was to convict Mike"s a.s.sailants.
"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 c.o.x 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."
"f.u.c.k 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 d.a.m.ned 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.signment-and of all places, the newly promoted Sergeant Mike c.o.x 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 a.s.signment. 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 h.e.l.luva 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 un.o.btrusively as he"d arrived, but he b.u.mped 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 s.p.a.ce 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.
CHAPTER 13.
c.o.x v. Boston Police Department Bob Peabody faced Dave Williams. "Officer, at any time while you were there did you yell out, "Stop. He"s a cop!"?"
"Negative."
"Is that a yes or no?"
"No."
"You did not yell that out?"
"No, sir."
"You did not yell it out once or twice?"
"I didn"t yell that out at all, sir."
"And you"re sure of that?"
"Positive."
"And that is the truth?"
"Absolutely."
Peabody asked Williams the question five times. Minutes later, he tried a sixth. "You categorically deny that you uttered the words, "Stop. Stop, he"s a cop!"?"
"I never said that, sir."
The heated exchange came more than an hour into Williams"s appearance before Peabody"s grand jury. It was Friday, the first of December, and seven months into Peabody"s investigation. Just as other witnesses had, Williams first checked in with a court officer stationed in an anteroom to guard the door. Williams then waited for Peabody to come out and get him. He walked into a room that was more an amphitheater than a courtroom, with three ascending rows of chairs where the twenty-three jurors sat. The bank of windows in the rear provided plenty of light, especially in the afternoon when the sun set. Williams took a seat in the flat area. His chair faced Peabody seated at a desk.
The prosecutor was getting nowhere. While he was uncertain whether Williams had actually delivered a blow or two, he was convinced Williams saw it all-"a bird"s eye view," was how he put it.
Williams pushed back hard. "I have no idea what happened to Mike," he told the grand jury. "I didn"t see anything of that nature, anyone striking Mike." Under oath, he elaborated on the skeletal accounts he"d initially given in his written reports. He said he"d bolted from his cruiser and chased the suspect named Jimmy "Marquis" Evans who ran from the Lexus"s front pa.s.senger seat. "He was running. I drew my gun, and I told him, "Get down. Get down. Get down," and he did. And I ran up to him. I just kept him at gun-point." He said he was in no position to see anything at the fence.
The account of a foot chase didn"t square with the tight geography at the end of the cul-de-sac, but Williams was unflappable as he addressed any inconsistencies. When Peabody pointed out Williams had written in one January 30 report, "both suspects fell down a steep hill," Williams acknowledged the inaccuracy as a harmless mistake. "I put down "steep hill" but I knew it wasn"t-I couldn"t tell whether the hill was steep or not."
Williams parried every incriminating remark others had made about him. He acknowledged saying at the hospital that it looked as if cops had beaten Mike, but insisted he was simply thinking out loud, putting words to what everyone in the room was thinking. "We were talking to Mike," he said. "We realized that something had happened that shouldn"t have, basically."
Peabody brought up Craig Jones, who had said that Williams fingered his partner, Jimmy Burgio. Peabody had decided Craig"s information had the ring of truth. First, he did not think Craig would ever concoct an incriminating statement against another officer. Moreover, the remark was not the sort of thing Craig or anyone would forget. "I"m asking you," Peabody said. "Did you ever tell Craig that you thought that your partner hit his partner by accident?"
Williams put his foot down. "No, I did not."
"Are you sure of that?"
"I"m positive of that."
"Absolutely sure?"
"I"m sure."
Williams explained Craig had misheard him. Sure, he"d brought up Burgio"s name with Craig, but only to refute rumors already circulating in the immediate aftermath of the beating. He"d told Craig that Burgio could not have hit Mike because "he was with me." Burgio, he said, had run after Ronald "Boogie-Down" Tinsley, the other suspect who"d fled from the right side of the Lexus. Williams said he"d seen Burgio get out of the car. "When I turned around, when I had my suspect, he was there." Williams said Craig had misunderstood and twisted his words all around. He was actually vouching for Burgio.
Finally, Williams exhibited an impressive inability to identify any of the other officers at the dead end, despite Peabody"s repeated efforts. He was comfortable discussing cops whose presence was widely acknowledged-Craig Jones, Joe Teahan, and Ian Daley, for example-but was stumped when it came naming any others.
"There were other cops there," he acknowledged.
"Did you know any of them?" Peabody asked.
"I can"t recall exactly who was there."
Williams certainly appreciated the benefits of cops sticking together. In October he"d gotten word in one of the two excessive force complaints pending against him-he"d been exonerated. In the Internal Affairs inquiry, every other officer had backed his position that he"d struck the Dorchester woman only after she"d a.s.saulted him. The eleven officers interviewed by IA either said they did not see Williams. .h.i.t the woman or said that Williams restrained the complainant only after she had hit him. "Officer Williams was met with physical resistance while making a lawful arrest and used the minimum amount of force necessary to subdue Miss June Ivey," ruled the investigator for Internal Affairs.
By the time he was finished questioning Dave Williams, Peabody was deflated.
"Is there any information, Officer Williams, that you can give this grand jury that would a.s.sist them in determining what had happened to Michael c.o.x that night?"
"Just what I told you," replied Williams.
It was a command performance by an officer who, in the hours after the beating, had likely said too much and was now explaining it all away to return to the police fold.
While Bob Peabody was pursuing his grand jury probe into the c.o.x beating during the fall, New York"s new police commissioner-the brash and high-profile Bill Bratton-was holding forth at Harvard Law School. Bratton, the exaBoston police commissioner who"d once gone on a ride-along with Mike and Craig, had agreed to be the keynote speaker at a forum t.i.tled "Police, Lawyers, and the Truth: A Symposium." Bratton was called on to address the problem of cops lying to make an arrest or while testifying at criminal trials.
The police perjury, nicknamed "testilying," was believed to be a by-product of the stand-together police culture that was responsible as well for the blue wall of silence. They were, in effect, branches of the same tree. With testilying, cops lied usually to protect a case and ensure a conviction. With the police code of silence, cops lied to protect another cop suspected of wrongdoing. In both, it was all about us versus them.
"You cannot break the law to enforce it," Bratton began.
Testilying had moved front and center into the national dialogue, a hot public issue for much of the year due to the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Allegations of misconduct and perjury by the Los Angeles police were a centerpiece of Simpson"s defense. With more than 150 million viewers watching the televised verdict, the former football star was acquitted on October 3 after his jury deliberated less than three hours.
In particular, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, one of Simpson"s lawyers, had been outspoken about testilying, and, indeed, at the Harvard forum he reiterated his combustible claims that cops not only lie routinely but actually teach one another how to do it. Many police and police unions were livid with Dershowitz, and some police chiefs boycotted the Harvard forum because of him.
Bratton, however, had not. Dershowitz and other criminal law experts, he told the audience, "have said police perjury is pervasive. If you asked the police unions, they would say it is minimal. I think the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
"This is enough of a problem that we need to address it. We can"t address it by ignoring it, and we can"t address it by boycotting conferences like this one." The practice, he insisted, was basically well-intentioned. "Testilying is different from any other form of police corruption because it is usually unrelated to any opportunity for personal gain. Cops who testilie do so in the belief that they are helping to enforce the law...As the cops who testilie see it, they don"t lie to convict innocent people, but to convict the guilty."
Bratton had chosen not to belabor the wholesale corruption behind the lying. But, truth be told, the made-up testimony-purportedly to give justice an edge-could indeed provide cover for the corrupt cop who was bad to the bone. Boston, at that very moment, had two veteran detectives who for more than a decade treated Roxbury and Dorchester as their own money store. Publicly, Walter "Mitty" Robinson and Kenny Acerra were known as street-savvy crime fighters often called on to help solve some of the biggest cases. They had press clippings saying so. The reality was that on the street they were a two-man crime spree. Lying routinely to obtain phony search warrants, lying routinely in court to cover up their actions, they shook down drug dealers for their money, drugs, and guns. Little did Bratton know, but as he spoke at Harvard, the two Boston detectives, having grown sloppy, were about to be caught. Federal investigators doc.u.mented fifty-six cases where the two had shaken down suspects illegally. They were eventually charged with stealing more than $250,000 in cash, drugs, and guns.
When Bratton was finished, the Boston police union was not at all happy with him. The union"s president angrily told the Boston Globe the police commissioner"s views on testilying were "incredible." The union official, a twenty-seven-year veteran, even denied testilying existed. "I went to court an awful lot and I can never remember any problems of this kind."
The denial had a hollow ring to it-just like denials of a blue wall of silence.