The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (21 page)

Murphy sized up the scene as having three parts that required supervision: the injured officer, the damaged police cruiser driven by Dave Williams, and the shooting suspects. He asked a few questions about Mike Cox and took at face value the speculation about a slip on ice. Not his problem—injuries to an officer were the worry of the officer’s supervisor, Sergeant Thomas. Then there was the damaged cruiser—it was from the Dorchester district. Not his problem again—the vehicle was the worry of his counterpart from Dorchester, a sergeant named Daniel Dovidio. Murphy instructed Dave Williams to radio Dovidio and tell him to come to Woodruff Way.

Murphy then dealt with the three suspects and the Lexus. He oversaw arrangements for transporting Tiny, Marquis, and Boogie-Down to the Roxbury station house for booking, for photographing the Lexus, and for towing the car. Smut Brown had already been taken in a separate police wagon to the station. Murphy then listened to several officers, including Ian Daley, who wanted to talk up their roles in the arrests. “Everybody wanted a piece of this,” Murphy said later. Murphy himself joined the unabashed maneuvering for glory. He later told police officials that down below on Mary Moore Beatty Way he’d helped capture Smut Brown—an embellishment completely at odds with the fact that Kenny Conley apprehended Smut Brown.

With a singular focus on the shooting suspects, Murphy walked around and began shooing cops away from the scene. “He started telling everybody to get the hell out of there,” said Bobby Dwan, who had reunited with Kenny Conley after Kenny’s return to the dead end. Said Murphy, “There was a lot of people there who were just kind of milling around.” Murphy also began spreading the canard about Cox—telling officers who asked about Mike’s condition that he’d fallen and hit his head.

Inadvertently, or worse, Murphy was aiding and abetting the developing smokescreen hiding the true nature of Mike’s injuries. He was clearing the dead end of officers who either were eyewitnesses to the beating or had picked up information about it. While paramedics loaded Mike into the ambulance, officers, instead of being ordered to document their actions, were told to disappear into the night.

By 3:15
A.M
., the ambulance carrying Mike Cox slowly worked its way out of the dead end en route to Boston City Hospital about six miles away. Many officers, following Murphy’s command, were pulling out. Craig Jones left to retrace his steps to search for the handguns. Richie Walker got into his cruiser to head back to the car he’d stopped near the Cortee’s and then abandoned to join the chase. Kenny Conley and Bobby Dwan returned to their cruiser; by 3:30

A.M
. they were gone. They headed first to the Roxbury police station. Kenny wanted to retrieve the handcuffs he’d used to complete the task Mike Cox had started—the capture of Smut Brown. From there, they continued driving through Roxbury back up to their sector in the city’s South End, where the next call they took was about yet another “suspicious person” on Washington Street. They found a hooker standing alone in the cold and ordered her to move on.

While some left, plenty of police were still amid the chaos of Woodruff Way—Sergeants Ike Thomas and David Murphy, Donald Caisey from the gang unit, Ian Daley, and a slew of officers from Boston and other police agencies. TV news crews began appearing. Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio climbed inside Williams’s cruiser to await the arrival of Sergeant Dovidio, their patrol sergeant. To stay warm, they blasted the heater.

Dovidio, the third sergeant, then showed up; in short order, he trumped the supervisory mess already in play at Woodruff Way. His became the starkest display of disregard of duty. Dovidio was fifty-eight years old and nearing retirement. It was as if he wanted nothing to do with actual police work. Earlier, when the high-speed police chase went one way, Dovidio went the other. Even though several of his men, including Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio, had responded to the shooting at Walaikum’s, Dovidio drove back to the station. He said he had some paperwork to do. Besides, he said later, he was not obligated to get involved in the chase. “It didn’t originate on my district.”

But Dovidio did have to leave his desk once Dave Williams radioed about the damaged cruiser. The sergeant was not happy. He pulled up behind the Lexus, marched to where Williams and Burgio sat in the cruiser, and wanted to know where Burgio’s cruiser was. When they explained that Jimmy’s was back at the station, Dovidio demanded to know what the hell was going on. He began yelling about violating department procedures for teaming up without permission. Burgio tried to settle the sergeant down.

“What are you worried about? I just made a great arrest,” he claimed.

Dovidio would have none of it. “The captain will have my ass.” Thinking it over, Dovidio quickly devised a solution: He told Williams and Burgio they had
not
been in the one cruiser; instead, Burgio had been in his own cruiser. That was how they were going to write up their reports: There was not one, but two cruisers from the Dorchester station. He even pointed to a spot in the cul-de-sac where Burgio should say his cruiser came to a halt. No matter that the deception would create all kinds of confusion for investigators later trying to map out the scene. Dovidio had come up with an expedient way out for all of them—one that came with his imprimatur to lie.

The message was clear: Protect one another. Dovidio wasn’t done either. Despite the flood of police officers, the sergeant, rather than naming names, was planning to say the only officers at the dead end when he arrived at 3:15 were the two in his charge. It was a fiction that helped clear the stage and create running room for those wishing to be invisible. In a third move, Dovidio decided he was going to try to see that Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio were honored for exemplary police work during the wildest police chase anyone in the department could remember.

Dovidio, all by himself, was the embodiment of the culture of silence and cover-up that was kicking into gear on Woodruff Way. But he was not alone. “Bottom line,” Kenny Conley said later, “is that no one took responsibility for that crime scene.

“The patrol supervisor [Murphy] from B–3 tried to say he caught the guy I cuffed…The anti-gang supervisor [Thomas] never really did what he was supposed to do. Lotta people lied that night. Believe me, Dovidio wasn’t the only supervisor to neglect his duty.”

After Mike’s arrival at the hospital, while much of the city still slept, police were busy at two locations dealing with the chase’s messy aftermath. The critical care unit at Boston City Hospital saw the comings and goings of some of Mike’s coworkers, as they checked on Mike’s condition and heard from doctors Mike had been hit with a “blunt object.” No amount of wishful or deceitful thinking could turn an ice patch into the culprit.

Then there was the Roxbury district station, where the four shooting suspects were taken for processing and where a couple of dozen officers came and went as part of the post-chase debriefing. “There was a lot of activity in the station, a lot of people around,” Craig Jones said. Given Lyle Jackson’s numerous gunshot wounds, homicide detectives had joined the other officers who were congregating, either filing in from Walaikum’s, the chase’s starting point, or Woodruff Way, the end point.

Smut Brown and his three friends were searched, fingerprinted, and handcuffed to the wall in the booking area on the first floor. Smut was the only one to give police his true name. The other three offered aliases they’d used before: Tiny Evans said his name was Anthony Wilson; his brother Marquis said he was Robert White; and Boogie-Down became Darryl Greene. In evidence bags, officers logged their beepers, cell phones, necklaces and rings, Smut’s $795 and Tiny’s $707.

Smut hadn’t been able to talk to the others and still thought Marquis was the victim of the police beating. Marquis was indeed hurting, but his aches came from the hit he took from the skidding cruiser. He was complaining he needed medical attention for his legs. Boogie-Down also wanted to see a doctor. “My right side of my face was scraped and bruised. My right hand was bruised. My lower back was bruised and my legs were hurting.” The two were taken by police escort to Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

In the second-floor “guardroom” a core group of cops was seated at desks to begin the paperwork. It was work with two tracks: one focused on the chase and doling out credit for the four arrests, the other focused on Mike Cox’s injuries. Ian Daley had gotten the job of authoring the official incident report about the chase, known as a 1.1, a reference to the department’s standard Form 1.1, while Donald Caisey of the gang unit continued working on the 1.1 about Mike’s injury.

Police reports are supposed to be objective, reliable, and detailed, but interest in those principles—interest in what
truly
happened at the dead end—seemed lost as the guardroom was transformed into a creative-writing seminar. Officers huddled for brief chats about their competing versions of events, sometimes leaving the room for private talks, all the while keeping an eye on how the reports were stacking up.

“Everybody was trying to add their little bit to the report—‘I’m so and so, don’t forget me.’ Things like that,” Craig Jones said. The process was neither orderly nor pretty. Flare-ups erupted. Craig and Ian Daley didn’t hit it off, for example. Writing reports was ordinarily an anathema, and Craig was put off that Daley was adamant about being in charge. He suspected that Daley saw being the writer as a way to control the narrative to say he made one of the arrests. “I felt like he wanted the glory,” Craig said.

But the others weren’t about to let that happen. Craig maintained he’d arrested the driver. The towering Dave Williams then claimed he and Jimmy Burgio arrested the two suspects in front of the Lexus. Burgio even showed up at the station briefly to reinforce the point. “It was my arrest,” he said. “I wanted it.” Richie Walker then claimed he arrested the fourth suspect, Smut Brown. He acknowledged that another cop was there, but he didn’t know who—a “tall, white cop” was the best he could do. Craig chimed in the description fit Gary Ryan of the gang unit, and that was that. The second cop became Gary Ryan. Mystery solved. No one bothered to call Ryan to learn this was all wrong.

Instead, an overwhelmed Daley dutifully jotted down notes—and, for the purposes of the report, not only was Kenny Conley suddenly Gary Ryan, but Richie Walker was the hero. “Officer Walker never losing sight of the suspect,” wrote Daley, “ran through bushes and behind buildings and finally captured suspect.” It was all part of the misleading mess that Daley typed up in his three-page narrative. He did get some measure of revenge against Craig Jones; he avoided giving Craig credit for arresting Tiny by not describing Tiny’s apprehension. Otherwise, it was all there—the key inaccuracies that Richie Walker captured Smut Brown, and that Williams and Burgio had captured Marquis and Boogie-Down “after a brief foot chase.” The part about the foot chase was yet another fabrication; after they were knocked to the ground, Marquis and Boogie-Down barely moved, except to wiggle out from under the cruiser.

But not every cop orbited the guardroom making sure Daley got his name spelled correctly. Some went back to work—like Kenny Conley and Bobby Dwan. Capturing Smut Brown was a career highlight for Kenny. He’d never nabbed a shooting suspect before. He was certainly as competitive as anyone and always gave it his all—fighting for a rebound under the hoop, for example. But his game was more about grunt than glory, whether on the court or on the job. He’d never gotten a medal. His personality was not about ego. “I’m not like that,” he said. With Smut, Kenny saw himself as making an “assist.” He and Bobby had helped out the guys from the Roxbury and Mattapan districts, and at the shift’s end, that’s what he and Bobby wrote down in their log at their station.

Jimmy Rattigan was another cop who eschewed the ego mud wrestling. He and his partner swung by the station after their release from the hospital. They went upstairs and walked into the guardroom and found everyone going at it. Said Rattigan: “They were saying, ‘I cuffed him,’ ‘No, I cuffed him,’ and they were like, ‘Well, I’m gonna take this one, you’re gonna take that one.’” He saw Ian Daley, Craig Jones, Dave Williams, and Jimmy Burgio. Rattigan was disgusted. “I thought to myself, there’s Mike Cox sitting in the hospital and these guys are arguing over who’s gonna take an arrest. Me and Mark, we were like, ‘Can you believe this shit?’ and then we just left.”

It wasn’t as if they weren’t talking at all about Mike. By dawn most everybody in the guardroom was aware the ice story was bogus. “When people were coming up to the guardroom,” said Ian Daley, “they were basically saying who was the police officer that got, you know, beat up?” Said Richie Walker: “That was the topic of the conversation.”

The talk, however, mostly circled around the beating instead of focusing on what actually happened—who did what and who saw what. There were moments, however—fleeting moments—where key cops, still in the heat of the night’s events, made comments that started down the road of truth. Ian Daley was one who began heading in this direction. He pulled Donald Caisey aside at one point and told him he knew cops had beaten Mike Cox. Caisey, taken aback, pressed Daley for more information. What are you saying? he asked. “Cops did this to Mike,” Daley said. Caisey said, Okay, who? Daley did not answer. That was as far as he’d go.

It was as if a paralysis had spread like a virus once everyone realized cops had beaten a cop. The ground was unfamiliar to them—a coworker, a brother, had turned out to be the victim of police brutality, and some cop or cops at the station had either committed the assault or witnessed it. Had a suspect been beaten—well, that was not so otherworldly. Many cops had seen or been part of an altercation where the bad guys got roughed up and sometimes worse. This, however, was not the more typical us-versus-them dynamic that lent itself to sticking together to gloss over the use of excessive force. This was radioactive, a beating that was turbo-charged with a complicated set of competing loyalties—to the individual person, to race, to the code of silence, and to justice.