The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (10 page)

The next morning on Armed Forces Radio, we heard that the embassy in Saigon and bases up and down the country had also been attacked. It was Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, and the Vietcong had launched the Tet Offensive.

We were issued a lot more ammunition the next night when we went out one more time to patrol the perimeters. As we drove by on the way to
our posts, I saw Whiskey Three all torn up, the wire down, the floodlights out. I was assigned to Yankee Two, and this was a very different experience from the stroll with my dog I had been taking each night for months. We expected to be attacked.

Nothing came of it. We spent several weeks on heightened alert, but we saw nothing more. Even as the rest of the country was being torn by this most significant assault in the war, our area stayed quiet. But the nature of the war had now changed. We no longer went down into Bien Hoa for recreation. For the remaining five months I spent in Vietnam, no one felt quite as secure or comfortable moving around.

Tet was the extent of my combat experience. In my entire eleven months in country, I spent only two or three nights under fire. Otherwise, I had a relatively sheltered Vietnam experience. My tour ended in late April 1968, and I flew home in one piece. I was very lucky.

I had shipped a whole trunk of my Vietnam gear home to Boston via the U.S. Army—jungle fatigues, T-shirts, boots, all the daily wear from my year in Vietnam. When my parents opened it, the stench was so bad they had to throw the whole thing out. Perhaps I had gotten used to it in Vietnam; maybe everybody in the army smelled the same over there. Perhaps, even if it smelled foul to the outside world, once there you simply learned to accept it. Perhaps that was Vietnam in a nutshell.

After I finished my thirty-day leave upon returning from Vietnam, the army assigned me to Homestead Air Force Base in south Florida. My parents hadn't seen me in more than a year, and they decided to drive down with me. I set my MP helmet in the back window of my father's green 1968 Mustang, figuring it would help with the speed traps, and we headed south.

I must have been the only soldier in army history to arrive for duty a day early. My parents and I checked into a Howard Johnson's, had a nice meal, and drove to the base, where I reported the next morning. The army told me I was being assigned to Company A, Fifty-second Artillery Battalion, an antiaircraft battery deep in the Everglades.

The U.S. government had positioned a significant portion of its Nike Hercules antiaircraft missile system at various sites in south Florida in response to the fear that Russian MiG jets would come winging over from Cuba and overwhelm American defenses. It was my responsibility, for the next two years, to walk my dog and guard these installations.

The Army van drove through a lot of farm country and into Everglades National Park. Then it kept on driving and driving down a straight concrete road that went on for miles. We passed nothing, just Everglades and overgrowth. Finally, we saw radar towers and Battery A, a series of one-story cinderblock buildings containing a barracks, mess hall, and supplies facilities, surrounded by a chain-link fence. Two years here? I felt like Cool Hand Luke doing hard time.

Farther into the Everglades, down another concrete road, around a bend, was the missile site. Once again, big berms, and in the berms they've got the barns, and in the barns they've got the missiles, long white things with little wings coming out of them, just like I'd seen in newsreels as a kid. They were antiaircraft missiles; these weren't nuclear warheads or anything. The dogs were kept in an eight-dog kennel not far from the missiles. The whole place was guarded by two towers and surrounded by another double row of chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

All the soldiers who worked targeting, controlling, and maintaining the missiles left at the end of the shift. Our duty consisted of driving down to the missile site at the end of the workday and walking patrol.

My dog's name was Shep. Shep was a big old-timer and would alert on the alligators, whose eyes glowed at night. The site had been built on a landfill, and you'd be out there walking the perimeter in the awful heat and thickening humidity with a million mosquitoes. If you shined your flashlight out into the Everglades, you'd see alligator eyes. All I could think of was
Peter Pan
and how Croc used to spend every waking hour trying to get another taste of Captain Hook. Never smile at a crocodile.

Our biggest fear was that the damn alligators would burrow in under the fence line and be in the run with us. The fence posts were set into concrete, but that might not stop an alligator with an appetite. Each new arrival was told the legendary tale about the K-9 handler who came around the corner one evening and found himself nose to nose with a big snapper. He and his dog took off like a bat out of hell, with the alligator chasing after them. We never lost a handler, but we saw a lot of alligators.

The base never had any action. Not one national-security alert in the two years I served there. It was easily the most boring assignment you could possibly have.

In the fall, 1968, my girlfriend Linda and I were married. Married soldiers could go home at night when they weren't working, so Linda got a job in a store in Homestead and I drove seventy miles round-trip when I went off duty to be with her. Homestead was a sleepy little southern town
with a small nonmilitary population. It was a long two years. Money was tight, and I was just marking time.

I made sergeant and got a leadership role running the K-9 security detail. I was finally discharged on November 29, 1969. Linda and I loaded our cat and what few possessions we had into my prize possession, a 1966 burgundy two-plus-two Ford Mustang, and drove back to Boston. As 1970 came in, I went back to work full-time for the phone company and was also working four nights a week behind a cash register in a Curtis Farms convenience store.

I BASICALLY MISSED THE SIXTIES. WHEN I WAS IN VIETNAM, SOME OF THE GUYS
wore beads, smoked marijuana, and listened to antiwar rock and roll, but I never had much interest in that. As far as the antiwar movement goes, after watching the Vietnamese Army and people, many of us began to feel they just wanted to be left alone. We began to ask what were we doing there. I knew enough history to know that the Vietnamese had been fighting a civil war for fifty years and that the French had been there before us. But I was nineteen years old and did not try to understand the overall scope of it. I was there, there was a war to be fought, my country was involved, and I had a small piece of the action. Two years of enforced isolation in the Everglades put me even further from the cultural upheaval that affected a lot of my generation.

I was fresh out of Vietnam at the time of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Looking at hippiedom, Woodstock, the drug culture, the style of dress, the music, Jimi Hendrix, Abbie Hoffman, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, from where I stood it was as if the country had had a national nervous breakdown. I disliked everything about the sixties.

I didn't particularly mind serving in Vietnam, I felt it was my obligation and I was proud to serve. I thought the war was justified, that our
intentions were honorable. I believed in the domino theory about communism, that we had to draw a line in the sand. (Later, like so many others, I came to question the wisdom of the war and the loss of lives; I came to believe there might have been a better way.)

I always loved my country and loved our system of government. When it became fashionable to be anti, I never bought into that. I never felt disenfranchised. I didn't harbor the anger and mistrust toward the government that other people did. I believed in order and conformity and the need for everyone to abide by social norms. There was behavior that was accepted and behavior that was not. Even as kids on the corner, we knew you didn't drink in public and you didn't use the street as a toilet. There were rules, there were reasons for these rules, and I understood and accepted those reasons.

I always liked to be in control, which is why drugs never appealed to me. I didn't need drugs for escape. If I wanted to escape, I went to a movie or read a book. I didn't have to shoot up to get away from anything, and I had little tolerance or understanding for people who did.

In the three years since I'd left the corner of Hecla and Adams, the whole neighborhood had changed. The area had been redlined by real-estate agents and targeted for rental and sale to minorities. It was astonishing, as if my entire hometown had disappeared. Some of my friends still lived there, but I found that by and large most of my neighborhood—my parents included—had moved out to the suburbs and been replaced by a largely Hispanic and black community. Right after Christmas 1969, after spending a month living with her parents in Duxbury, Linda and I moved into a one-bedroom apartment outside of Boston in Weymouth.

The City of Boston didn't give a civil-service exam every year, and when they did, the Boston Police Department didn't always hire from it. Depending on budget and politics, some years no one got hired at all. That was out of my control. I had waited all my life to take the Boston police exam, and when one was finally scheduled for early 1970, I was ready.

I set my alarm very early the day of the test. The rest of my life would depend on this, and I wanted to give myself plenty of time. I'm the kind of guy who likes to get places early, settle in, and get comfortable. I woke up that morning to find that it was snowing like crazy. It was February, and a blizzard had blown in, a real nor'easter. The roads were icy and piled high with snow. It was going to be slow going.

The exam was being held at Boston Latin, the old school I had flunked out of. It was a fifteen-mile drive from my home, and I allowed an hour
and a half to make the trip. Half a mile from my apartment, just as I was heading onto the Route 3 expressway, the car died. I was on the ramp, in the middle of a blizzard, and the most important test in my life was going to begin in exactly ninety minutes.

I slammed the door, ran up the ramp, and was lucky enough to find a pay phone that worked. I called my father. No answer at the house. Where were they at eight o'clock in the morning? In any event, by the time he got down from Milton, I'd never make it.

I called my sister Pat. She lived the next town over in Quincy. She was home. Down she came, boots and a winter jacket over her pajamas, in her ’61 Ford Falcon. Pat was a bit of a character, she had a presidential seal on the side of her car; it wasn't exactly the Seal of the President of the United States—it had some cockamamie saying on it—but it looked official. I left my Mustang on the side of the ramp and hopped in with her. When we could get up any speed at all, we skidded and plowed and slogged into the city. I was a complete basket case: Am I going to get there? Am I going to get there?

We pulled up in front of the school two minutes before they locked the doors. I ran inside, sweating and crazy, and took the test. I passed.

By the end of August, Boston's newly elected mayor, Kevin White, announced he had signed a contract with the recently formed police union that guaranteed the force two-man cars and a “four-and-two” work shift, four days on and two days off. Before this time, Boston cops had worked horrendous schedules with no overtime and no paid time for court appearances, conditions that had in large part contributed to the creation of one of the country's first police unions. Mayor White, new in office and eager to make an impression, was looking to enhance the police department, and he met many of the union's demands. To staff it, he was going to have to hire a lot of new police. Hallelujah!

As well as passing the written exam, to become a member of the Boston police, you had to pass a physical. It was pretty demanding; being a cop is a strenuous job. You had to climb a rope to the ceiling; you had to run a mile in a qualifying time; you had to climb a ladder, pick up a 150-pound dummy, throw it over your shoulder, and climb back down; you had to jump in a pool and swim one hundred yards—all in the space of one hour.

I went to the Cambridge YMCA and trained rigorously, except for the swim. I was then and still am deathly afraid of water, and I had never learned how to swim. I desperately wanted to be a police officer, but I didn't see how I could pass.

When I got the notice to report for my physical, I was in a panic. There was no way out. At the last minute, I went down and got the thing postponed. Then I went to my sister Pat again.

Pat was trained as a lifeguard. She took me to the Quincy Y and taught me to swim. Well, not exactly; whenever I got in water over my head, fear overwhelmed me and my breathing went all haywire and I hyperventi-lated and struggled even harder and got tired out and sank. Pat taught me to flounder in a straight line.

When I got to the Cambridge YMCA on the day of the physical, I was anything but calm. The nerves, the anxiety jolted through me. Thank God, the pool at the Cambridge Y was only four feet deep. It was a lap pool; if it had had a deep end and a diving board, I would never have made it. I had to swim four laps back and forth, and as I looked down the lane before I dove in, I didn't see how I could do it.