The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (11 page)

Fortunately, the officer monitoring the exam was drunk. He had a reputation for being four sheets to the wind and I had trained in anticipation of this. I eased myself into the water.

I was flapping my arms, doing everything I could to stay above water, and I made one turn, then another. I could hear myself grunting—it was the sound of unmistakable panic, and with one lap to go I didn't think I'd make it. I was pulling up the rear, splashing, gurgling, and the last ten yards I don't know if I walked or swam. The attendant never noticed. He passed me. I immediately got out of the pool, ran into the locker room, and threw up.

On October 7, 1970, one day after my twenty-third birthday, I was hired onto the Boston police force. There were 157 of us in that class of officers, with three blacks and no women. Of the 2,800 cops on the Boston force in 1970, only fifty-five were minorities, with no women. In December, the Boston police hired an additional fifty or so officers, and then the lawsuits began. The discrepancy between a civilian population that was 20 percent minority and a police force that was 2 percent minority was so clear that various groups began to protest it in court. No one was hired on the Boston Police Department for the next several years while these suits concerning discriminatory hiring practices were moving through the system, ultimately resulting in federal consent decrees controlling minority hiring. I had just made it.

As a prospective candidate, I was interviewed by the number-two man in the department, Superintendent-in-Chief Bill Taylor, who said to the person with him, “This is a kid who's going to go far in this job. This kid
could be commissioner.” So I got on the Boston police and began pulling down the magnificent sum of $153.85 a week. First thing they did was send me and the rest of my class to the police academy.

We were supposed to be trained for twelve weeks, but just before Thanksgiving, in order to beef up the downtown area and save on overtime pay for regular officers, they interrupted our training and put us out in the street. These were the days when people from all over the area came downtown to do their holiday shopping and see the Christmas lights on Boston Common, and Boston was gridlocked from Thanksgiving through Christmas. We were rushed through qualifying with firearms, given what we needed to know for the short term, and put out on traffic duty, undercover, and pickpocket details. We changed from our khaki academy uniforms into our dress blues. I was so proud to put on that blue uniform. About seven weeks after coming into the Boston Police Academy, there I was, a gun on my hip, directing traffic and freezing my rear end off in front of Symphony Hall. I had finally made it. I was a Boston cop on the streets of Boston! Merry Christmas. Happy New Year.

I enjoyed traffic duty. (I had started at age one and a half!) I was in control, like when I was a crossing guard at Edward Southworth, except the girls weren't chasing me home anymore. I was standing in the street in charge of the flow of huge numbers of people and vehicles, all stopping and starting at the sound of my whistle, the movement of my hands.

The traffic division to which we were assigned temporarily was a plum assignment for regular officers for other reasons as well. The regular traffic cops had steady posts, and at Christmas time shop owners and business owners were very free with the Christmas envelopes to the cops they saw every day. Like the mailman with a steady route, the cop on the beat developed friendships with the merchants, and it was a very commonplace practice to accept a bottle or an envelope with a five-dollar bill as a holiday gift. The downtown posts were particularly lucrative because of all the big businesses. Maybe you'd get a deal on a stereo system or a deep discount on a suit of clothes. One captain in the downtown dis-trict was famous for keeping the front doors of the police station open as people carted in the gifts; legend had it that the station was overflowing. It wasn't legal, but it was widely accepted, and nobody—not the police, not the merchants, not the media—thought that accepting these gifts was a crime or a sin. For a brand-new young officer, it was an eye-opener.

But taking that envelope could potentially lead to more significant forms of corruption. If you could excuse taking a gratuity, next thing
maybe you could take care of a ticket. And once you've taken care of a ticket, maybe you could take care of an arrest. Benign neglect could turn into indifference, which could develop into a corrupted enforcement of the law.

And what if a store owner decided not to participate? What if he had a bad year or didn't get along with the cop on his beat? Would he feel he did not get the same protection as the guy down the block who was offering the envelope? Would ten dollars get you better service than five? It was a legitimate concern; it did work that way over time.

The distinction was made between “grass eaters” and “meat eaters,” terms used by the Knapp anticorruption commission investigating systemic police corruption in New York City in the early 1970s. Grass eaters were officers who took a few bucks to not issue a citation or to not enforce a Sunday-closing blue law—basically, to look the other way. Meat eaters were more aggressive: They were the cops who demanded money in exchange for allowing an illegal activity; they saw a violation and went in and threatened a businessman with police action unless he paid up.

At the academy, this kind of moral theorizing was talked about in plati-tudes, but because of our early assignment to the streets, we were quickly schooled in the ways of the real world of policing before the lessons of the academy could sink in. One of our instructors was a uniformed officer named Charlie Dunford, a nice guy, a real character. He came in once in a while and gave us a sense of what to expect when we got back out there. One day, he came to the front of the class and said, “Hey, fellas, I'm here to give you dugout training.”

A dugout is a place where cops go to get off their feet for a while, to get out of the weather. Every traffic cop had a dugout on his post. When I was assigned to traffic detail down by the old Park Plaza office building, a room in that building was outfitted with chairs and couches, where cops could take lunch out of the public eye. If they wanted to take a quick nap, that's where they'd go. The favorite dugout was a firehouse; there was always a card game going.

Dunford described for the class in graphic detail how you would get into the dugout. “You get close …” He pressed his back and palms against the wall and slid along furtively, “make sure nobody's looking …” He swiveled his head both ways like you see in prison-break movies, “and then you
duck
in.”

We were laughing, he was kidding, but he gave us more tips. The streets of Boston, we knew, were broken up into walking beats, and every couple
of blocks there were police call boxes. Walkie-talkies weren't standard issue in those days. The first few we had were as big as suitcases; there were only four in the whole district. Walking cops were on their feet eight hours a day, and guys ran out the door after roll call so they wouldn't have to lug these things around all shift. Once you left the station, you were out of communication. It was still a time when a cop felt safe walking the neighborhood by himself without a radio.

The call boxes were stand-alone metal containers that opened with a police key. Inside was an old telephone, the kind where you held the earpiece to your ear and spoke into a separate mouthpiece. Some of the old drunks used to hide their bottles inside; a call-box slot fit a pint of liquor perfectly. The telephones connected to switchboard operators at the station who plugged in the calls. On top of the call box was a long pole with a red light, and when that light was blinking it meant you were to call in. Dunford told us, “Watch the lights.” Every cop with any time on the force knew what that meant. The ideal dugout was one where you could look out the window and see the light.

Having had more than a month in the street, once my class got back to the academy, we were seasoned veterans, or at least we thought we were. We were uncontrollable; you couldn't tell us anything. After about a month, they gave up trying. There's an old Irish folktale about a band of patriots who were driven out of Ireland under British rule and roamed Europe as mercenary soldiers under the name the Wild Geese, never to return. One of our instructors, Detective Bernie Hurley, nicknamed our class the Wild Geese. He also looked at the assembled talent and said, “This is going to be the class the stars will fall on.” (Stars were the Boston Police insignia used to designate top brass.)

A lot of cops coming on the job have some connection within the department. For many it's family: a father or cousin or stack of uncles who have been on the force for generations and who can put in a good word and get you a placement. I didn't have a hook. (In New York, that kind of contact is known as a “rabbi,” someone who can get you through the system with divine guidance.) I was coming in alone. As befitting someone with no access to the strings being pulled, my first assignment was to Police District 3, Mattapan, one of the toughest districts in the department and thought to be a dumping ground.

For many years, the Mattapan area had been a predominantly middle-class Jewish community. It had a very famous neighborhood delicatessen, the G&G, a favorite campaign stop for presidential candidates. In the late
sixties and early seventies, Mattapan, like my old neighborhood, had been a victim of redlining; in three or four years, a neighborhood that had been almost 100 percent middle-class and Jewish became 90 percent poor and black. Crime shot up, law enforcement went down, corruption took root.

Corruption in the Boston Police Department in the early 1970s was thought to be widespread in the detective bureau and rumored to be run by the detective sergeants. While many detective sergeants might well have been honorable, hardworking police officers, a large number were thought to be corrupt. They controlled the detectives and the vice investigations. If there were deals to be made with the courts, if you were going to try to put in a fix, word was that the detective sergeants were the group to go to. They were the source of many allegations. They were also, as you might expect, very powerful people.

I have to say “allegedly” about all of this because a lot of these allegations never resulted in indictments. Unlike the Knapp Commission investigations in New York, in Boston in the 1970s no major police corruption scandal broke that resulted in cops going to jail.

The detective sergeants allegedly collected the protection money in each district and distributed it to other levels in the department, allowing bosses to stay on the take and above the fray. A story made the rounds that the home safe of one of the superintendents had been robbed of several hundred thousand dollars. This was at a time when superintendents were making about $20,000 a year. There were so many of those stories, they had become department folklore.

As a young cop, I never witnessed payoffs. I was told, “Stay away from these locations, kid.” You knew, but you didn't know. It was all scuttlebutt, done with a wink and a nod, just beneath the surface.

Boston was a puritanical city that by law closed its liquor-licensed premises at one o'clock in the morning and prohibited the sale of liquor on Sundays. Of course, a significant amount of drinking and dancing as well as illegal gambling got done on weekends and after closing time at any number of after-hours joints. Licensed or not, these places were often allowed to remain open after-hours, but as young police officers we understood that we weren't to go near them. The bosses told us, “We've got an investigation under way, and we don't want you going in there and screwing it up.” In reality, these places were probably paying good money every week for the privilege of having the cops stay away.

As kids on the corner, we knew where these joints were—we knew where to get a six-pack when the grocery store wouldn't sell to us—and
we always assumed that if we knew about it, the cops must know about it, and they must be getting taken care of not to disrupt it. Once I got in the station house, I soon understood how it worked. It was pretty much commonly understood that we stayed away from there.

But many of these joints were storefronts or people's apartments in the middle of residential neighborhoods, and they were the source of problems. With drinking and gambling going on late at night, this is where the knife fights and the shootings occurred. The area's legitimate residents wondered, rightly, why the police couldn't do anything about it. Plus, as idealistic young newcomers a few of us wanted to do something positive. This looking the other way was not what we joined the department for. The after-hours hangouts were in our sectors and they were our responsibility; if something went wrong, we would be blamed.

What helped some of these places stay in business were department policies and procedures and the law itself that precluded police from entering without a complaint. Occasionally, when the violations became too egregious, some unknown upstanding citizen (or cop) would put in a dummy call: There's a man with a gun. There's a fight inside. Officer in trouble. (The call came through the central switchboard and was untraceable.) This gave the police a reason to enter the premises and break things up. Cops were shocked, shocked, to find out what was going on. That sort of thing put people's noses out of joint back at the station, but they couldn't do much about it.

As well intended as these dummy calls might have been, they set a very bad precedent. You can't commit a crime to prevent a crime. In those days, there wasn't a young cop in Boston who thought he was doing anything wrong when he made these calls; he thought he was pursuing the greater good, but his world wasn't big enough to understand it was a downward spiral. It might seem that your cause is just, but you can't tell a lie to get to the truth. If you can justify illegally entering a premises, next thing you know you can justify planting evidence, then you can condone arresting a civilian on a trumped-up charge just to get him off the street. Break one law, break them all. Once you start chipping away at the legalities, you lose all force of law. The end does not justify the means.