The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (16 page)

As I was responding, another call came in. The holdup man was identified as a black male, six feet two inches tall, in a red leisure suit.

This was South Boston, 1975, at the height of the notorious schoolbusing crisis, when racial tensions were incredibly high. South Boston was a white neighborhood so hostile to black people that most blacks would not go there if they could in any way avoid it. One major employer, the Gillette razor-blade company, hired a lot of blacks, but even those workers usually walked or drove only through areas that were very well policed. The idea that a large black man in a red leisure suit would rob a bank in South Boston just didn't make any sense.

Further radio transmission: the suspect fired a shot in the bank, has now exited the bank, and is dragging with him a white female, either a teller or a customer.

Dorchester Avenue is a major artery through South Boston. The bank was situated directly next to a railroad track, at the base of a four-lane steel bridge. The bridge had no overhead wires or girders; it just rose and humped over the railroad track. Across the street was a big bus-maintenance garage. On one side of the bank was an empty lot and on the other the Doughboy donut shop.

I took a right onto Dorchester and had to stop about seventy-five yards from the bridge. Traffic wasn't moving because this screwball was dragging a young woman up the street with a gun to her head. Bus drivers and garage workers had emptied into the avenue; a couple of guys had hopped off a dump truck and joined the posse; it was a Thursday, big payday in a busy area, and a crowd had gathered and surrounded the man and his hostage. They were hanging back, giving the guy about ten yards breathing room because he was waving a gun at them. He's got a paper bag full of money and a black revolver and he's got his arm around this woman's neck and he's got an angry crowd of thirty-five to forty white people around him. Where's he going to go? For some reason, he starts up the bridge. The crowd moves with him.

I was the first unit on the scene, so I radioed, “We've got a black male dragging a white female onto the Broadway bridge. I'm moving up.” There were no other police units in sight. I took out my gun and moved through the crowd, which, strangely, was not moving back from the man's threatening gestures.

The gunman continued to drag the woman onto the bridge. An office building overlooked the bus yard, and its windows were filling with workers coming to see what the big deal was. On the far side sat a sandwich
shop and the D Street public-housing development, overflowing with poor white people, the heart and soul of South Boston. Word was spreading quickly, and folks had begun to pour out of the projects. The bridge had low, pebbled concrete sides and a walkway behind the huge water pipes that served as a railing, and people were craning their necks to watch the action from the street. The man and his hostage were now at the center of the bridge. It was as if he were onstage.

After becoming a sergeant, I had volunteered for hostage-negotiator school. One of the things you learn is: Never give up your cover. If I had been thinking straight, I would have remembered, but the crowd moved backward, I walked forward, and all of a sudden I had gone past the stopped cars and the dump trucks and the buses and found myself out on the bridge, in front of the gunman, my own weapon aimed directly at him, only five yards away.

Two minutes earlier, I had been a happy guy riding in my car; now I was facing off with this black guy in a red suit. I didn't know if he had already shot someone, only that a shot had been fired. I didn't know if he had an escape plan or an accomplice, but I could see the fear in the man's eyes. I suspect he could see the fear in mine.

The hostage kept collapsing, and the gunman struggled to keep her upright as his shield. He waved the gun at her, at the crowd, at my face. The crowd wasn't moving in on us, but it wasn't going anywhere either. I heard police sirens and knew the cavalry was coming. I heard the crowd growling in waves, but at the same time everything had gone silent. It seemed like an eternity while the three of us stared at one another. Then the hostage-school training started to kick in: Talk to the guy, get a dialogue going.

“Hey, look, calm down,” I told him. My gun was pointed at his head. “You haven't hurt anybody yet. Look, you can see you can't get away, you're going to have to give it up. You're going to face jail time but, you know, you hurt her or you hurt me and you're going to make this a lot worse situation.”

“Stay away! Stay away!” he shouted. At least he was talking to me. The idea was to keep him involved.

“Look, don't hurt her. She's got nothing to do with this. Why don't you let her go?”

I don't know how long this went on. It seemed like forever; it might have been a couple of seconds. Meanwhile, I could see other police on both sides of the bridge beginning to make their way forward, starting to
get into position. In particular, I saw a couple of old-timers, Officers Gene Kelly and Bob Dumas, two cops who had worked Southie for forty years. They were both big, robust, the kind who would jump right in. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them trying to sneak up in back of this guy.

They were scaring me to death. The man was jittery. He was pointing the gun at me. He was scaring me to death. “Stay back!” I yelled to Dumas and Kelly. One of the new sergeants, George Kenney, was on the scene now, and I began talking to him on my walkie-talkie. “Get them back!
Keep them back!”
I was trying to maintain a dialogue with the gunman and reduce his panic. Kelly and Dumas probably figured they could tackle him. He'd shoot me, then he'd shoot her, and with the cops behind him, I wouldn't be able to do anything for fear of shooting both of them. Kenney finally coordinated with the other units, and they backed off.

On either side of the bridge, as traffic got more and more backed up, people were getting out of their cars and walking toward this show. They didn't have to come too far, because wherever you were you had a great view.

We were dancing around, the gunman and I, me trying to stay in front of him, not allow him to focus anywhere else and get any more excited or anxious. More of my hostage training kicked in. I realized that what was causing him the most tension was my gun; he couldn't keep his eyes off it. It's the nature of people faced with a weapon: You always end up focusing on it. I was doing the same thing, my eyes kept going back to his gun, particularly when he had it pointed at me.

I am the world's worst shot. I had proved that fact in the army and on the firing range. I couldn't shoot this man anyway because I'd end up shooting the hostage, so my weapon was really of no use to me. A ton of other cops were around by now, and any of them could take this guy out better than I could, if it came to that.

“Look,” I said, “I'm going to lower my weapon. I'm not going to harm you.” I bent my arm and slowly dropped my pistol to my side. I could see him thinking, “What's going on here?” Then it must all have come to him: I can't get out of here; the most immediate threat is gone for now; maybe I can live through this.

I was standing stock-still with a gun pointed at me.

“Okay, it's up.” He dropped his gun hand and then the hand holding the money and the woman. She slumped and crawled away. Cops came swarming from all directions and tackled him.

There is one inexplicable aspect of human nature that all cops share:
We are attracted to danger. We get paid to run toward danger rather than away from it. Standing on that bridge was all the excitement any cop could crave. I have to admit, once I had lived through it, it was exhilarating. I had met the cop's ultimate challenge; I had put my life at risk for another, and I'd won.

News traveled fast. A witness called the police station and told the clerk, Charlie McLaughlin, “Jeez, this cop was amazing. He went right up and faced this guy off. He's gotta have balls as big as cannonballs!” So when I came through the door with the prisoner to do the paperwork, McLaughlin said, “How you doin’ there, Cannonballs?”

The nickname stuck. Jack Gifford gave me two gold-painted golf balls. I kept them on my desk.

In police circles, one thing cherished above all else is heroism, facing down fear, courage. From then on in the police world, no matter what department I went to, I had credentials: cannonballs. I had faced off with a guy and rescued a hostage. That carries a lot of weight with cops; you're not an armchair soldier, you've made your bones.

Captain Allen nominated me for the Schroeder Brothers Medal, the BPD's highest award for valor, given for a singular act of heroism, and I was selected. I received the second Schroeder Brothers Medal ever awarded and accepted it with pride.

It's funny how things work sometimes. The office building overlooking the Broadway bridge was the home of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers (IBPO) and the National Association of Government Em-ployees, two big unions representing hundreds of thousands of workers. Its president, Ken Lyons, happened to catch the whole hostage drama as it unfolded out his window. Through Lyons, the IBPO honored me at their annual luncheon as their Person of the Year. Commissioner di Grazia had been invited to assist in the presentation, and his office called and asked if I would meet the commissioner at his office and drive with him to the luncheon. I jumped at the opportunity to spend even a moment with him.

It was raining like crazy on the day of the presentation, and by the time I parked my car and walked to headquarters, I was drenched. I wanted to make a good impression, but the rain was squeaking in my shoes.

The commissioner's office was on the sixth floor of police headquarters. I tried not to gawk, but I soaked up the atmosphere—who knew when I'd ever get back? The doors to all the offices were framed in beautiful old oak, the windows in these old doors were etched glass, even the doorknobs were engraved with the Boston Police Department seal. The entire place
had a special aura of authority, the weight of tradition and history. Everything I wanted to be was here. Just breathing sixth-floor air was a privilege.

Di Grazia had a black woman secretary, which was unusual in the BPD, and she was legendarily tough on everybody. When I was finally allowed to squeeze past her and was ushered into the commissioner's private office, I was floating.

The commissioner drove us to the lunch—imagine, a police commissioner driving a sergeant!—and when it was over took us back to headquarters. As he drove, he talked about what he was looking to do with the department and asked me for my perspective as a new sergeant. I was flattered to be asked my opinion, and I tried to be as politic as possible. I was slightly in awe and only said I was enjoying the direction in which he was taking us.

I saw di Grazia one other time that year, after fellow sergeant Jack Gifford and I wrote him a letter. In order to ensure that sergeants were checking up on their troops, a directive had been issued by the department's chief uniformed officer, Superintendent-in-Chief Joe Jordan, requiring that police dispatchers, who were all patrolmen,
at their discretion
assign patrol supervisors to go on certain calls. The new sergeants had no problem checking up on the troops; renewed vigilance was a major component of what we saw as our job. Gifford and I thought the directive put the responsibility in the wrong hands. By giving control of the assignments to the dispatchers, it eliminated our ability to go in unannounced. We wanted to decide which calls to monitor and when to roll in silently without tipping off the cops that we were coming.

If they know supervisors will be on the scene, cops will naturally show up and be on their best behavior. If they know we are not coming, they may act differently. We wanted them to be on their best behavior all the time, not just when their bosses were watching. This directive was a prime example of old-style police thinking; rather than motivate the force to do the right thing, it motivated them to learn how not to get caught. Rather than correct the actions of the few, we were effectively penalizing the many.

Gifford and I, as resident gadflies, wrote di Grazia a letter making this case. Mo Allen signed off on it and sent it over. There are a million ways for a letter like this to get sidetracked, but it reached the commissioner, and Gifford and I were invited in to discuss it. We were sitting quietly in front of di Grazia's secretary when the door opened and who came
walking out but Joe Jordan himself. Jordan always looked like a million bucks in full dress uniform. He was a handsome man, careful about his appearance, who wore his hat kind of cocked to one side like Douglas MacArthur and had taken to wearing tinted aviator-style sunglasses. He saw two of his uniformed sergeants sitting, hats off, at the commissioner's door and said, “What are you two doing here?” You could see him thinking, What the hell are these two doing jumping the chain of command? While our letter went through his office to get to the commissioner, likely he hadn't seen it.

“We have an appointment with the commissioner, sir.”

“Who are you?”

“Sergeant Bratton.”

“Sergeant Gifford.”

“Oh, well, how're you doing?” He left.

In we went and made our pitch. Di Grazia listened and said, “I think that makes sense. Let me talk to the superintendent.” Some time later, the order was rescinded.

My effort to get di Grazia's attention was not without calculation. Responsibility for assignments was an issue about which I had strong feelings, but I did also consider how making this case could enhance my standing and increase my access to the top man in the department. I wanted to rise in the Boston police organization, and I was always trying to get noticed.

The major issue facing Boston in the early and mid-seventies was race. In 1974, a federal court ruled that Boston's public-school system was intentionally segregated and, as a remedy, ordered the city to bus students, white and black, to achieve integration. Many of Boston's neighborhoods erupted in outright rebellion that went on for six years.

Rather than accept desegregation, white parents began to send their kids to private schools. What had once been a mostly white public-school system was soon filled with minority students; money spent on security and busing was money not being spent on the schools themselves, and the quality of education began to decline. The whole system deteriorated. The public's anger was phenomenal, and the police were right in the middle of it.