The Fence Part 2

s.m.u.t resumed the livelihood he knew best-dealing c.o.ke. He spent his days getting stoned and dealing the drug on the streets of Mattapan, Dorchester, and Roxbury, though he had a knack for getting out of the trouble that inevitably came his way. He was soon arrested by Boston police, but was later found not guilty of the drug-dealing charge in Dorchester District Court. In early January 1992, he was arrested again, but he beat that drug-dealing charge too, winning another ruling of not guilty.

Hosting Hip-Hop Night was a display of business ac.u.men by the Cortee's. Generally speaking, Boston was not a destination for rappers and hip-hop shows. The shows that did make it to New England took the stage at the Centrum in Worcester or the Providence Civic Center in Rhode Island.

Walking inside, s.m.u.t and Boogie-Down were swallowed by the club's darkness. The dance floor in the center of the room was full. The bar along the right side was deep with patrons. The few tables were all taken. The DJ in a booth straight across the room was playing everything-from Notorious B.I.G., the king of hip-hop, to Wu-Tang Clan to Nas, the street poet. Lots of "gangsta rap," vicious and raw, violent and drug-fueled.

s.m.u.t spotted Tiny Evans.

Tiny was with Marquis-or Jimmy-Evans, Tiny's younger brother. He was the biggest of them all-more than six feet tall and weighing 220 pounds. s.m.u.t hardly knew Marquis, who was his age, twenty-three. And Marquis had just gotten out of prison-convicted at age seventeen of using a sawed-off shotgun in an a.s.sault case. The one thing s.m.u.t knew was Marquis could be a hothead, which Tiny sometimes manipulated to his advantage.

Tiny saw s.m.u.t and hurried over. Tiny had spotted a kid named Little Greg who was affiliated with the Castlegate Street gang. "Tiny was saying, 'Little Greg is in the club, Little Greg is in the club,'" s.m.u.t said. "He was talking a mile a minute."

Tiny and Little Greg had a beef going back a couple of years-beginning when Tiny ripped Little Greg's chain right off his neck and kept it. Then the previous summer Little Greg got some revenge. Tiny told s.m.u.t he was getting his hair cut when Little Greg burst into the barbershop and fired a shot. The next time s.m.u.t saw Tiny he was walking with a cane. "He got hit near his s.c.r.o.t.u.m." Not surprisingly, neither event was reported to police. They were matters for the street. Now inside the Cortee's, Tiny and Little Greg exchanged looks. s.m.u.t saw that Tiny was monitoring Little Greg's whereabouts. s.m.u.t reminded Tiny it was his birthday. "Leave it alone," s.m.u.t said.

Looking around, s.m.u.t observed friend and enemy alike. But among the foursome-s.m.u.t, Tiny, Marquis, and Boogie-Down-he felt secure. The group stood at the bar. Boogie-Down spotted his girlfriend and snuggled with her. Marquis was broke but wanted to buy a round of drinks in honor of his brother's birthday. He had the gall to ask Tiny to loan him $20. Tiny couldn't believe it, but dug into the pocket of his blue jeans, where he had a roll of more than $700 in cash. Drinks were on Marquis.

The songs worked loud and hard on s.m.u.t. He ordered a drink, another smooth Cask & Cream. s.m.u.t loved rap. He saw himself as a budding lyricist and eventually would go from toying with words and beats inside his head to writing them down on paper.

They were mostly autobiographical lyrics like: I had a Daddy who was crazy so I lost my patience That's when I hit the street, searchin', hurtin', wantin' salvation.

My occupation was me cuttin', puttin' rocks in a bag....

It was a verse from a song "Our Hoods" by s.m.u.t Brown, whose hook went: Ya'll don't know what it is To grow up in our hood (our Hoods!) Ya'll don't know what it is To see the things that we would.

CHAPTER 3.

Kenny Conley When Kenny Conley arrived that night at the station in the South End of Boston to work the overnight s.h.i.+ft-known as the "last half," from 11:45 P.M. to 7:30 A.M.-he first went to his locker on the second floor to get his equipment squared away. Then he walked back downstairs to read some reports and talk to the guys coming off duty to see what kind of night it had been. That's when he learned he was without his regular partner, Danny McDonald, who was out on an injury and not available for duty.

Kenny wasn't all that surprised. McDonald had injured his knee the night before while the two worked an anti-crime unit-the Delta Ka1 car-patrolling the district in an unmarked cruiser looking for trouble: drug dealing, prost.i.tution, crimes in progress. "You're out there hunting," Kenny said. The anti-crime cars were considered more pro-active than the "service units" that were directed by a dispatcher to respond to calls for police a.s.sistance, ranging from a disabled vehicle to more serious crimes.

The anti-crime units were also different from the police department's elite units that also worked in street clothes. Kenny patrolled only in his district, known as Area Da4, which covered parts of the South End, Back Bay, and Fenway neighborhoods. Officers a.s.signed to either the drug unit or the AntiaGang Violence Unit-such as Mike c.o.x and Craig Jones-had citywide jurisdiction and were free to roam.

The night before, Kenny and McDonald had driven slowly down one of the narrow alleys running behind the townhouses and red-brick buildings that made up the Back Bay, the historic neighborhood that was home to a mix of students, young professionals, and the well-heeled. Kenny was driving when they noticed a car ahead of them, occupied and idling. They watched as two men approached the car, textbook "suspicious activity" for that hour of the night. The officers ran the car's plate. When it came back as a stolen vehicle, McDonald opened the cruiser's door, climbed out, and began walking to the car. That's when the car lurched forward. Instantly, Kenny hit the gas pedal and looped around to cut the car off. Other police units responded in time to catch the two men who fled on foot. The suspects were taken into custody, while McDonald was taken for treatment. He'd been hit in the knee by the lurching car and would eventually undergo surgery to repair the ligament damage.

Kenny learned during roll call that McDonald would be out. His supervisor asked whom he'd like to work with that night in the Delta Ka1 car. Kenny looked around the guardroom full of officers ready to go on duty. He spotted Bobby Dwan. He'd never worked with Dwan before, but they were friendly. Bobby had come onto the force in 1990, a year before Kenny did. He was a second lieutenant in the National Guard who had served for six months in the Gulf War in 1991 as a platoon leader in the military police. Like Kenny, Bobby was from Boston, although Bobby grew up in Mattapan on the opposite side of the city from Kenny's South Boston. Bobby was a jock; he was a three-sport varsity athlete in high school-football, hockey, and baseball-and played center for the first line on the police department's hockey team. He was married, with a baby girl and another due any day now, and he lived just outside the city. There was no pretense about Bobby-nothing fancy and no bull-and Kenny liked that.

How about Bobby Dwan? Kenny told the supervisor.

It was done.

Bobby had been scheduled to work a one-person service unit, so he had to run to his locker and change back into the clothes he'd worn to work-blue jeans, sneakers, and the L. L. Bean barn jacket with the green corduroy collar his wife had bought as a gift. He joined Kenny, who already was set to go-dressed in jeans, sneakers, a black turtleneck, an off-white Carhartt jacket, and a corduroy baseball hat with a shamrock on it.

They headed out to the Delta Ka1 anti-crime car. Side by side, they were an odd couple: Kenny towered at six-four and weighed 215 pounds, while Bobby was five-three and barely topped 150 pounds. In the city, the big news at the time was the nationwide manhunt for Boston's most famous gangster, James J. "Whitey" Bulger. Under investigation for years, the aging crime boss from Southie had hit the road at the beginning of the month after a corrupt FBI agent tipped him off to a pending federal indictment. Whitey disappeared with a girlfriend, and soon enough the sixty-six-year-old killer made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List alongside Osama bin Laden.

Whitey was the talk of the town, especially in Southie. But for twenty-six-year-old Kenny Conley, another son of Southie, all the Whitey talk was background noise to personal anguish. His mother had died-on Thanksgiving Day. She'd fallen ill suddenly in October, was hospitalized, and fell into a coma. She never recovered. She was fifty-two.

"I took that hard," Kenny said. He and his mother had been very close. "It was the toughest thing I ever went through." He thought about his mother every day. But he was not about to talk to Bobby Dwan about her. "When I'm on the job, I focus on the job."

The first-time partners left the Da4 station after midnight. Within minutes, the Delta Ka1 unit was heading to East Newton Street in the South End to investigate a report that prost.i.tutes were working a street corner despite the sub-freezing cold.

Growing up in South Boston, Kenneth Michael Conley always wanted to be a cop. His uncle Russ-his father's oldest brother-was on the force and worked for years at the same station where Kenny was eventually a.s.signed-Area Da4. As a boy, he had been impressed by his uncle's uniform. "I'd see my uncle coming home, in his uniform with his partners, coming to see my father, and it excited me." In addition, Kenny's boyhood perspective on his uncle's duties neatly fit with the Southie virtue of help thy neighbor. "I like to help people," he said. To a question in his eighth-grade yearbook asking what he would be doing twenty years later, Kenny's answer was: "Boston Police Officer."

His modest upbringing was one of the typical Southie stories unfolding within a few blocks of home. When he and his twin sister, Kristine, were born on December 11, 1968, his parents lived in a third-floor walk-up at 599 East Fourth Street with their first-born, Cheryl. His parents, Ken and Maureen, or "Moesie," were both from Southie. They'd met when their respective "crowds" crossed paths. Maureen; her oldest friend, Peg O'Brien; and their other friends hung out at Frank and Rosie's on N and Sixth Street. Kenny and his pals hung out at a spa one block away, on N and Fifth. Maureen and the girls would go to the spa for pizza and to play the jukebox, and the guys in Ken's crowd would follow them back to Frank and Rosie's. "Before long it was one crowd," said Peg O'Brien. Ken, who was four years older than Maureen and a high-school dropout, worked as a truck driver and later as a track worker for the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, or "the T." Maureen worked for an insurance company, but quit when Cheryl was born. Within a couple of years, though, Maureen and Peg got part-time jobs at Gillette, headquartered in Southie, testing new deodorants. They'd sit with a "panel" of other women in hot rooms with pads under their sweating armpits to test the effectiveness of the deodorant. The two friends worked as a tag team, alternating between work and home. While Maureen worked, Peg watched Cheryl; when Peg worked, Maureen watched Peg's daughter.

"Kind of like Lucy and Ethel," Peg O'Brien said. "I think it was for about ninety minutes a day. We got paid about $35 a week." When the twins Kenny and Kris were born, Maureen decided to stop working again and stay at home with her three kids.

The Conleys lived in a four-bedroom apartment with a single bathroom, one block from East Broadway, which, along with West Broadway, was Southie's main commercial street. The two Broadways ran the length of Southie, from Boston Harbor on the east to a bridge on the west side that connected the neighborhood to the city. For a third-floor apartment, the Conleys' home did not have much of a view. They looked out onto the asphalt parking lot of the telephone company building that occupied the entire block from East Broadway to the side street-H Street. The far side of the parking lot actually rose uphill, an incline leading to the back entrances of some retail businesses on East Broadway. Kenny Conley called the tiny hill Tar Hill. In the winters after a fresh snowfall, he and his pals used it for sledding. The "trail" began atop a sliver of gra.s.s, ran under an iron railing, and then across the asphalt lot. The chain-link fence at the sidewalk served as a safety net, stopping their sleds from shooting out onto the street.

The Conley homestead was only 3.8 miles from where Mike c.o.x and his family were living in Roxbury-but the two neighborhoods were a world apart. Southie was overwhelmingly white and Irish-and had been since after the Civil War when the first wave of Irish immigrants moved into the area.

In the other three-decker apartments and row houses surrounding the Conleys lived families much like their own, where the breadwinners mainly worked in the trades, the public utilities, Gillette, "the T," or the police and fire departments. The median family income when Kenny was a toddler was $11,200 annually, and the majority of grown-ups never went to college. It was blue-collar through and through.

In the beginning, meaning back to the American Revolution, the gra.s.sy and hilly peninsula jutting into Boston Harbor was ideal for grazing livestock. In March 1776, the Colonial forces, led by General George Was.h.i.+ngton, used it as a base from which to drive the British out of Boston. By the early 1800s, South Boston formally became part of Boston, connected to the downtown by the new Dover Street Bridge.

Given its geography-nearby but separate and isolated-Southie became a convenient location to build the city's prisons, hospitals for the mentally ill, and poorhouses. Iron foundries, machine shops, and s.h.i.+pyards on the waterfront all sprang up.

The potato famine from 1845 to 1850 that devastated Ireland triggered a ma.s.sive exodus to the city, first to the tenements of the North End and then, in the decades following the Civil War, to Southie. The Irish eagerly took jobs in s.h.i.+pbuilding and along the waterfront unloading freight s.h.i.+ps. The women traveled across the bridge where they cleaned the homes of the Brahmins on Beacon Hill. Life revolved around work, family, and the many new Catholic churches opening throughout a neighborhood that was only 3.1 square miles. In time, it was said that Southie was a "state of mind."

"For those born and raised there, South Boston was a warm, friendly, comfortable community where people knew one another, shared the same values, enjoyed the same pastimes, and were safe from outside contacts and alien influences," wrote the historian Thomas H. O'Connor, a history professor at Boston College. "Southie pride" became a powerful force embedded in the clannish, tight-knit neighborhood-an us-versus-them mentality between the neighborhood and the rest of the city, or world for that matter.

Kenny Conley quickly came to embody that pride and the neighborhood's cultural emphasis on staying put rather than breaking away. "I did see myself growing old, sitting right down here, in South Boston. I've always said, and I think it's the sentiment of everyone around here, Why leave G.o.d's country?" From early on, in addition to working as a police officer, he'd say his dream was to marry and have a family. And his idea of making it was to find a house in the densely built neighborhood that actually had a garage and a driveway. "You know, something I could take a s...o...b..ower to."

Kenny was nine years old when his parents realized their own dream and became Southie homeowners. His father paid $10,000 in cash for 78 H Street-the third in a cl.u.s.ter of six row houses they could see around the corner from their apartment. The house had white aluminum siding with black trim. There were four bedrooms-two on the second floor and two on the third-and two bathrooms, a luxury for a neighborhood where a single bath was the norm. The Conleys closed on the house on November 3, 1977, but could not move in. No one had lived in the house for years, and the inside was a wreck. "We did a total gut job," said Kris, Kenny's twin sister. They made the move three months later, just before the Blizzard of '78, the nor'easter that dumped more than twenty-seven inches of snow on the city between the morning of February 6 and the next night. The renovation was not finished and the interior was always a work-in-progress. This was because Maureen Conley decorated the house herself, and then she'd do it over again.

Kenny's bedroom was on the third floor at the top of the stairs. It had a sliding French door opening into a brown-paneled room his parents had carpeted wall-to-wall with navy-blue carpet. His mother chose a color scheme of red, white, and blue, and everything was matching. She decorated the room with ceramics she and her girlfriends made at a local shop.

The second bathroom was on Kenny's floor. It had a rear window opening onto the second-floor roof. His parents stored an eight-foot ladder on it, and during the summer they'd climb out the bathroom window and use the ladder to get to the third-floor roof. They kept folding chairs up there for sunbathing. To the north, there was a view of the sprawling Edison utility plant and the s.h.i.+pping terminals along the waterfront. To the south was a steeple from the Catholic church on the next block.

The family room, or den, was in front on the second floor overlooking H Street. This was where the kids hung out, where the large TV console was stationed, where Maureen was at her most imaginative. One wall featured a fake fireplace that, when turned on, made crackling sounds and flickered with phony flames. "The room had a country feel," Kris said. "It sounds tacky and crazy, but it worked."

The move to 78 H Street was hardly a big one for Kenny, his two sisters, and their parents-just around the corner from the apartment on East Fourth. They now faced the side of the telephone company building instead of looking out onto Tar Hill, the parking lot behind the building. But there was one key difference-their stretch of H Street was atop one of Southie's hills. Looking south on a clear day, Kenny was able to glimpse the ocean waters of Old Harbor off Carson Beach, the main beach in Southie.

The corner at H and Fourth Streets, along with the next corner-H and Fifth-defined Kenny Conley's universe. "Nothing's changed since I lived here," he once said while standing on H Street as a grown man. As a little boy Kenny made friends who then became friends for life. His best friend, Michael Doyle, lived on East Fourth in a house located between Kenny's old apartment and his new house. "In front of his mother we called him Mike, but 90 percent of the time he was just Doyle," said Kenny.

Kenny, Doyle, the other Mike-Mike Caputo-and other pals turned the corner of H and Fifth into their own Fenway Park for wiffleball. Using the same kid ingenuity that had led to sledding down Tar Hill, they made the four street corners the bases. Home plate was located at the southwest corner-which meant hitters drove the wiffleball slightly uphill and upwind. Games were interrupted by pa.s.sing cars almost always occupied by a neighbor or relative. Between games they'd take a break and wander into the variety store at the northwest street corner (third base). The store, where Kenny's parents often sent him to buy bread or milk, was owned by Mike Caputo's parents. Kenny usually bought a Pepsi and Reese's peanut b.u.t.ter cup.

The boys owned the corner-a hangout after school and during the summers. In the ninth grade, Kenny scribbled an ode to his friends and their place inside the closet door in his bedroom. It read: "H + Fifth...#1." Under that, Kenny then drew a shamrock and wrote "Southie" underneath the shamrock, and then he wrote his friends' names.

Sports were king. Kenny and his friends played wiffleball, baseball, pickup football, just about any game they could come up with. Lots of kids in Southie laced up ice skates and became hockey players at the neighborhood rink, but Kenny never caught the hockey bug. Right away, his favorite game was basketball. He was always tall for his age, an advantage Kenny had right into adulthood, when he topped six feet and kept going.

But his height did not necessarily mean Kenny was the hot player everyone wanted when it came to choosing up sides. "I wasn't usually the first pick," he said. Kenny was not what was called a "skill player." He wasn't a fancy pa.s.ser or ball handler whose slick moves faked and fooled players on the other team. He didn't possess a sweet shot, either beneath the hoop or from far away. Kenny was the opposite of finesse. "My game?" he once asked rhetorically. "I don't got game." He joked: "I'm not known for anything except for standing there." His game was physical, rugged, and without nuance. He pulled down rebounds. In fact, his game mirrored his personality-straight-ahead and no bull. There was never anything slick about Kenny Conley. On and off the court, what you saw was what you got-a hardworking, unpretentious kid without a shred of guile.

Kenny played most of his basketball one block away from his house in the second-floor gym of the Gate of Heaven Church. The brick church was built in 1863 during a period when the Irish immigrant population was exploding and spreading east across Southie toward City Point. Kenny practically lived in the hall, playing basketball year after year in the church's Catholic Youth Organization, or CYO, league. He was ten years old when a young priest named Father Kevin Toomey came to Gate of Heaven. Father Toomey ran the CYO programs, and he became a mentor to Kenny and his friends who hung out at "Gatie." Father Toomey drove the boys to their away basketball games. For a couple of years when Kenny, Mike Doyle, Brendan Flynn, and Bobby McGrail were teenagers, they picked up $10 each from the father for "breaking down the hall" after Bingo Night and getting it ready for Sat.u.r.day CYO basketball. The boys worked late, and Father Toomey often came by to check on them. He would sometimes toss around a football to break up the monotony of folding tables and chairs at midnight. "He kept us straight," Kenny said. When Kenny was a high school senior in 1987, he was awarded the parish's Catholic Youth of the Year Award, and a plaque inscribed with his name was hung in the Gatie gym. The winner the year before was his best friend, Mike Doyle.

Kenny had everything he wanted within a five-minute walk from his house-his friends, school, church, the Gatie gym, the playing field at the corner of H and Fifth Streets, and the Italian cold-cut grinders at Mike Caputo's parents' variety store. His boyhood was simultaneously unexciting and fulfilling. "I just did what I was supposed to do," he said. His horizon expanded a bit when he and his friends got their drivers' licenses. "We'd drive to Castle Island to Sully's," he said, "which has the best hot dogs in the world." It was a comment at once serious and comic. Castle Island in Boston Harbor, just off City Point, was connected to Southie by a causeway. In 1970, when Kenny was two years old, the island and the fort built on it during Colonial times were placed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was only about a mile from Kenny's house. But to a boy on H Street, the five-minute drive there seemed really far away.

It wasn't as if Kenny never left Southie. In the summers, his mom took him and his sisters to the Cape. They'd pile into the station wagon and visit Peg O'Brien at her cottage, nicknamed "Grump's Stump." They often went on weekend and vacation trips with their mother's friends-Peg, Twinkie, Nancy, and Arlene. The kids swam and played while the mothers enjoyed "mothers' medicine," frozen lime juice and vodka.

The Conleys traveled to Disney World in Orlando, Florida, when Kenny and Kris were eight years old, and they drove another time to Niagara Falls, where they splurged and stayed at a Sheraton hotel. During summers they sometimes drove seventy miles north to York Beach, Maine, and stayed at the Sands Motel with its large swimming pool. During school vacations, families a.s.sembled at spots like The Elms, a ski resort in Manchester, New Hamps.h.i.+re, or the Brickyard, another skiing area in New Hamps.h.i.+re, where Kenny broke his leg when he was twelve.

The one dark shadow was his father's drinking. "It was never really a problem at home or on vacations," Kris said. "But if my parents argued it was about Dad's drinking and his being out and carrying on." Kenny's father had a rough-and-tumble look about him; he was a heavy smoker with tattoos on his forearm; later, he shaved his head and had an earring in one ear. After working all day driving trucks he would hang out in the bars. "You knew when he was drinking, but he was never doing it around the house," Kris said. Their mother wouldn't let him. Over time, the tensions got the better of the couple. The marriage broke down for good soon after Kenny and Kris graduated from high school. Maureen and Ken never divorced, but they never lived together again. And it was during this troubled time that Maureen started drinking heavily. "I knew it was a problem when I saw her drinking at home," Kris said. She saw it as her mother's "mid-life crisis." "She was always a doer, but now she had no kids to tend to, she was upset about the marriage, she had this freedom and was unhappy."

Maureen had been working for some time as a waitress at the Park Plaza Hotel. She'd gone back to work when the twins were in the fifth grade. Having taken her role as a stay-at-home mother so seriously, she actually asked the eleven-year-old twins Kenny and Kris for their permission. "She explained we would only be home alone for about thirty to forty-five minutes between the time we got home from school and when she got home from work," Kris said. "She was all concerned, but we thought it was great." They'd go wild during the brief but daily stay of parenting. "We'd have these blow-out fights," Kris said. But the shenanigans ceased once they heard their mom pus.h.i.+ng open the big front door.

When it came to school, Kenny Conley-along with Mike c.o.x in Roxbury and s.m.u.t Brown in Mattapan-was a child of busing, the court-ordered remedy to desegregate Boston's public school system. None of the three boys was ever directly in the line of fire. Their parents joined the legions of Boston parents who, during the busing era, avoided the tumultuous public schools and sent their kids elsewhere. Mike c.o.x was sent to St. Mary's School in the neighboring city of Brookline, s.m.u.t Brown was enrolled in the METCO program and bused to the affluent Boston suburb of Wellesley, and Kenny Conley attended one of the Catholic parochial schools not far from home.

Kenny considered himself a "Gatie," and the Gate of Heaven School was right around the corner, but he and his sister attended elementary school at St. Peter's. The brick Catholic parish school with the tiny asphalt playground was located on Sixth Street, a "commute" of three blocks from Kenny's house. He attended St. Peter's because Cheryl had gone there and his parents liked it. The school was grades one to eight. Kenny's cla.s.smates were the same year after year-another st.i.tch in Southie's tight-knit way of life. "Each grade was about thirty-five kids, and I basically went through with the same kids."

He was a freckle-faced boy of five, with a big smile and a mop of hair, when the buses began rolling in 1974. They carried black students from Roxbury to South Boston High School, and they transported white students from Southie to other city neighborhoods. It turned Southie into a war zone. State police patrolled school corridors, riot police flooded the streets, and police snipers took up positions atop three-deckers to enforce the law against the often violent anti-busing protesters. Many in Southie did not deny the school system was segregated, but they found unacceptable a solution that forced students out of neighborhood schools. But to a national television audience the angry confrontations between blacks and whites made Southie seem a hotbed of intolerance. Some of the ugliest moments showed Southie women shouting, "n.i.g.g.e.rs go home" at buses filled with black children trying to get to school.

The clash of politics, law, and educational equality was over Kenny's head. But the high school was only a few blocks from his house, and the protests and street fighting were all around. Kenny, Kris, and their mom were eating dinner at a neighbor's first-floor apartment one evening when the front door flew open and a teenager came running through the house. "No one locked their doors back then," said Kenny, "and this kid came in and ran through the kitchen and out the back door. There were a couple of cops right behind him. It was crazy. We watched and went back to dinner."

During the early years of busing some of Kenny's peers were swept up in the anti-busing fervor and joined the demonstrations. Not Maureen Conley's son. "I was the kid, when they were egging buses, I was always coming home." Fourth Street was a route protesters took to the high school for a demonstration, and Kenny, his sister, and their friends were sometimes hauled off the street by a watchful parent. "I can recall being told to hurry and get inside," Kris said. "But I didn't really know why at the time."

For high school Kenny wanted to follow his pal Mike Doyle, who was a year ahead of him, to the Don Bosco Preparatory High School in Boston. Never a star academically, Kenny went to summer school in 1982 so he could get in. He took courses in English and math. It worked. He began attending the Catholic school in September, catching the number 9 bus each morning at the corner of H Street and East Broadway for the ride through Southie and across the bridge into downtown Boston.

The extra effort may have gotten Kenny into Don Bosco, but starting out he was at best a mediocre student. Freshman year he got mostly low B's and C's. Then during soph.o.m.ore year Kenny began to click-his grades improved steadily. That year and the next he earned mostly B's and A's. He peaked his senior year, both in cla.s.s and on the playing fields. He played varsity basketball and football, and his grades were so strong he made the National Honor Society. "It felt good being able to come home having a 100 on an exam," Kenny said. His perfect grades-100s across the board-in his religion cla.s.s earned him the Religion Award at graduation in the spring of 1987. He also was named a Golden Bear, one of the school's highest honors, awarded for character and leaders.h.i.+p. The previous year's Golden Bear was none other than Mike Doyle.

The awards left Kenny feeling a little dizzy. To be sure, he enjoyed them, but he was not used to the attention and did not consider himself "an awards or medals guy." Glory-seeking was not what made him tick; instead, like his mother, he was a "doer." Kenny Conley saw himself as one of the guys who got the job done without fanfare.

Kenny was coming of age in the long aftermath of busing and s.h.i.+fting sands in his hometown-namely gentrification. Slowly, young professionals were discovering the neighborhood's proximity to downtown, its sea breezes, and its water views. But even as the outsiders arrived, Southie's public image remained largely negative. The tumult of busing in the mid-1970s might have long subsided, but Southie had been scarred deeply.

"Although the crisis over busing was a relatively brief episode in South Boston's 300-year history," the historian Thomas H. O'Connor wrote, "it was an unusually bitter and violent period that stereotyped the neighborhood forever in the minds of people throughout the nation as a place where beer-bellied men and foulmouthed women made war on defenseless black children." The stereotype was ripe for exploitation and would be used against Southie-the sense of loyalty made into a vice, not a virtue.

Kenny would someday experience this firsthand. But in 1987 he was riding on his own modest-sized version of cloud nine. Following the strong finish at Don Bosco, he spent the summer hanging out with friends, driving a delivery truck, and enjoying himself. He lived at home and had few expenses. His parents' marriage was unraveling, but they had stayed friends. Kenny began playing basketball in a new adult CYO league at Gatie. One of the other teams, called the Evans Club, consisted of the Evans brothers, including Paul, a high-ranking officer in the police department who was twenty years older than Kenny and eventually became police commissioner during the 1990s.

Kenny also was accepted into Suffolk University in Boston. He registered for cla.s.ses and lined up financial aid and grants. But when September rolled around, Kenny was a no-show. "I just didn't want to go." He decided he'd had enough of school and was talking to his father and Uncle Russ about the Boston Police Department. With their guidance, he filled out an application. He took a police cadet exam. Then, one day in November 1987, Kenny got the call to be a cadet, the first step in his dream of becoming a full-fledged police officer. Kenny was told to report for duty on December 5, 1987-six days before he turned nineteen. Mike Doyle was also accepted into the cadet program.

Kenny's first a.s.signment was working in the traffic division. He was on the job only two months when tragedy struck the department. Heavily armed members of the Drug Control Unit had quietly made their way up the stairs to an apartment on the third floor of 104 Bellevue Street in Dorchester. It was around 8:30 on the night of February 17, 1988. Using what was known as a no-knock search warrant, the plan was to surprise a cabal of drug dealers known to be working out of the apartment. The cops paused outside the bolted steel door and then began smas.h.i.+ng their way inside using a battering ram and a sledgehammer. That's when the whole thing went awry. Shots were fired from inside. One of the officers, Sherman Griffiths-thirty-six years old, married, and the father of two little girls-was. .h.i.t in the head. His partner, Carlos A. Luna, and other cops hauled him out of the line of fire. They tried desperately to treat the wound and resuscitate the burly, bearded eighteen-year police veteran. He was rushed by ambulance to Boston City Hospital and was p.r.o.nounced dead a few hours later. The police world mourned.

In the aftermath of Sherman Griffiths's death, Police Commissioner Francis M. Roache called the drug unit officers "highly trained and very professional." But as time went on the tragedy erupted into scandal. When it came to prosecuting the man charged in the cop's death, Detective Luna could not produce the confidential informant cited in paperwork to obtain the search warrant. Luna had written on the warrant application he'd obtained probable cause for the raid because "John" had provided him with firsthand intelligence about the drug den. But it turned out there was no John; he did not exist.

The drug unit's unlawful practice of lying on search warrants-a practice that amounted to a violation of the const.i.tutional protection against unwarranted searches under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Const.i.tution-had been exposed. Luna and his supervisor, Sergeant Hugo R. Amate, eventually admitted they had routinely made up informants as a way to cut corners. The two disgraced officers were convicted of perjury and lost their jobs.

Kenny Conley was a new cadet at a time when the Boston Police Department was under fire, when its long-calcified culture of lying and cover-up was spilling increasingly into public view. Commissioner Roache and his top bra.s.s found themselves on the defensive, insisting publicly the corruption was isolated. But the rank-and-file privately knew otherwise: Luna and Amate were scapegoats for a broader pattern of corruption. A diary entry by the chief of homicide, made public years later, reflected this. The chief noted the commissioner was angry about the fallout created by the drug unit's missteps. But, the cop noted, "no blame can be attached" to Luna and his supervisor because concocting fake informants and cutting corners was "the way the system operated.

"Because the acts of the drug officers imperil the police commissioner it appears that he is upset with us. If the case happened the same way tomorrow we would have to do the same thing. It looks like a case of wanting to shoot the messenger."

When Kenny and Bobby Dwan responded to their first call the early morning of January 25 and arrived at 36 East Newton Street, the street corner was barren. n.o.body was around, never mind prost.i.tutes. The durability of prost.i.tutes always amazed Kenny-the idea they'd be out on a weeknight in 29-degree weather. "If they need the money they go out there in their little skirts, whatever," he said. On the other hand, the cold did put a chill into the level of illegal commercial activity. In that way, Mother Nature was an ally, an anti-crime initiative. Kenny and Bobby hung out for a bit, and then by one o'clock cleared the scene-calling in an "8-boy," police code for no persons found.

Kenny had become a full-fledged police officer after serving four years as a cadet. He had directed traffic during rush hour, he had worked in operations on a night s.h.i.+ft answering 911 emergency calls, and, lastly, he had worked in the commissioner's office as a gofer. "Paperwork," Kenny said. "I was basically a secretary." On January 14, 1991, Kenny entered the police academy, and six months later, he was a.s.signed to Area Da4.

Kenny was twenty-two years old. Graduation from the academy on June 19, 1991, was one of the most important days of his life. His family gathered for the ceremony, and Kenny proudly posed for photographs in his uniform with his mom and dad, and with Mike Doyle, who was also sworn in and was now on the force. Several nights later, Kenny, Mike Doyle, and other new officers hosted a celebration in Southie at the teachers' union hall. Father Toomey showed up to see his former crew and to congratulate Kenny and Mike.

Kenny was living at home on H Street. His father was gone, but his twin sister, Kris, was there, as she attended Emerson College in the Back Bay. His older sister, Cheryl, lived in the house with her two kids, too. Kenny no longer slept in his boyhood bedroom on the third floor. He made the bas.e.m.e.nt into a makes.h.i.+ft bachelor's pad, laying down carpet and installing a separate entrance in back.

Kenny worked hard-both his regular s.h.i.+ft out of the Area Da4 station and details to earn extra money. In his free time he'd work out and play basketball in a couple of men's leagues, including Gatie's. For a few years he played football on Sundays. He hung out with the same friends from the corner of H and Fifth. They'd bring a beer cooler to the basketball games. Or, after games, they'd go home and shower and grab beers at The Cornerstone in Southie, which was owned by a family friend, or the Corner Tavern at K and Second Streets. Kenny's sandy-brown hair began thinning prematurely, and he became a "cap guy" with a growing collection of Red Sox, hockey, and other caps.

The mega-blow to the Conley family came in the fall of 1994. No one saw it coming. Maureen Conley had been working her s.h.i.+fts as a banquet waitress without incident. She had not had a drink in more than a year. "She was doing great," Kenny said. Kenny was out working a detail that October 19, 1994, Kris was leaving for work when her mother said she did not feel quite right. Their aunt came by and saw that Maureen was in trouble. Kenny was called and rushed home. He called an ambulance. His mother was taken to the New England Medical Center, where doctors discovered she had acute kidney failure due to hepatorenal syndrome, along with liver disease.

"She went into a coma," said Kris. "She had surgery, but never recovered." Five and half weeks later, Maureen Conley was dead. "It was so sudden," said Kris. "Boom."

Two months later, Kenny was still shaken but kept his grief to himself.

Kenny and Bobby Dwan had barely cleared the East Newton Street area when they were called back, this time to talk to a man who lived in an apartment above a restaurant. The man complained nervously about the goings-on in apartment 3, saying drug dealers lived there. "He said there was supposed to be a drug s.h.i.+pment coming in," Kenny said. Intrigued, Kenny and Bobby stuck around to see if the man was right.

They began the stakeout at 1:09 A.M. By 2:07 A.M., they'd had enough. Bobby called the dispatcher and they pulled away. "Nothing happened," said Kenny.

Meanwhile, in another part of the city, Mike c.o.x and the gang unit had high hopes for the club Cortee's, where an a.s.sembly of hip-hoppers included Robert "s.m.u.t" Brown and his friends. For Kenny Conley, though, the s.h.i.+ft was shaping up like another ordinary night in what so far had been an ordinary career. In his four years on the force, Kenny had never been shot at. He'd never had to shoot at someone. He'd made plenty of arrests, but never a major one-such as a collar in a murder case. The absence of medals on his wall did not bother him. He was a young officer who did his job without fanfare.

But that was about to change, and despite what was in store for him, Kenny came up with a bit of gallows humor for that night. He would say years later that January 25, 1995, was one night "I wish I'd called in sick."

CHAPTER 4.

The Troubled Boston PD When Mike c.o.x and Kenny Conley were finding their footing during the early 1990s as neophytes on the force, the Boston Police Department itself was wracked by controversy. It seemed that with disturbing regularity a high-profile incident, involving tragic consequences, displayed the department's weaknesses, corruption, and an impenetrable us-versus-them mentality. The 1988 shooting death of Detective Sherman C. Griffiths during a drug raid exposed entrenched corruption in Griffiths's drug unit, where officers routinely and brazenly fabricated confidential sources to secure court-approved warrants. The department's reputation took a huge hit, as the fallout spilled over into the 1990s.

Then in late October 1989, a horrific crime in Boston captured the nation's attention-and, by the time it was over, showcased how the Boston police and the media had fallen prey to racial stereotypes in the worst way. In the early evening, a suburban couple leaving a birthing cla.s.s at Brigham and Women's Hospital, one of Boston's premier hospitals, was shot in Roxbury while in their car. The husband, Charles Stuart, suffered gunshot wounds but survived. His wife, Carol, died within twenty-four hours, and their son, born by emergency Caesarean section, died seventeen days later. Charles Stuart claimed a black man had robbed and shot them. Within days, Boston police stormed through a nearby housing project, turning it upside down and hunting for William Bennett, the black man homicide detectives insisted was the killer. The media coverage was unrelenting and swept the country. But the storyline turned out to be all wrong-in fact, it was a perverse and deadly hoax perpetrated by Charles Stuart. Nearly ten weeks after the sensational murders, it was revealed Stuart was the triggerman who shot and killed his wife. Charles Stuart committed suicide on January 3, 1990, by jumping off the Tobin Bridge into the Mystic River. Leaders of the minority community claimed Boston police were unable to see past racial blinders and had violated blacks' civil rights during its reckless manhunt in Roxbury. The finger-pointing, lawsuits, and repercussions lasted for months and months.

Later in 1990, a nineteen-year-old man was shot and killed by two Boston police officers after he'd shot four times at the officers. The teenager became the first of five people shot and killed by police during the next twelve months. Police practices soon came under in-depth press scrutiny, when in the spring of 1991 the Boston Globe published a four-part series about the Boston police t.i.tled "Bungling the Basics." Police officials were outraged and produced a point-by-point reb.u.t.tal. The city's mayor, Raymond L. Flynn, meanwhile announced in May the formation of a blue-ribbon committee to review the newspaper's findings. Flynn persuaded one of the country's best-known attorneys to chair the committee-James D. St. Clair, who in the 1970s had served as special counsel to President Richard M. Nixon during Watergate. In his thank-you letter to St. Clair for accepting the post, Flynn seemed to tip his hand-that he'd be happy to secure a clean bill of health for the police department. He noted in his letter that "Police Commissioner Roache has raised questions about the accuracy of the information contained in the article and the conclusions drawn by the reporter."

But if Mayor Flynn was looking for a whitewash, he didn't get one. Ten months later, on January 14, 1992, the "St. Clair Commission" submitted its findings to Flynn in a blistering 150-page report, concluding the police department's workings were deeply flawed and that Police Commissioner Mickey Roache was an utter failure who should step down.

"I've always believed if you have a talented team and it's not winning games, you fire the manager," St. Clair told the Boston Globe about the panel's recommendation that Flynn fire Roache . "This team has talent, but it's not winning any games."

The panel had interviewed hundreds of residents and more than eighty police officers. "We found poor morale among the police force and a growing impatience in the community," wrote the panel. "It is clear to us that most officers with whom we spoke and many segments of the community have lost confidence in Commissioner Roache and his command staff's ability to lead and manage the department."

The special commission pointed to the department's inability to police its own as a singular failure of wide-ranging impact that put residents in danger, fueled mistrust residents felt about police, and tarnished the department's reputation. "The failure to monitor and evaluate the performance of police officers-particularly those with established patterns of alleged misconduct-is a major deficiency," it said.

The panel conducted a painstaking audit of the department's Internal Affairs Division. The division's work, the panel found, featured, "shoddy, half-hearted investigations, lengthy delays and inadequate record-keeping and doc.u.mentation." The panel discovered that less than 6 percent of all complaints of police misconduct filed by citizens were sustained as valid during the two-year period of 1989 and 1990. "This statistic strains the imagination," the panel said. "It a.s.sumes that more than 9 out of 10 citizens who complain of police misconduct are mistaken or are lying." The panel also found that a group of officers had gone largely unpunished even though they were repeat offenders and responsible for a "disturbing pattern of violence towards citizens." In short, the department was brus.h.i.+ng off police wrongdoing, not rooting it out. For the rank-and-file officers, the reality was that misconduct was no big deal-it rarely got them in trouble. Internal investigators either booted the investigation or did not look into the allegations at all.

In addition to calling for Commissioner Roache's removal, the St. Clair Commission recommended an overhaul of the Internal Affairs Division to include developing an "early warning system" to identify those officers with multiple misconduct complaints so that they could be targeted for retraining and even counseling.

The St. Clair Commission's findings were big news. It put Mayor Flynn back on his heels. In response, he said the department would implement many of the suggested reforms. For example, the department adopted a so-called Early Intervention System (EIS) to identify wayward officers. Initially, EIS required more than twenty complaints against an officer to trigger a review of the officer's conduct. The high threshold seemed a joke, more a throwback to the past than a reflection of forward-looking reform, and soon enough the threshold was lowered to three complaints within a two-year period.