The Fence Part 9

"You are not appearing very sure of yourself," Hussey said.

More than a half hour had pa.s.sed, and Hussey had heard enough. "What if I told you that Michael c.o.x described a black male, approximately five-nine-and that someone was going to put handcuffs on him. Who do you think that would be?"

Daley said nothing. Hussey followed with another question: "Did you ever tell Officer c.o.x to put his hands behind his back, who you thought was a suspect at the time. Then you told him, 'Put your hands on the car.'"

Daley still said nothing. Hussey kept going; he had the floor now. "Michael c.o.x might have been unconscious that night but his recollection is a lot better today."

Daley did not say a word.

"Officer Daley, I'll ask you, please, don't make yourself more trouble than you have already. Okay. Be truthful with us. Don't be untruthful. It will ruin your reputation the rest of your career."

Daley spoke, not to answer a question, but to ask one. "Can I talk to my lawyer?"

Sergeant Detective Cruz shut off the tape recorder. Following a short break, Cruz fiddled with the machine. "Okay, it's 10:35 A.M. I'm turning the tape back on." The tape recorder ran for one minute more-just long enough for Daley to a.s.sert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. "I no longer want to speak to anyone."

The interview was over. Daley had made his choice. His words were the last he would ever say to Boston police investigators regarding the beating of Michael c.o.x.

Between February and March, investigators for Internal Affairs interviewed fifteen Boston police officers. Mostly they were stiff-armed-as when Daley "lawyered up" and shut down his interview. Jimmy Burgio's interview never got started; he showed up just long enough to a.s.sert his privilege against self-incrimination. Dave Williams, saying he had "nothing to hide," actually met twice with investigators. He then began with the canard that he and Burgio barreled into the cul-de-sac in separate cruisers. He even penciled in a phony location for Burgio's car right behind his own cruiser on a diagram. Hussey and Cruz already suspected the story about two cruisers was bogus. Hussey warned Williams about telling the truth. "I'll ask you again. Officer Burgio-was he in the car with you?" Williams admitted he was-he and Burgio did ride together.

Williams was caught in the lie. Hussey pounced. "See, David, what this is, it complicates matters if you are not being up front, truthful with us."

"I've been truthful with you the whole time," Williams insisted.

Hussey wasn't impressed. "I have a problem here," he said. "We have an officer that was severely beaten and we are pretty convinced that an officer did it. Probably mistakenly. Okay. But I have two major problems. First, the amount of beating the suspect took, who turned out to be a police officer. And secondly, when the people found out he was a police officer they walked away and left him bleeding on the ground."

Hussey was looking to leverage Williams's admission into something bigger. But Williams did not budge. He stuck to the story of complete innocence he outlined in his written report-that he'd jumped from his cruiser and caught one of the suspects after a foot chase in the front of the gold Lexus. Williams was talking about a suspect who, in fact, did not need to be chased, who was already down and accounted for soon after Williams's cruiser hit him. It didn't matter. Williams said he didn't see a beating.

Not every interview was as unproductive as Williams's. Investigators did pick up bits and pieces. In addition to Ian Daley's comments about what plainclothes officers should wear, for example, Donald Caisey added that while writing police reports Daley told him he was sure cops had beaten Mike. Investigators learned about the similar statement Dave Williams blurted out in Mike's bay in the hospital emergency room-that he thought cops had beaten Mike. Craig Jones added the information about his encounter with Dave Williams in the upstairs hallway of the Roxbury police station. Craig said, "His exact words to me, he thinks his partner may have hit Mike by accident."

Richie Walker had a tantalizing tidbit. The dreadlocked cop disclosed he saw a Boston police officer following Mike c.o.x as Mike ran toward the fence after a suspect. He said the officer had to be from one of the three police vehicles that arrived ahead of him-either c.o.x's or Daley's or Williams's-because, he said, "no one pa.s.sed by me."

But Walker's comment was a tease. His memory turned all fuzzy after that. He said he could not recall if the officer was in uniform or dressed in plainclothes, whether the officer was white or black. "I couldn't say," he said. "All I know is I saw figures going forward." Most frustrating, he denied seeing Daley, Williams, or Burgio at all.

Investigators at one point were hoping gang unit partners Joe Teahan and Gary Ryan might be able to build on these leads. After all, the pair said their car was the fourth one in. Hussey and others interviewed them three times-more than any other officers-but they got little back. Hussey said flat-out at one point he thought they knew more. But the two gang unit cops were dug in: They saw nothing. By their account, they arrived after the beating and in time to find Mike on the ground. It didn't matter that on key points they contradicted each other-or others contradicted them.

The sessions proved a disappointment to Hussey, featuring the same monotonous drumbeat of "yes," "no," and "I don't recall." After the stack of skeletal reports and a bunch of know-nothing taped interviews, Kenny Conley and Bobby Dwan came across as breaths of fresh air. The Form 26 report Kenny prepared was a detailed, typewritten account of the night that at 520 words stood out as an opus-up to ten times longer than most of the reports turned in by nearly sixty police officers. In his, Kenny wrote he thought they were the third police car at the dead end, while Bobby said they were the fourth or fifth. Both were mistaken; they were farther back than that, more likely in the seventh or eighth position. But that missed the point. The point was their openness about placing themselves in the thick of it.

When asked by the investigators to identify other officers they'd seen, Kenny and Bobby did so-naming names or describing physically those whose names they didn't know. When asked by investigators to scan through a book of officers' faces, they did so-pointing out the officers they hadn't known by name. In his interview, Bobby described seeing a "commotion" down to the right along the fence when he first jumped out of the cruiser and ran to the left, after an officer running in that direction. When asked about the officers down by the fence, Bobby said in that split second he hadn't recognized them. But he did have this detail: Two were in uniform-a black cop and a white cop.

In his interview, meanwhile, Kenny was similarly forthcoming. While most officers seemed to take great pains to place themselves as far away as possible from the fence, Kenny talked in the only manner he knew-straightforward. He gave a point-by-point account of his role in the car chase and described in detail how he bolted from the cruiser, scaled the fence, and eventually captured Robert "s.m.u.t" Brown.

But for all their cooperation, the problem was Kenny and Bobby didn't have any evidence to break the case. Bobby certainly had a tidbit about seeing two uniformed cops in the commotion, but Kenny didn't even see a commotion. He told Hussey he was coming to a stop when down the hill he first spotted the four suspects jumping from the Lexus. "My eyes were just trained on a kid coming out of the pa.s.senger side, a black kid with a brown leather jacket." he said during his first interview. Kenny ran after s.m.u.t Brown. "I didn't see anything or hear anything," he said. "I was trained on him." Hussey asked him if he'd seen anyone else chasing the suspect, and Kenny said no.

"There could have been," he said, "but I just kept my eyes aimed on him."

When the sixty-five-minute interview ended, Hussey thanked Kenny for his effort to recall the night's events. "I appreciate your candor," he said to Kenny.

Given that, Kenny was surprised when he was called back for a second interview several weeks later. He showed up at headquarters on April 25 at the end of an overnight s.h.i.+ft. The interview began at 6:50 A.M. Right away, Kenny noticed Hussey and another investigator had adopted an almost abrasive posture.

Hussey's mood swing in part reflected his frustration. The veteran cop kept expecting someone to step up and do the right thing. But no one had. He was going back to people in a position to see something, but kept getting the same evasive bobbing and weaving. He wanted to try Kenny Conley again-the rare interviewee who'd talked candidly. Intuitively, it would seem Kenny saw Mike and the a.s.sault. It was just common sense. Hussey said as much to explain Kenny's callback. "You were in really a great position here to see what went on right at that fence because that is the location, where that guy hopped the fence, that is the location where Michael c.o.x received his injuries."

Kenny understood Hussey's thinking. But he hadn't seen the beating.

"Do you remember seeing a commotion?" Hussey asked.

It was as if Hussey was pleading: If not the beating, a commotion?

"Out of your peripheral vision?" Hussey asked. "I know you stated before that you were focused on that suspect that hopped the fence. Did you see anybody out of your peripheral vision anywhere near the fence?"

"No, sir."

The session ended on a testy note. It was clear to Kenny that Hussey's view had changed. It seemed Hussey no longer believed him. Kenny left headquarters feeling troubled. He had certainly wondered why he had not seen anything besides s.m.u.t Brown. The question would haunt him for years to come. Kenny was like most people-like Hussey, even-who figured people see things they're supposed to see, particularly when the person is a trained police officer. Most people would guess they'd notice a beating, even while in hot pursuit of another person. But what Kenny didn't realize was this long-held a.s.sumption was plain wrong, and that scientific research conducted throughout the 1990s was debunking the popular wisdom about what people "see." Psychologists had several names for the phenomenon, "change blindness" and "inattentional blindness." Tests showed that people focusing on one event were surprisingly inattentive to something else in their field of vision that was salient and unexpected. But the research was far beyond Kenny's frame of reference. All he knew was he had not seen the beating.

Kenny drove to Southie and headed to the bas.e.m.e.nt bedroom he'd built in the house on H Street when he moved back during the summer to save up some money. He needed to get some sleep. The way the interview had gone nagged at him. "I felt at that point I was being blamed for something I had nothing to do with," he said later.

The follow-up interview with Kenny Conley marked the end of the line for Jim Hussey's Internal Affairs inquiry. Ralph C. Martin II, the district attorney for Suffolk County-and the first black district attorney in Ma.s.sachusetts history-was taking over the case. The switch signaled more than the district attorney's interest in the beating. It indicated Police Commissioner Paul Evans and his command staff were coming around to the gravity of the beating allegations-what one high-ranking police official began calling "among the most serious investigated by the department." The stakes were much higher than in an Internal Affairs inquiry where administrative sanctions ranged from reprimand to termination. With a criminal probe, officers faced possible jail time. But while the change of course suggested a tougher stance, it also represented the loss of even more time-a recurring theme ever since the night of the beating. Launching a criminal investigation basically meant starting over. Martin's prosecutors and officers from the police department's Anti-Corruption Unit would not have the benefit of Jim Hussey's work. They would never read about Dave Williams getting caught in a lie during Williams's interview with Hussey and Cruz. They would never read what Ian Daley said, or Richie Walker, Joe Teahan, Gary Ryan, Craig Jones, Kenny Conley, and Bobby Dwan-or Mike c.o.x for that matter. Being part of an administrative inquiry, evidence developed by Internal Affairs could not, for const.i.tutional reasons, be turned over to a criminal investigation. The new investigators got written reports about the high-speed chase and dead end, but not the tapes of interviews conducted by Internal Affairs.

But if any prosecutor was up for the challenge, it was Ralph Martin. He was a young, energetic a.s.sistant United States attorney in his early forties when first appointed to become the local district attorney by the Republican governor William Weld in 1992. Then, in the 1994 fall elections, he won voters' support to a four-year term. The outcome surprised many; Martin campaigned as a Republican in a county, comprising the cities of Boston, Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop, where Democrats outnumbered Republicans six to one. For Martin, the combination of race and justice had long been a powerful source of motivation. Originally from New York City, he was the son of a police officer. His mother was found beaten to death when he was two years old. Martin had gone to college at Brandeis University outside Boston and then moved into the city to study law at Northeastern University. He would always remember how he'd been influenced by a black a.s.sistant district attorney from Boston when he was a college senior wondering what to do with himself. The man urged a career in criminal justice because "it's important to have black folks who are principled in law enforcement."

Martin, in his brief professional life, had already displayed a willingness to go after cops suspected of wrongdoing-even if the efforts blew up in his face. Before becoming the district attorney, Martin was the federal prosecutor a.s.signed to investigate the Boston police mishandling of the most notorious murder case in decades-the 1989 killings of pregnant Carol Stuart and her baby, shot at a traffic intersection in Roxbury after leaving birthing cla.s.s. The stomach-turning case that made national headlines became more grotesque when it turned out Carol's husband, Charles, was the killer. Boston police, meanwhile, had spent weeks building a misguided case against a black man. When the shocking truth came out, the city, especially the black neighborhoods, was in an uproar, and the U.S. attorney put Martin in charge of looking into claims police framed their suspect and strong-armed blacks to incriminate him. Following his investigation, Martin recommended that "several Boston police officers should be indicted on charges of intimidating witnesses, planting evidence and violating the civil rights" of the suspect. Many officers were incensed. But their anger at Martin turned into triumph when Martin's boss, judging he could not win convictions before a jury, rejected the recommendation and decided not to prosecute the police.

It was a public rebuke, a setback fueling tension between Martin and Boston police officers that carried over into his tenure as the Suffolk County district attorney. "Conflict with the police has been a major theme in the career of Ralph Martin," noted a Boston Globe profile. His pro-active role in the Stuart probe "guaranteed he would get a hostile reception from many police officers when he became DA."

Now in early 1995, while monitoring the c.o.x beating investigation, Martin became embroiled in another police mess. He had indicted a veteran officer with forcing a prost.i.tute to have s.e.x while working a paid detail in downtown Boston. But the case barely got past "go." On February 27, a Superior Court judge not only threw out the rape charge, he went after Martin, characterizing the district attorney in his five-page order as an out-of-control cop hunter. The judge said Martin had manipulated the grand jury process to indict the officer, tactics he decried as a "perversion of our entire system of justice." The accused cop's attorney also had little good to say about the Suffolk County district attorney. "Martin has treated police officers unfairly," he said.

Martin considered appealing the judge's order, but three weeks later, on March 22, he decided "no mas"-he would not do that. He remained unapologetic, however. "Who guards the guards?" he asked rhetorically. The only cops he didn't like, he said another time, were the ones who broke the law. "People in law enforcement-not just cops-should be held to a higher standard of honesty and integrity, in order for the public to have confidence in us." Martin said dropping the rape case should not be taken as a sign he'd lost the will to tackle police misconduct. "I don't think I have ever been shy or reluctant to investigate police misconduct when it appears," he told reporters.

It was the end of April when Jim Hussey got the order to suspend the Internal Affairs investigation and make way for Martin's criminal inquiry. Hussey walked away from the case believing he and his colleagues had made some progress, zeroing in on Jimmy Burgio, Dave Williams, and Ian Daley as the "pool of suspects." But the leads were circ.u.mstantial. There was much more to do. The IA's focus had been narrow: on the first to arrive at the dead end. Fifteen officers were interviewed, when another forty-five were known to have some connection to the chase. IA had not tried interviewing civilians living on Woodruff Way, and it had not interviewed officers from other police agencies who showed up at the scene. It had not tried interviewing the foursome in the gold Lexus who, quite possibly, had seen everything: s.m.u.t, Tiny, Marquis, and Boogie-Down.

s.m.u.t Brown and the others had been behind bars ever since their arrest, charged with first-degree murder. During the several months that Internal Affairs looked into the beating, s.m.u.t met several times with a public defender a.s.signed to represent him. He was held in the Nashua Street jail, a new, $54 million facility built in the shadow of historic and highbrow Beacon Hill and near Ma.s.sachusetts General Hospital. The public defender found him "very scared, very worried." The lawyer tried to rea.s.sure s.m.u.t, "to make sure he understood he's got help and not to lose hope." The two mostly went over the shooting at Walaik.u.m's that started it all, and s.m.u.t was freaking out he'd been accused of murder when he'd been as shocked as everyone at the hamburger joint when gunfire broke out. s.m.u.t talked about the car chase to Woodruff Way. He said that after scaling the fence he could have outrun the cop "because the cop was thirty yards away when he called out to stop." He stopped when he could have kept going and escaped in the woods. It was the kind of detail the attorney noted. Fleeing was typically seen as "consciousness of guilt." But when s.m.u.t stopped instead of escaping, that was something the attorney could argue showed consciousness of innocence. s.m.u.t stopped because he had nothing to hide.

In these early meetings, s.m.u.t also mentioned the beating at the fence. s.m.u.t had continued to think Marquis was the one who had taken the blows. While they were being booked later at the Roxbury police station, he had not had a chance to talk to Marquis. The only thing he knew, Marquis was taken to a hospital for treatment. s.m.u.t then found out that was all wrong-from rumors, from his mother and Indira during their visits, from Marquis himself when they both were eventually in the same jail. "That was a cop!" s.m.u.t got to thinking. It seemed surreal. Cops beat another cop like that? This, s.m.u.t knew, was heavy. When winter turned to spring and he heard talk about the inability to solve the beating, s.m.u.t sat in jail awaiting trial for murder knowing he'd seen plenty at the fence.

"They took affidavits and reports from everyone who was on duty that night but n.o.body has talked to our clients," one of the defense attorneys said about the police investigation into Mike c.o.x's beating. The murder suspects might know something, the attorney noted, but no police official had reached out to them. "No one has contacted me to say, 'Would you mind if I talk to [them] about this other incident?'"

Ralph Martin and his immediate circle of advisers weren't the only ones in the district attorney's office who'd taken notice of the bizarre beating case during February and March. a.s.sistant District Attorney Bob Peabody had read the first newspaper account. Peabody, thirty-nine, worked in Martin's Special Prosecutions Unit. His bloodlines ran deep in Ma.s.sachusetts history. He was a descendant of the founder of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony and the state's first Colonial governor-John Endicott. His father, Endicott "Chub" Peabody, was governor in the early 1960s. Peabody, tall and built solidly like his father, played the line on the Harvard College football team. He studied law at Boston College. With about seven years of experience as a prosecutor, Peabody was no longer green but had yet to attain the status of seasoned veteran.

Bob Peabody noticed the story because he knew Mike c.o.x. More accurately, he knew who Mike c.o.x was. Peabody's kids attended the Park School in Brookline with Mike's two boys. Peabody's middle son and Nick c.o.x were in the same elementary school cla.s.s. He and Mike traded greetings at school events, but little more. When Peabody read about Mike's injuries, he made a point of going up to Mike the next time he saw him at the boys' school to ask if he was doing okay. Mike was polite and friendly enough, but it was a brief, awkward exchange, the kind Mike was trying his best to avoid. Soon enough, however, Bob Peabody and Mike c.o.x would be having more formal exchanges about the beating.

For Boston Red Sox fans, springtime was always about a fresh start, a new season of hope for winning a World Series and ending the miserable drought since the last national champions.h.i.+p in 1918. The baseball strike in 1995 that was threatening to shut down the Major League Baseball season had ended on April 2, and three weeks later the fans piled into Fenway Park for the home opener. The worry was that hard-throwing ace Roger Clemens was out of action with a shoulder strain. The good news was the lineup: Slugger Jose Canseco had been added to provide more home run power, while shortstop John Valentin was maturing into an elite player. Down in the minor leagues, a new infielder named Nomar Garciaparra was impressing with his slick fielding and batting stroke. The Sox took the field and clicked on all cylinders: Pitcher Aaron Sele threw a shutout and Sox hitters drove in a slew of runs in a 9a0 win over the Minnesota Twins.

For Sergeant Mike c.o.x, the opposite was true about the spring: It was a season of despair and hopelessness. "My wife was saying, 'I told you this wasn't going to go away. This is terrible what they did to you. Don't you see it?'" By the time Jim Hussey was shutting down the IA inquiry, Mike had indeed begun to come around.

"I mean nothing's happening. Nothing's being resolved."

With help from Craig Jones, Donald Caisey, and a few other friends, Mike monitored the department's faltering Internal Affairs inquiry. He picked up bits and pieces. He learned Dave Williams owned up to lying that he and Jimmy Burgio rode in separate cruisers, but he also learned nothing happened to Williams for s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the initial effort to establish the layout of cops and cruisers at the dead end. Williams had a knack for eluding trouble. Just as he was becoming embroiled in the unfolding c.o.x affair, he appeared to be facing hot water on another front. Two civilian complaints against him for excessive force, still pending from the fall, caught up to him. The cases, at long last, had triggered the department's new Early Intervention System, the program to monitor officers with two or more complaints. It had taken four months-and only after the c.o.x beating probe began-when Williams was notified to undergo retraining due to a "potential problem area: physical abuse during arrests." He was ordered to enroll in a course in "Verbal Judo" while the complaints were under investigation. Verbal Judo was a method for using words rather than force to defuse volatile situations. But Williams quickly learned EIS was more sound than fury. The city thought Verbal Judo was not a proven program and wouldn't pay for it. Williams never took it or any other course. Instead, he focused his verbal skills on denying the excessive force accusations still under investigation, including the one by Valdir Fernandes, the eighteen-year-old who accused Williams of smacking him around for spitting too close to Williams on a porch.

Mike also learned about Ian Daley taking the Fifth. It made him mad that someone he believed definitely had evidence about the beating had gone stone cold. But if Mike was upset, Craig Jones was furious. Craig was convinced Daley was either a beater or a witness to it. "I was p.i.s.sed," he said. "I couldn't believe no one was going to step up." He was also taken aback that many cops didn't seem to realize the severity of the beating. "I had people coming up to me saying something like this happened to them. I'd say, Oh, you did? You had blood in your urine?" Craig tried to set them straight. This was not a case of one cop mistakenly spraying another cop with mace or whacking him with a glancing blow, "and the cop immediately apologizes and it's over." This was much worse. "It was a crime," he said. Mike was owed "a lot more than an apology.

"Some things you can let go, but some things you can't, and this was one of those things," he said. "If you were p.i.s.sing blood, I'd tell those guys, would you let it go?"

Throughout the three months Internal Affairs was investigating the beating, Mike continued to puzzle over Police Commissioner Paul Evans. The commissioner was less aggressive than he'd expected. "Initially he didn't take it seriously enough," Mike decided. The top cop's generally silent posture, he thought, had created a vacuum where the downplaying of the beating that Craig Jones kept running into was able to gain traction. It was the fertile ground for rumors questioning the department's commitment to hold the beaters accountable. Was Evans serious? Or should everyone sit tight and ride out a whitewash? One thing was certain. In his first year, the commissioner was proving himself as a master of policy statements. He issued a series of impressive and high-minded new directives aimed at improving the department's tarnished image.

Less than two months after the beating, Evans in March promulgated a new order explicitly listing the duties of sergeants and patrol supervisors when force has been used by officers in their command. It amounted to a checklist of what the three sergeants at Woodruff Way-Isaac Thomas, David Murphy, and Daniel Dovidio-did not do following Mike's injuries. The order was called "Special Order Number 95a16: Amendment to Rule 304, Use of Non-Lethal Force." Its purpose was "to more clearly delineate what const.i.tutes a full and complete Patrol Supervisor's investigation in cases where the use of non-lethal force is used, or alleged to have been used, on a subject." The new rule required that "prior to the end of the tour of duty," the supervisor was to prepare a report that included reports from officers alleged to have used non-lethal force, reports from all police personnel at the scene, and reports from civilian witnesses.

Two days later, on March 17, Evans announced a second new directive called "Special Order Number 95a17: Identification of Plainclothes Officers." Its purpose was "to minimize the potential risk to officers a.s.signed to plainclothes duties by establis.h.i.+ng policies and procedures that will aid in their being properly identified." The rule, which had been in the works for months, established for the first time a hand signal officers working in plainclothes could employ to identify themselves to other officers-"in order to avert an unfortunate confrontation or tragedy." The officer was to raise his arms over his head and cross them at the wrists, turn his palms forward, and spread out his fingers.

Then several months later came Evans's new "Public Integrity Policy: Rule 113." The nine-page, single-s.p.a.ced directive addressed the need for the police department to "maintain the highest standards of honesty and integrity." It noted that police departments throughout the country experience corruption. "Boston certainly has not been immune to those problems. Corruption, brutality, falsifying evidence, and bias cannot be tolerated among individuals sworn to uphold the law. Nor can hypocrisy, unfairness, deceit and discrimination be tolerated in an organization dedicated to the highest ideals of justice and the rule of law."

The doc.u.ment contained eleven ethical canons. Canon nine, in particular, stipulated: "Police officers shall use only that amount of force reasonably necessary to achieve their lawful purpose. Excessive or unauthorized force is never justified and every officer not only has an affirmative duty to intervene to prevent such violence, but also to report any such instances that may come to their attention."

The orders addressed flaws exposed in dramatic relief by the beating. To Mike, the words certainly looked good on paper, but what about their application? What about the lies and failure to cooperate during the Internal Affairs inquiry? Truth telling could have been a concern pursued in any number of directions-Dave Williams and Ian Daley, to name two. No one was looking at Sergeant Dan Dovidio. Even cohorts in Mike's gang unit were vulnerable, given the fantasy about the ice-slip codified in reports that first night.

Beyond the lying, there were leads that seemed to be ignored. What about Richie Walker saying he saw a cop chasing Mike; Bobby Dwan saying he noticed a commotion by the fence involving a black cop and a white cop in uniform; Mike saying he was kicked by a white officer; gang unit officers saying Dave Williams and Ian Daley later said cops had beaten Mike; Craig Jones saying Dave Williams later had told him his partner had hit Mike; Ian Daley dramatically shutting down his interview, and Jimmy Burgio taking the Fifth? The burden of proof in an administrative inquiry was substantially less than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" required in criminal cases. Why were Burgio, Williams, and Daley still on the street? Mike wondered why they weren't at least put on desk duty while the investigation into the beating continued.

"No one's getting in trouble," Mike said. The commissioner's directives seemed like big talk, little action. The message cops could take from the absence of any real consequence was to hunker down: No one else is saying anything. I'm not saying anything.

"I was feeling more and more uncomfortable with the process," Mike said.

By early spring, it didn't take much to awaken Mike. He slept on edge, as if waiting for something to happen. It could be a telephone call; the crank calls had continued as February pa.s.sed into March and March into April. Or it could be the nightmare in which he was helpless against police attacking his house and family. Or it could be something else. Mike was always wondering, what next?

The pounding at the front door therefore saw Mike bounding out of bed and hustling downstairs in his shorts and T-s.h.i.+rt. It was the middle of the night, and he didn't want his boys or his sisters' family downstairs waking up. Kimberly, however, was out of bed and right behind him.

Before Mike reached the landing he heard the loud crackle of police radios outside. He opened the door. Two uniformed officers stood on the stoop. Mike recognized one of them, but didn't know his name. They were from the Ba2 station in Roxbury.

The second officer, the one Mike did not recognize, spoke up. He said they'd been dispatched to the house on a 911 emergency call-a 911 call, the officer said, for a disturbance. "For a man being beaten."

Man being beaten? Mike couldn't believe what he was hearing. You gotta be freakin' kidding me, he thought. Man being beaten? The beating was January 25. Woodruff Way.

The two officers seemed poised, ready to barrel into Mike's house.

Mike didn't say a word. He filled the door frame. It was a silent standoff lasting a few seconds. The cop Mike had recognized then recognized him, and he turned to his partner.

"Let's go," the cop said. The second officer, confused, hesitated. The first kept going, heading toward the cruiser parked on the street. C'mon, he called back to his partner. To Mike he said, "Sorry."

Mike shut the door firmly. Kimberly wanted to know what was going on. "Just go back in," Mike said. Upstairs, he told her they had the wrong house. It was a mistake. Oh, was all Kimberly said. They got back into bed and tried to get some sleep.

Both knew Mike was lying. It was not a mistake but a new twist in the ongoing hara.s.sment-a phony 911 call, almost funny in a perverse way.

Mike understood that inside the department, there was no longer any question about where he stood. Everyone knew he was cooperating. He'd met with Internal Affairs and made it clear he wanted justice.

With that, it seemed to Mike the message behind the hara.s.sment was changing. It had gone from being a warning to lie low and not cooperate to a kind of punishment and payback for deciding to push the matter. The new message was: You're not one of us.

Thoughts like that were taking their toll. Instead of feeling better three months after the beating, Mike was feeling worse. It was blowing his mind-he'd been beaten, he was the victim, and yet he was the outcast.

"What is it about me?"

He found himself obsessed with the question. "What is it about me that these people think that they can just do this? And just walk away, and never admit to anything or apologize."

He was thinking in ways he never had before. He was never particularly race-conscious growing up, but he began thinking that being black was the only viable explanation for the abandonment that started at Woodruff Way. "They were able to leave me because they thought less of me because of what I am," Mike said. "It wouldn't have happened if I were white."

The thoughts at times had a crippling effect. Mike retreated into himself. He became jumpy and fearful, and, on occasion, Kimberly found him alone, crying. But something else was at work too; at other times the thoughts worked Mike into a rage. "The more I relived what happened to me, the angrier I got," he said, "and it wasn't just the beating that angered me. It was the fact that they left...They just left me there like an animal to die, you know, on the side of the highway."

While the Internal Affairs inquiry was winding down, Mike made a key decision. He contacted the Boston attorney who'd come to the house to talk about possible legal action. During the first visit, Mike hadn't given Stephen Roach the time of day. But Mike now told Roach to go ahead-Roach could write the city to request a full copy of Mike's medical records. It wasn't as if Mike had committed to taking specific action, but he no longer knew whom to trust and he wanted to be ready. He saw no harm in letting Roach make a few preliminary requests for doc.u.ments.

Mike also agreed to a second request from Roach. He agreed to meet with a psychiatrist. He didn't believe in therapy, but the lawyer wanted a professional evaluation. Seeing a psychiatrist might also ease some of Kimberly's concerns. Mike went twice to see an a.n.a.lyst named Dr. Jerome Rogoff-for ninety minutes on April 24 and for another sixty minutes on May 1. Rogoff was a forensic psychiatrist with a drawer full of credentials. He was a member of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law and had taught at Tufts Medical School and Harvard Medical School. He'd treated prison inmates and served as an expert witness in both civil and criminal cases.

Following the two sessions, Rogoff wrote Roach a report that ran six pages. It began with an outline of Mike's life, saying that Mike grew up in Roxbury in a "stable, intact family." He noted that his father died of cancer when he was sixteen, "at which point his severe and prolonged bereavement interfered with his performance at school." By senior year at Wooster, the report said, he'd recovered and finished strong.

The main thrust of the report, however, was not Mike's past. It was to determine Mike's "current mental and emotional state." Rogoff found Mike "guarded and suspicious," which, noted the psychiatrist, was not typical for him. "He was always preternaturally calm under stress, which contributed to his effectiveness as a plainclothes policeman." The psychiatrist listed other symptoms all too familiar to Mike and his family-"he has trouble sleeping," "the content of the nightmares is of people trying to shoot him, to kill him, often while he is with his children," and "he cries from time to time, especially when he thinks about how even those he thought of as his friends on the police force have deserted him."

The diagnostics ran several pages. "Taken together, these symptoms describe a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with elements of clinical depression (Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood) added to it."

Rogoff was clear about the cause of Mike's troubles. "Both the timing and the content of these symptoms, coupled with the fact none of them existed before January 25, 1995, leave no question that they were caused directly by the incident of that night."

It was discouraging stuff. And Rogoff wrote there was no specific treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. But he did end with a note of encouragement. "I was impressed with Michael c.o.x's inner strength and integrity of character (personality), and thus I would hope that he would be able to put himself back together psychologically in a fairly short time."

CHAPTER 12.

Dave, I Know You Know Something Two years before the beating of Mike c.o.x, a pair of leading experts on police practices were asking: "How can police, who can be exemplary heroes, beat people and then even be prepared to lie about it?" The paradox was the central question explored in their 1993 book, Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force. The two scholars were Jerome H. Skolnick, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and later New York University, and James J. Fyfe, a longtime New York City patrolman who left the force after earning his Ph.D. in criminal justice.

Using cases that included the ferocious beating of Rodney King on March 3, 1991, by Los Angeles police officers-captured on videotape and televised around the world-the authors said the answer was found in the proposition that "two princ.i.p.al features of the police role-danger and authority-combine to produce...a distinctive world view." It's an "us-versus-them" perspective, where the high-risk and often violent nature of the job creates a policing culture based on "internal solidarity, or brotherhood."

The brotherhood, they wrote, controls behavior even when an officer crosses the line-such as in the beating of Rodney King. It almost doesn't matter that police departments routinely issue policies on integrity and truth telling. (In Boston, it was Commissioner Paul Evans's new "Public Integrity Policy: Rule 113.") When it comes to survival on the street, the unwritten codes about sticking together are what matter, even if that means lying and a cover-up. The last thing a cop wants to do is testify against another cop. "The code decrees that cops protect other cops, no matter what, and that cops of high rank back up working street cops-no matter what," wrote Skolnick and Fyfe.

Mike c.o.x did not need to read any book to understand the blue wall of silence. "It's a large part of being a police officer in general and the culture of being a police officer-protecting one another." In his a.n.a.lysis, the code's logic began with the presumption that a cop was always right. "Whatever it is that he's doing is a.s.sumed to be right. Because you're a.s.suming his actions are always right, you don't look for any wrong." In other words, there was never any misconduct for cops to talk about. It was why one of the officers on the witness stand in the Brighton 13 police brutality trial could unblinkingly testify he'd never seen a Boston cop doing anything wrong. In his six years on the force, Mike certainly understood the basis for the code-the need to be able to count on your cohorts, virtually without reservation. It was all about survival while working on the edge of life and death to uphold law and order.

But then came his beating. The code's underlying rationale-"us versus them"-did not fit. Mike was not one of "them." He was not a drug dealer. He was not a gun-toting g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger. He was not Rodney King. Mike was a cop-one of legions of "us" that made up the Boston Police Department. If the beating had been posed to him as a hypothetical scenario, Mike would have said that the code did not apply-not when the crime victim was another cop. But that hadn't happened. Instead, Mike watched good cops-good guys, friends of his-not wanting to get involved because doing so meant testifying against another cop. This included black cops-when he would have thought a racial solidarity among the black officers would have kicked in to override the silence. But that hadn't happened either. The code had a power Mike never imagined. It even trumped race. While a second investigation began in the ashes of the first, Mike was seeing that the reach of the blue wall extended beyond concern for any one individual. "And I just happened to be the individual."

In June, the Boston Herald reported that District Attorney Ralph Martin and the police department's Anti-Corruption Unit had taken over the investigation of Mike c.o.x's beating. "This was nothing but another Rodney King situation-only this time there was no video camera," one of the paper's unnamed police sources was quoted saying. Since it was located inside the tabloid, the casual reader might easily have flipped past the story. But interested parties-meaning the police world-would certainly notice, and for those readers there was more: The story named names. "Two officers from Area Ca11," it said, "James Burgio and David Williams, have been questioned in connection with c.o.x's beating, but no formal charges have been brought against them, sources said."

The account was brief, only 408 words long-hardly headline coverage. The rest of the Boston media barely blinked. In fact, the report was only the fourth article since the January 25 beating. Such a low story count was surprising. For one thing, the chase was considered the longest in Boston anyone could remember, involving the most cruisers ever. Then a high-ranking police official began referring to the a.s.sault as "singular" in the department's history. Police Commissioner Evans's chief of internal investigations, Ann Marie Doherty, based her characterization on the combination of "the type of injuries that were sustained and the fact that medical attention was not immediately provided." The newsworthiness of the case was crystal clear. It was a no-brainer: Journalism 101.

But the story hadn't gained any traction. It wasn't as if the local press was not busy covering the police department-good news and bad. Commissioner Evans and Mayor Tom Menino, along with a number of city officials, posed for photographs at the ground breaking for a new police headquarters in Roxbury to replace the seventy-year-old building in the Back Bay that was obsolete. It would take two years to complete the new $62 million structure Evans boasted would house state-of-the-art ballistics and crime labs, and the relocation to Roxbury was viewed as improving the department's community policing programs along with its accessibility to residents.

There was the bad press Evans and the mayor continued to get over Accelyne Williams's death during a raid the year before. Negotiations with the elderly minister's widow, Mary H. Williams, had broken off, and she'd sued. One of her lawyers called the bungled drug raid that led to the minister's death by a heart attack "a crime that the city of Boston and the police department have to be punished for." Mayor Menino's press office released a statement calling the suit "regrettable." It noted the city's proposal to pay $600,000 was "the largest litigation settlement the city has ever offered." But that response only infuriated columnist Derrick Z. Jackson of the Boston Globe. "Rodney King," wrote Jackson, "collected $3.8 million." Mayor Menino, he wrote, was Mayor Scrooge. "Williams vomited and died of a heart attack. Williams was a pristine victim, with not a scintilla of warranted suspicion. One could not possibly imagine a more obvious case to settle quickly, not just to ease the pain of the family but also to send an expensive signal to police that they had better learn to tell black people apart."

Then, of related interest, there was the resolution to the police brutality case in nearby Providence, Rhode Island, that had been making news since the week before Mike c.o.x's beating. Four months after his suspension the rookie cop who'd been caught on tape kicking a black concertgoer was allowed back to work. There were strings attached to the reinstatement. The officer was required to repeat his training at the police academy and would not be allowed to work on the street until he did. He had to take a course on cultural diversity. He forfeited $12,000 in pay. Finally, he was required to write an essay. The topic: what it meant to be a police officer as it related to human rights.

But all of those were breaking news events that the media then reacted to and covered. The c.o.x case was different. No one was holding press conferences or handing out press releases. In fact, no one connected to the scandal wanted any coverage-not the police commissioner, not the mayor, not the police union, not even Mike c.o.x, given his nature. Boston did not have its own Reverend Al Sharpton, the New York Baptist minister and vitriolic activist, to inflame public interest. Instead, the c.o.x case belonged to that category of news story the media uncovered by being investigative, enterprising, or "pro-active" in its reporting-and in this instance the Boston media had dropped the ball.