Common Ground (128 page)

The conversation that evening in the deputy’s office was not encouraging to his visitors. Rachalski explained that his division’s resources were already stretched to the breaking point. Policemen from all over the city had been mobilized for the busing crisis. At night, his men were on call for South Boston, Hyde Park, or Charlestown, wherever the trouble was, then had to be at Madison Park High at 6:30 the next morning. That left little manpower to handle break-ins and muggings; it was impossible to maintain the kind of intense surveillance which might deter such offenses, and with only eleven plainclothes detectives, it was difficult to mount more than perfunctory investigations after the crimes had been committed. In any given case, the chance of arresting a “perpetrator” was negligible. Nevertheless, sensitive to his visitors’ political clout, Rachalski ordered the two stationary cars replaced by an
eight-man foot patrol on four parallel streets: West Brookline, Pembroke, West Newton, and Rutland Square.

The cops of District 4 had little sympathy for the South End’s embattled gentry. Third-generation Irish and Italians who had followed their compatriots to the suburbs, they couldn’t understand why any young professional would choose to live in a troubled inner-city neighborhood. Responding to a burglary or holdup on West Newton Street, they often told the victims, “Well, if you live in an area like the South End, you have to expect this sort of thing.”

For a time, the foot patrols could be seen every evening on West Newton Street. Then they disappeared altogether, not a blue uniform to be seen for hours on end. When residents complained, a rash of traffic tickets started appearing on cars along the four streets. Many were for the most minor of violations—parking more than a foot from the curb—something which was difficult to avoid when the streets were lined with snowbanks. To those hit with such summonses, it seemed that the police were taking revenge for being called out on foot patrol in the middle of a harsh New England winter.

Nobody was angrier than Colin Diver. Six years with the Mayor and Governor had left him with rigorous standards for public service. After running Bill Cowin’s abortive campaign for attorney general in 1974, he had reluctantly moved into the private sector, accepting a joint appointment in the Law School and the School of Public Management at Boston University. His new focus there on the particulars of management technique gave him even more exacting criteria for assessing governmental performance. By any standards, the Boston police didn’t measure up.

As parking tickets settled like wet snowflakes along West Newton Street, Colin called Deputy Superintendent Rachalski. “Look,” he said, “we’d be better off if you pulled your men off the street and let the muggers do their work. That way my neighbors and I might lose, say, thirty dollars a night, and people could protect themselves by not carrying cash. This way we’re getting ripped off with two hundred dollars in parking tickets every night. You may call that police protection. I don’t.”

From Rachalski’s apologies it became clear that the ticket blitz wasn’t the work of resentful patrolmen. District 4 clearly didn’t trust its own men to walk their assigned beats in the heart of winter. Suspecting that the patrolmen would hole up in a bar or some other cozy retreat, their superiors had ordered the ticketing to assure that their men were at least out on the street where they might deter, if not actually apprehend, a criminal. Meanwhile the Divers and their neighbors were paying the price.

Impelled by the same sense of responsibility which had led them to confront truck traffic, commuter congestion, substandard housing, and rampant prostitution, Colin and Joan gradually assumed command of the war on crime. They kept a careful list of every crime committed in their corner of the South End. Friends and neighbors called at all hours to report incidents, which Joan inscribed in a loose-leaf notebook. In neat schoolgirl’s script she recorded the
informant’s name, the location, date, and time of the crime, the number and description of the assailants, their weapons (if any), the victim’s name, the goods or money taken, and whether or not the crime had been reported to the police.

The level of criminal activity remained fairly constant through the Christmas season, but as 1975 ended, the situation on the Divers’ block deteriorated radically.

It started on Tuesday, December 30, when a man up the street was mugged in the alley behind his house.

At 5:00 p.m. the next day—New Year’s Eve—a gang of boys with sticks stopped an elderly man on the sidewalk and took his wallet.

Half an hour later the same gang grabbed an old woman’s purse.

At 5:45 on January 6 the Divers’ next-door neighbor, Linda Trum, was returning home with her three-year-old daughter when two young men came up behind her. One of them put his arm around her neck and, as she struggled, her assailant said, “Don’t scream. Just give us your money.” She said she wasn’t carrying any. The men rifled her pockets, then ran off down the block.

At 9:45 that same night, Colin and Joan were watching television when they heard a scream from the alley behind the house. Colin grabbed the Slugger, the bat with which he had once helped win the Lexington Little League championship, and ran into the alley. There he found a woman named Terry Baksun, whose purse had been snatched. Colin looked up the alley, but the mugger had fled.

After dinner the next night the Divers had an appointment to look at a new Kirby vacuum cleaner. The salesman—a college student named Bobby Jacobs—was aggressive but charming, and Colin and Joan smiled to themselves as he ran the machine up and down their dining room, demonstrating a bewildering array of tubes and brushes.

At 8:20 p.m., their elder son, Brad, hollered down the stairs, “I think I heard a scream outside.”

Colin gestured to Jacobs to turn off the vacuum cleaner.

“Are you sure, Brad?”

“I think so.”

Colin ran to the door, grabbed the Slugger from its niche, and dashed out onto the sidewalk, where he found a twenty-five-year-old black woman named LeSola Morgan.

“What’s the matter?” Colin asked.

“He took my pocketbook.”

“Who did?”

“Some guy. He hit me in the face and grabbed my purse.”

“Which way’d he go?”

“Down there,” she said, pointing toward Tremont Street.

As Colin started off in that direction, he saw a man run out of the alley by the library carrying a large black handbag.

“That’s my pocketbook,” yelled LeSola Morgan.

“Stop!” Colin hollered. “Stop! Thief!”

The man ran harder, thundering past the library.

Taking up the chase, as he had so often in the past, Colin noticed something unusual about his quarry. Most of the others he’d pursued through these streets were kids who ran like NFL ends, gone before he got anywhere near them. But this one was different: a man in his late twenties or thirties, lumbering down the sidewalk like a rogue elephant. And Colin was actually gaining on him!

At Tremont Street, the man dodged a screeching taxi, darted past a honking panel truck, and charged across the busy thoroughfare. Colin hesitated for a moment. Tremont was a significant boundary to his world, the southern border of the gentrified South End. Beyond it stretched a row of tenements, occupied principally by Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans. The O’Day Playground halfway down the block was the center of the South End’s heroin trade, a dangerous place at any time of the day or night. On other chases in months past Colin had always stopped at Tremont, unwilling to carry his pursuit into alien territory. But he was fed up. After six crimes of violence on his block in barely a week, he had to catch one of these bastards! Without further reflection, he hurtled across Tremont and sprinted after the fleeing figure.

It was a dismal night, cloudy and cold. Streetlights glowed in the fog. A fine drizzle lay an icy slick along the pavement, but Colin kept his footing, quickly making up the ground he’d lost. The mugger was running down the middle of West Newton Street. Gaining steadily on his man, Colin thought: I’m actually going to catch this guy! He could feel the smooth, round handle of the Slugger in his right hand. Raising the bat, he thought: Am I really going to hit this guy? Can I? Should I? Before he could deliberate further, he came abreast of his target and swung the Slugger in a short, powerful arc against the man’s head.

As if he’d pulled some hidden trigger, the scene erupted in a clutter of disjointed images.

The mugger collapsed in a heap on the street.

Tripping over the body, Colin tumbled to his knees, sliding six feet along the ice.

The purse flew from the man’s grasp, coming to rest in a puddle.

The Slugger broke in two, the barrel sailing onto a nearby stoop, the jagged handle still clenched in Colin’s hand.

Struggling to his feet, Colin turned to confront his antagonist, who was hauling himself upright. For a moment, the two men stood in the middle of the street, staring at each other. The mugger shook his head slowly, as if to clear the mist before his eyes, and suddenly lurched forward.

My God, Colin thought, he must have a knife or a gun!

But either the man didn’t see him or wanted nothing more to do with him, for he began staggering—half running, half walking—up the sidewalk.

Colin picked up the pocketbook. Once more he hesitated. He’d retrieved
the woman’s money, he’d given the guy a good thwack on the head—maybe he should just forget about him.

At that moment, Bobby Jacobs, the vacuum cleaner salesman, came steaming up the street, yelling, “What’s going on?” Emboldened, Colin pushed the pocketbook into Jacobs’ hands. “Hold this,” he said. “I’m going after the guy.”

Retrieving the Slugger’s heavy barrel from the stoop, he ran up the sidewalk, nearly colliding with two black men dressed to the nines for an evening on the town. “Hey,” yelled Colin. “Help me out, will you? See that guy down there? He just robbed a girl. Grabbed her pocketbook.”

“Aw, man,” said one of the men. “You
got
to be kidding.”

“Come on,” Colin said. “He smashed a black woman in the face.”

“All right,” said the second man.

Colin and his new ally resumed the chase. Just short of Shawmut Avenue they corralled the mugger, who was too groggy to put up much resistance. Colin grabbed him by one arm, the black guy by the other, and together they propelled him onto Shawmut, where a police car was advancing majestically up the avenue. Colin jumped into the roadway and rushed directly into the squad car’s path, forcing it to a halt.

Alighting from his car in amazement, Patrolman Gerald Abban asked, “What the hell’s going on here?” Still out of breath from the pursuit, Colin did his best to explain. Finally Abban took custody of the mugger—who turned out to be Ruberto Caban, a thirty-year-old Puerto Rican from nearby West Concord Street.

After other police came to the house to take his story, Colin was left ruefully contemplating the evening’s events. Only gradually did the implications of what he’d done begin to sink in—he’d clobbered a guy over the head with a baseball bat. Not since boyhood scuffles had he inflicted injury on another human being. It was one thing to bluster, as many of his neighbors did, “If I ever get my hands on one of those bastards …” It was something else to actually do it. And with a weapon as lethal as a baseball bat, there was always the possibility of serious injury. Ruberto Caban had looked a little wide-eyed out there, like a prizefighter who’d been hit once too often. If anything was wrong with him, a zealous lawyer could sue Colin for thousands in medical bills. For his own sake, as well as Caban’s, he hoped he hadn’t inflicted any real damage.

The broader implications were even more disturbing. Nearly a decade before, he’d moved into the city to help bring racial justice to Boston. Now he was rushing out of his house to hit dark-skinned people over the head. Before him on the kitchen table lay his boyhood bat, splintered beyond all further use. Some of his cherished assumptions were in smithereens as well.

The next morning, Colin and Joan went to Municipal Court for Caban’s arraignment on a charge of unarmed robbery. All through the hearing, Caban glowered at the Divers, who were somewhat relieved when he was held on $1,500 bail. After the hearing, Colin left for Boston University and Joan for the Hyams Trust, where she tried to concentrate on foundation business. But
her mind kept returning to what had happened the previous evening—and the previous week. The nightly routine of crime was taking its toll. That afternoon she wrote a letter to Kevin White:

Eight days later, the Mayor responded: