Murder in Boston (21 page)

The restaurant hypothesis was shaken almost as soon as Barnicle proposed it. The day after his column was published the
Globe
ran a story by Kevin Cullen and Anthony Flint in which they quoted one of Carol’s former business associates as saying that Carol was well aware of Chuck’s desire to have a restaurant of his own. Such a plan, in fact, was discussed by the two of them in detail when they were trying to decide what to do with the profit from the house in Medford. In the end they agreed jointly to sink the money into the Reading house and postpone the restaurant idea.

It is possible, of course, that Chuck decided not to wait any longer. But if Carol’s insurance totaled only $282,000, that was only a little more than double what he made each year and only 60 percent more than their combined annual income.

Nevertheless, Barnicle claimed he knew what Chuck’s motive was. In the conclusion of his January 10 column, he shared it with his readers. In his view Carol died for the most trivial of reasons:

She died because her husband wanted to be someone important. He wanted to have his name on a restaurant, to own something, to have people truly like, admire, and remember him. He wanted people to think he was swell, and he wanted to get where he was going in a hurry. His wife’s life was merely the down payment.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Chapter 18

One way of evaluating developments in the Stuart case would be to treat the incident as if it were a natural event, such as a series of earthquakes. Chuck’s death really shook the Richter scale. The biggest shock to follow Dereck Jackson’s and Eric Whitney’s recantations of their grand jury testimony against Willie Bennett occurred when Michael and Mark Stuart, Shelly Yandoli, and Neysa Porter gathered in Richard Clayman’s law library, a meeting to which the media had been invited.

It was Clayman’s show, and he took full advantage of it. The forty-two-year-old lawyer who had once worked as a former assistant district attorney under Flanagan has a reputation for flamboyance, and on this day he showed why. Stripped to his shirtsleeves with the cuffs rolled back, he pranced like a rock star in concert. He bobbed his head. He shook his shoulders. He paced. He pursed his lips. He waved his arms. He rested his hand reverently on Michael’s shoulder, on his head, like a fundamentalist preacher bestowing a blessing. He did semaphores with his hands. He croaked and bellowed and whispered. He did everything but play the bagpipes and dance. Although the Stuart siblings sat around Clayman in a serious semicircle—Shelly, Michael, Neysa, and Mark, looking diminutive against the walls of books—they may as well been cardboard cutouts. Under strict orders from Clayman to let him do
all
the talking, they uttered not a word. What they would have said, had Clayman let them talk, would have been icing: the lawyer served up the cake.

Verily, he said, the rumors about some of the family members knowing of Chuck’s role prior to his death were true. Michael, the lawyer confirmed, had known about Chuck’s involvement within seventy-two hours of the incident. He knew because Matthew had gone to him and told him. The others did not know until much later. Mark and Shelly found out on January 1 and Neysa the next day, although Clayman was strangely vague about dates and other specifics. But the real shocker from Clayman was the announcement that Michael had gotten a preview of what was coming, an advance peek at what was going to happen long before Matthew came to him.

Weeks before the October 23 shooting, in late August or very early September (his impreciseness with dates was either coolly deliberate or unbelievably sloppy), Clayman said Chuck pulled Michael aside and they had a “disjointed, vague conversation” in which Chuck asked Michael if he would help him kill someone. Whether Chuck had identified that “someone” as Carol was not clear. In any case, Michael’s reaction, according to his lawyer, was to brush it off as a stupid comment.

“At that time it had no significance to Michael,” Clayman said. “My client’s response was a definitive ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m not getting involved in any sort of crazy thing you’re talking about.’” No more was said about the subject, Clayman said. Not then; not later. Not even after Matthew told him what he knew about Chuck’s role in the October 23 shooting.

“I reviewed that conversation with him, and it doesn’t have a hell of a lot of significance,” Clayman said. Pausing, he added, “But in retrospect, after examining all the data, an argument can be made that it should have had, or why didn’t it, or at least now I think someone could argue that it had some significance.”

Clayman’s statement strained credibility. The lawyer was asking the world to believe that Chuck had asked Michael if he’d help him kill his wife. Michael had brushed it off as if it had been a dumb comment like telling him that the Atlanta Braves were going to win the World Series. Seven weeks or so later, the wife is killed. Even while Chuck is recovering from surgery from his own wound, brother Matthew comes to him and says that Chuck was involved in Carol’s death. And Michael never went to Chuck and said, “Hey, remember last summer when you talked to me about killing Carol?”

Clayman’s understatement hardly registered among the gathered reporters, who twitched nervously, waiting for him to finish so they could bombard him with questions. Newspeople got their chance soon enough, but they got very little new useful information.

Was there a family plot to keep silent?

No, Clayman responded firmly. “The appearance that has evolved is that some type of conspiratorial scenario existed, all these family members sitting around talking about keeping something hidden. That is not true.”

Did any of the brothers or sisters go to Chuck’s home while Chuck was in the hospital and remove incriminating material, such as insurance policies?

No, said Clayman. “They knew nothing about insurance. If some documents were picked up, it was not the kind of pickup that was intentional, as if they went looking for insurance papers.”

Did he think that any of them, especially Michael, might be legally called to task for the role he had played in the series of events?

No, Clayman said yet again. “I am comfortable after an examination of this entire scenario that there was no violation of the law. His hands are legally clean.”

Legally, maybe. But he did not say anything about morally. Still, that would hardly be Clayman’s job. He was being paid to promote his client’s innocence, not help pave their path into a courtroom. Whether a grand jury agreed with Clayman’s assessment was yet to be seen.

Apparently concerned that the original grand jury that had begun hearing evidence in the Stuart case the previous November may have been tainted by the flap over the testimony implicating Willie Bennett, District Attorney Flanagan named a new twenty-three member panel and said it would begin immediately investigating the case, starting from the very beginning. As would later become evident, he did not specify that they should be in any rush to do so.

Despite the whirlwind of controversy around Mayor Flynn and Police Commissioner Roache, Flanagan had managed to keep pretty well out of the line of fire as far as the Stuart case went. A veteran politician, a wily expert in the ways of bureaucracies, the gray-haired, jowly district attorney knew when to stand up and shout and when to sit down and shut up.

Seemingly slow in starting his career, Flanagan went to work for District Attorney Garret H. Byrne in 1962, when he was thirty-two years old. For sixteen years he worked in a back office, keeping a low profile. But in 1978, with his boss about to turn eighty, Flanagan decided to make his move.

“It’s time for a crusading district attorney,” he bragged in announcing his candidacy. Flanagan won that election with ease. But it was the closest he ever got to being a crusader.

Many political observers are puzzled by Flanagan’s ability to inspire confidence in voters. Despite the pledges of his first campaign, he has been anything but an aggressive prosecutor, preferring to get by as he did for most of the time he worked under Byrne—by not making waves. His critics accuse him of running a patronage shop, filled with aging white men with Irish surnames. But the voters are not listening. Flanagan has handily won each of his three reelection campaigns, and in the last race he did not even have any opposition.

His strongest support seems to come from white, Catholic voters who like him because he is a regular in the Knights of Columbus halls and a frequent participant at the ubiquitous communion breakfasts. He likes to pump hands and slap backs, and he has an apparent natural inclination to laugh quietly at himself. His trademark is his necktie, which always is the most outrageous and ostentatious he can find.

Although his personal popularity has remained high, at least among whites, and his vote-drawing power is enough of a shield to scare away formidable opposition, the professional confidence of his staff has come under increasing scrutiny. Even before the Stuart case, there were serious questions about how his men were doing their job.

In Boston, before Chuck and Carol were shot, the longest continually running headline grabber in the crime sphere was a confused legal battle referred to as the Griffiths case. What happened was this:

On February 17, 1988, Detective Sherman C. Griffiths, a member of the Boston PD’s drug control unit, went to an apartment house in the Dorchester section of the city to make a narcotics bust. Approaching the apartment in which he thought the suspected drug dealer was hiding, he was shot through the door. He died instantly, without seeing who had shot him. Tucked in Griffiths’s pocket was a search warrant that had been obtained after another detective, Carlos Luna, swore to the judge that he had a detailed description of the suspect, which he said had been provided by an informant.

A thirty-four-year-old Jamaican immigrant, Albert Lewin, was quickly arrested and charged with killing Griffiths, even though Lewin did not fit Luna’s description of the drug dealer whom Griffiths had been on his way to arrest.

In building Lewin’s defense, his lawyers asked the police department to produce Luna’s informant to see if they could straighten out the matter of the non-matching description. It developed that there had been no informant; he was a figment of the police department’s imagination. So was the description. Information that drugs were being dealt in the apartment had come from three different people, officers later swore, none of whom apparently could describe the dealer. So Luna made up a description so they could get a search warrant. Since no one wanted to admit this to Lewin’s lawyers, Luna told them that the informant was dead.

He testified later that the idea of the imaginary informant’s imaginary demise was given to him by another police officer and was “reinforced” by one of Flanagan’s top assistants.

Flanagan’s assistant denied the charges on the stand and has twice been vindicated of encouraging Luna to lie.

Although the case has not yet been settled, it prompted Flanagan’s critics to question how far the district attorney’s prosecutors would go in trying to get an arrest and conviction—an issue that erupted in full force in the Willie Bennett case. Raising even more eyebrows was the fact that the same prosecutor, Thomas Mundy, was in charge of both cases.

This was still another twist that added even more complications to the Stuart case and was a good reason for Flanagan’s men not to want to disclose any more information than they absolutely had to about the Stuart investigation.

Chapter 19

Although the
Globe
had been hinting for days that there was another person to whom Chuck had confided his plans, its reporters had failed to come up with anything solid. Kudos for that accomplishment went to David Ropeik at WCVB-TV, the city’s ABC affiliate.

On January 10 Ropeik aired an interview with an old high school buddy of Chuck’s. Although the man appeared on the air, his identification was camouflaged electronically and his name was not divulged. The man said he had gotten a call from Chuck the previous September, which was a surprise because he had not heard from him in years. Chuck said he and Carol wanted the man and his wife to have dinner together. The man said he and his wife went and had a good time. A few days later Chuck called him again and asked him to have dinner with him alone. After they had eaten and were walking back to their cars, the man said Chuck started telling him about how he was tired of being married to Carol and how things were just going to get worse now that they were going to have a baby. “That’s going to give her the upper hand in our relationship,” Chuck allegedly said, “and I can’t stand that.” Chuck said that Carol had refused to have an abortion, so he was going to be saddled with both a wife and a child, neither of which he wanted. To make matters worse, Carol would quit her job and they would lose her income. That would mean the end of his plans to open a restaurant, Chuck whined. Then Chuck looked the man in the eye and popped the big question: Would he help him kill Carol?

The man, who was later identified when he appeared before the grand jury as David F. MacLean, a truck driver from Lowell, said he thought Chuck was joking and passed it off with a light remark. Later, after the shooting, he remembered the conversation and mentioned it to a couple of people, one of whom told a policeman friend of his. The cop notified a detective in the homicide division, who called MacLean not long after the shooting and asked about the conversation. Frightened, MacLean denied that the talk ever occurred.