The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (23 page)

Mike didn’t expect his wife, mother, and sisters to understand any of this.

“In the beginning I had a lot of faith,” Mike said.

In law enforcement it’s a well-known truism that the chances of solving a crime diminish the longer a case goes unsolved. For one thing, witnesses have time to think about what to say or to decide not to say anything at all. Offenders have time to work out the wrinkles in their cover stories. “The best moment for justice is right away,” one prosecutor said.

In the Cox case, some Boston police officials may have been hoping the department’s low-key response to the beating would result in a quick and quiet resolution that kept the matter largely in-house. They may have figured that given the unique circumstances—cops beating a cop—it was reasonable to expect the offenders to come forward. Mike had thought as much. They were wrong.

In the first days after the beating, instead of launching a full-blown Internal Affairs inquiry, commanders in the field put out the word that officers in Roxbury and Mattapan who’d participated in the chase and were at the dead end had to file a so-called Form 26 report. The officers were to document what they’d done and what they’d seen.

For two weeks the Form 26s trickled in—and the false notes struck the morning of January 25 in initial reports played on. Nearly sixty officers prepared reports—and not a single officer saw or knew anything about Mike’s misfortune. The ultimate see-no-evil filings were done by the core group of officers who, along with Mike and Craig, arrived first to the dead end: gang unit officers Gary Ryan and Joe Teahan, Richie Walker, Ian Daley, Dave Williams, and Jimmy Burgio.

Ryan’s report said he and his partner, Teahan, rode in “the fourth m/v [motor vehicle] on the scene,” where they found “Michael Cox lying on the ground.” That was about all he wrote; Ryan said he didn’t see anybody else and had no idea how Mike got hurt.

Richie Walker, according to his written report, had not even seen Mike Cox: “I learned via my portable Boston Police radio that there was an injured officer at the location where the pursuit had ended.”

Ian Daley drafted a brief, handwritten account in which he at least acknowledged a Cox sighting: “At the conclusion of the pursuit, Officer Daley did observe P.O. Cox laying on the ground bleeding.” But Daley provided no meaningful details.

Dave Williams used a typewriter to fashion his report—all sixty-four words of it. He said he and Burgio were “involved in a foot chase,” suggesting he was in no position whatsoever to see Mike. Williams even got Mike’s name wrong, typing, “I was unaware of any injury to P.O. Richard Cox until later.”

Jimmy Burgio, in the few sentences he prepared, avoided any mention of Mike by focusing singularly on his moment of putative glory: “Myself and P.O. Williams engaged in a brief foot pursuit ending with the arrest of two suspects.”

Their supervisor, Sergeant Dan Dovidio, then extended the cloak of cover. He filed a report saying no other officers were at the dead end when he arrived, except for Williams and Burgio. Separately, he then sought honors for the two officers. He typed a “Recommendation for Commendation,” writing, “Officers Williams and Burgio are worthy of recognition and should be commended for their excellent performance that without doubt instills public confidence to victims of violent crimes.”

The collective exercise in evasion did little to shed light on the beating. The leaders of Mike’s gang unit were growing restless. The unit’s commander on January 30—five days after the beating—fired off a single-spaced, three-page memorandum forcefully calling on the department’s top brass to start an Internal Affairs investigation. “The most disturbing aspect of this,” the commander wrote, “is that not only was Officer Cox assaulted, but he was
left
on the sidewalk.” The commander stressed, “as of the writing of this report, no officer has come forward, in spite of the fact that there were numerous officers involved in this initial vehicle and suspect pursuit.”

Four days later, the
Boston Herald
ran the first story mentioning Mike in connection with the high-speed chase and capture of four murder suspects. The tabloid’s early “bulldog” edition hit the streets not long after midnight and was usually read by the cops, firefighters, cabdrivers, and anyone else working in the dark. The story said Mike had been injured and the department was investigating whether he’d been beaten.

Later in the night, the telephone rang and awoke Mike and Kimberly. Mike turned carefully and grabbed for the receiver by their bed. He heard a voice grumbling. The voice was unfamiliar, and Mike had to hold the receiver away from his ear when the grumbling grew into a primal scream. The scream spread through the room. Then it stopped. The caller hung up. Mike put down the receiver. He was puzzled, but didn’t think much of the weirdness. He and Kimberly tried to get comfortable again.

Then the telephone rang again—and again. Each time Mike picked up the receiver to hear the same animallike scream. Then the caller hung up. Toward dawn, Mike picked up the receiver, bracing for the scream, but it didn’t come. Mike said, Hello? The caller asked for someone by name, but uttered a name that made no sense. “It was a nonsense name,” Mike said. “It was a name I couldn’t even pronounce.”

Mike asked the caller, Who?

“You asshole,” the caller yelled. “Fuck you!”

The line went dead, and that was it. The calls ended. They didn’t belong to one of Mike’s nightmares. The telephone calls had been real, and they left Mike and Kimberly bleary-eyed. But they weren’t going to puzzle too much over a wrong number or sick prank, not with all they had going on in the family, given Mike’s condition.

It was Friday, February 3, nine days since Mike’s beating.

Later in the morning a friend of Mike’s called to tell him about a story he should read in that morning’s
Herald.
The story was on page 16, and it carried the headline “Alleged Beating of Undercover Cop Probed.” It was a brief account—289 words long—reporting that the department was looking into the possibility that “an undercover police officer was beaten by other officers at the height of a chase following a shooting last week.”

Mike read the story carefully. He noticed a mistake right away; he worked in plainclothes and wasn’t an “undercover” cop. The mistake didn’t matter at this point. What mattered was this was the first public disclosure that Mike had been a casualty in what so far had been heralded in the media coverage as a night of sterling police work.

Mike read on: “Officer Michael Cox, 29, a member of the Anti–Gang Violence Unit, suffered kidney damage and head wounds in the Jan. 25 incident, which occurred as police pursued four suspects for a shooting at a Roxbury eatery, sources said.”

The department’s spokesman was quoted as saying, “This is serious.”

Mike found himself thinking about the crank calls. He could hear the caller’s voice in his head and it made him feel queasy. The calls were clearly connected to the story. He might be reading the story for the first time at midmorning, but Mike knew that cops working the overnight shift often grabbed the two morning papers, the
Herald
and the
Boston Globe.

The caller, Mike decided, was not random, a nobody—he was a cop who’d read in the
Herald
that the department had started looking into the beating and that Mike was talking. He would never be able to prove it, but he knew it in his bones. Mike felt a panic. The newspaper story followed by the middle-of-the-night “Fuck you.” Juxtapose the two, and Mike knew the call was a warning: Keep your mouth shut.

The story itself presented another puzzle for Mike. In it, police sources were quoted saying they were trying to sort out what happened. One was quoted saying Mike “remembers being in pursuit, he remembers being struck, and that’s all he remembers. Obviously something happened. But if he doesn’t tell us, how are we going to know?”

If he doesn’t tell us, how are we going to know?
Mike reread the quotation. It was absurd, he thought, flat-out absurd—the notion only he had the key to the truth.

Then came this: “We have no official complaint yet. Michael has not come in and said he was beaten up.”

No official complaint?
thought Mike. The notion that police investigated violent assaults only after the victim filed a formal complaint was flat-out absurd. “Hogwash,” Mike said. The department was making it sound like the ball was in his court—to both pursue the case and solve it.

None of this sounded good to Mike. The story in the city’s other daily newspaper, the
Boston Globe
, only added to his anxiety. Like the
Herald
, the story reported police officials were “trying to determine how plainclothes officer Michael Cox was injured in the line of duty last week.” But comments by the spokesman were, once again, misleading if not outright false. “We’re not sure—he’s not sure—how he was injured.”

Mike was confounded. The two newspaper stories were like a punch in the stomach. The way he read them, the message was at best mixed. Officials were saying his injuries were serious but they didn’t know how he got hurt. They were flummoxed.

Then came this: “There is no assumption of any wrongdoing yet.”

No assumption of wrongdoing?
Mike couldn’t get past that line. It was nine days since he’d been beaten, and everybody knew he’d been beaten—mistakenly, perhaps, but he was beaten, and the beating was overkill, a case study of excessive force.

“Everybody and their mother knew about it,” Mike said. Yet there it was, officials telling the public, “There is no assumption of any wrongdoing.” This did not sound like a department determined to get to the bottom of the beating of one cop by other cops.

For the first time, Mike wondered what was going on. One thing, he had not heard anything directly from the police commissioner. Paul Evans had not visited the house or called to ask how Mike was doing. Evans had not issued any clear signal inside the department that the brutal beating broke all the rules—written or unwritten—for which he was demanding accountability. In the newspaper stories, Evans was not even quoted; he’d let his spokesman handle what was at once a deadly serious matter and a potentially huge embarrassment for the police. The commissioner was certainly busy with other ongoing embarrassments—most notably the botched drug raid that had left an elderly Dorchester minister dead. The day after Mike’s beating, Evans had had to stand before the reporters to announce the suspension of one lieutenant and reprimands of two supervisors. Then, after announcing the disciplinary measures, Evans faced criticism he’d done “too little, too late.” Meanwhile, lawyers for the city and the minister’s widow were locked in sometimes nasty negotiations to settle her wrongful death claim.

The commissioner apparently did not have time for Mike Cox. And his remoteness, along with his spokesman’s wishy-washy comments, stood in sharp relief to all the public concern about police brutality fifty miles down the road in Providence, Rhode Island. The videotape showing an officer kicking a black man in the stomach during a melee after a concert was a big, ongoing story. The police chief had gone public with his concern and condemnation of the apparent misconduct, and he was soon joined by the city’s mayor, Vincent “Buddy” Cianci. “Let the chips fall where they may,” Cianci told reporters. “We will not tolerate excessive force. We will not tolerate any brutality.”

When the stories about Mike ran in the
Herald
and
Globe
, Mike’s family jumped all over them. They saw the stories as clear-cut evidence supporting the point they’d been making—the police department was in cover-up mode. They said, We told you so, Mike, you have to do something! Then lawyers began calling the house, despite the unlisted number, to discuss with Mike the possibility of legal action. “I was amazed about how many people had my phone number,” he said. Mike was appalled by the unsolicited calls. No, he said, despite his family’s protestations. No. Even if he’d begun to wonder.

His family persisted. To make them happy, Mike agreed to meet with an attorney one of his sisters had come across on her own. His name was Stephen Roach, a forty-five-year-old civil trial attorney. Roach had just struck out on his own, teaming up with another lawyer to start his own firm downtown. He had been practicing law for just over a decade, competently but without fanfare. He was not well-known in the halls of power or in the media as one of the city’s go-to lawyers who could make things happen in the corridors of justice. In Boston, it was always said that personal connections and who you knew mattered—in business, in politics, and in law. Roach was not a member of this elite club of insiders.

Roach was originally from the town of Houlton in northeast Maine along the Canadian border. He came to Boston to attend Boston College, graduating in 1973, and began studying law in Boston at Suffolk University Law School in the fall of 1979. Roach apparently liked a full plate; he held a full-time job while attending law school. He was intense and indefatigable and, once he got a taste of law school, displayed a streak of feisty litigiousness. The year he began law school, Roach and his roommate got into a beef with their landlord. The bathroom ceiling leaked. Pieces of rotted wood and plaster came loose and fell on them. The landlord ignored their demands to fix it, so Roach sued him. He brought a small claims action in the city’s housing court, seeking reimbursement for $750 in rent. He and his roommate won. The landlord appealed, and the two sides negotiated a settlement for $400. It was the kind of landlord dispute most tenants only grouse about. Not Stephen Roach. For him, bring it on.

Roach showed up at the Coxes’ on Supple Road in Dorchester in early February. The meeting did not last long. “I just wanted him to leave as fast as possible,” Mike said. “It was like, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. I have a headache. Can you please leave?’” Mike had met with Roach mainly to placate his family, but the meeting did last long enough for Mike to realize Roach was an outsider. “He knew nothing about the Boston police,” Mike said. “He had not worked for them, and he didn’t seem to be part of that culture.”