The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (24 page)

For Mike, this was good. Roach didn’t owe anyone anything. “He seemed like a safe outlet.” On his own, Mike had privately begun to question the low-key nature of the department’s response. Maybe his family was on the right track. Maybe the “grace period” was not so much time to allow the wrongdoers to step up as to enable a cover-up to take root. Maybe the delay was to see whether Mike was going to push this thing; if Mike didn’t, then maybe the debacle at the dead end just goes away.

Then there came a second call several nights later, followed by a third. “Virtually every night,” Mike said. Sometimes the caller didn’t say a word, other times the caller screamed, and other times he yelled, “Fuck you.” Sometimes Mike lifted the receiver and left it on the floor. “An hour later I might put the phone back, and ten minutes after that the phone would ring.” Mike became convinced the caller was a cop using blunt force—the linguistic equivalent to a nightstick or flashlight—to keep him down and silent. But if that was the intent, the harassing calls worked to an opposite effect on Mike: as a wake-up call from his deep slumber.

“It helped me to focus,” Mike said. “This was
not
just gonna go away.”

By the second week of February, investigators for Internal Affairs were working in earnest—an effort that began only after the initial newspaper accounts about Mike ran on February 3. The news stories might have been circumspect, but they had signaled the word was out. The department could no longer put off pursuing a formal look at the incident—and the first order of business was a sit-down with Mike Cox.

Mike arrived at police headquarters in downtown Boston late in the afternoon of February 9 and rode the elevator to the fourth-floor offices of Internal Affairs. For the division, the Cox case—officially known as Case #2795—was hardly standard stuff. When it came in, for example, investigators were checking out an officer who’d failed to report for duty on New Year’s Day and apparently never called in sick. In another new case, investigators were sorting out who did what in a car accident involving a police officer and a retired city resident. The retiree complained the officer, while writing out a ticket, was abusive, yelling, “Fuck” and “Fuck you” at her.

In contrast, Mike’s case was the kind of complicated and radioactive mess few investigators would want to touch—and, in the end, it was handed off to a relatively inexperienced investigator. Sergeant Detective Luis Cruz had only worked in the division for about a year. But it wasn’t only his short service that stood out. Cruz had his mind elsewhere. The ambitious officer was wrapping up law school and looking to graduate in June. He also had been trying to get out of Internal Affairs. He wanted to work at the police academy training recruits. With a transfer imminent, Cruz nonetheless took the helm.

Mike’s interview marked his first formal talk with investigators. His appearance actually may have surprised those in the department hoping Mike’s fifteen days of silence signified he was going to do nothing. Indeed, Mike had been fielding regularly what he interpreted as messages to go this route. Some were crude—the crank telephone calls at night, for example. Others seemed more subtle. More than once, Mike listened while someone he knew on the force shared a story about being mistakenly roughed up by other cops. One was a fellow officer in the gang unit named Fred Waggett. “He had been hit with a baton before,” Mike said. “The guy apologized and he let it go.” Mike liked Waggett and was not offended by what he took as the theme to Waggett’s first-person tale: Silence is golden. “He was giving advice he thought was legitimate,” Mike said, “and he was sincere in how he thought I should handle the situation.”

The truth was no one really knew what to expect from Mike Cox in the aftermath of the beating. He was a quiet man who guarded his privacy. Few on the force knew him besides his partner, Craig. Mike might have liked it that way, but the privacy came with a price. Indeed, going back to when he was a boy, his reticence was often misinterpreted. When Mike sat mute while his adviser at Milton Academy accused him of smoking pot, the adviser confidently took Mike’s failure to speak up as confirmation. Now fifteen years later, Mike’s silent ways were still being misconstrued. Colleagues who came to see him thought his low profile meant he was going to sit tight.

The week before the sit-down, for example, the department had issued a press release announcing Mike’s promotion to sergeant—along with sixty other new sergeants, twenty lieutenants, and eight captains. Even though the promotion was long in the works, Mike immediately heard talk that the promotion was his payoff for not being pushy. “The rumor was they’re gonna take care of me, not to worry.” Mike should not have been surprised by rumors based on false interpretations of his silence, but he was.

“I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’”

In fact, Mike’s showing up at headquarters to see Sergeant Detective Cruz did not constitute a turnabout of any kind. He’d always wanted accountability—and nothing less. If he’d said little to anyone about his expectations, it was due to his nature and his injuries; headaches, for one, plagued him. The start of the Internal Affairs probe—however belated—was a good sign to him. Two weeks had gone by, and the offenders had had their chance to come clean. It was time for Internal Affairs to turn up the heat. “I had family members telling me nothing would happen, but I was sure they would get to the bottom of it,” Mike said. “I believed that wholeheartedly.”

The interview with Cruz was taped. Mike’s recollection about what happened to him at the fence was still scant, but he tried his best to be helpful. He was adamant about some points and wrong about others. In the report he wrote for the interview, for example, he asserted clearly the ice-fall story was fiction. “I did not slip on ice or any other substance.” But he incorrectly told Cruz that when he first ran from his cruiser toward the fence, he was chasing Smut Brown and a second suspect. The mistake was one Mike was never able to resolve; a faulty memory told him he’d run after two suspects.

Mike provided other new information—bits and pieces of the night’s events that were slowly returning to him in the two weeks since he’d been home recuperating. He recalled that before he lost consciousness a white man wearing black boots kicked him in the face. He couldn’t describe the man’s features, however, or recall whether he was in uniform. “It’s possible that I might later on remember.” For now, that was it.

Mike offered one other new lead—another moment that had come back to him. He described standing, blood-soaked, behind a police cruiser, when “I see a black officer.” The officer, he recalled, was yelling and trying to arrest him. He wore a uniform and had a slim build. “I know he’s smaller than me,” Mike told the investigator, but that was all he came up with.

The taped interview ended at 5:15
P.M
. It had not lasted even thirty minutes. Mike still suffered from huge gaps in his memory. But even if he could not identify any of his assailants, he felt he had provided investigators with some good leads about one of the men who’d beaten him and about another officer who then tried to arrest him. Mike promised to pass along any other details—if and when they came back to him. The short interview left him feeling exhausted. Mike headed home to rest.

The next week, Mike ventured out to attend the ceremony honoring the eighty-nine newly promoted officers. During the event, Police Commissioner Paul Evans spoke to Mike for the first time since the beating. The private conversation amounted to a pep talk. Evans asked how Mike was feeling and encouraged him to get better so he could return to work soon. He told Mike not to worry about the “incident” and that “he would take care of it.” They were encouraging words that Mike wanted to believe.

But it wasn’t so clear whether the case was a high priority to Evans yet—or ever would be. Three weeks had now passed, and Evans had still not spoken out publicly about the beating. He’d certainly had the chance. The ceremony itself presented the latest opportunity. It coincided with Evans’s first anniversary as “Boston’s top cop,” and the local newspapers used the occasion to write stories recapping his first year. In interviews with the
Boston Globe
and
Boston Herald
, the commissioner talked about the highs and lows. On the positive side, he noted the streets were safer as a result in a sharp drop in the city’s crime rate, a decline he credited to putting more cops on patrol and forging alliances with neighborhood and religious leaders. The low point, he then said, was the death of the retired minister Accelyne Williams during a botched drug raid in Dorchester—a senseless tragedy that had been a headline story throughout the year.

Noticeable by its absence was any mention of Mike Cox. The Cox beating—one of the worst cases of police brutality in modern times—was a senseless assault that so far had only barely made the news, and the commissioner wasn’t drawing attention to it.

It was important for Mike to attend the ceremony, but it wasn’t easy. He didn’t want to talk to anyone about the beating, and he felt people were staring at him. Some even seemed to be avoiding him. But Mike was proud of making sergeant, a rank he’d earned. The police world was still his world. And he knew others who’d won promotions. Mike was glad for them too. Diana Green, for one, also made sergeant. Mike had gotten to know “Dee” Green on the job working in Roxbury and Mattapan. She was originally from the South and had overcome a lot—childhood scoliosis as well as her father’s accidental death—to become one of the top performers on the anti-crime unit. Like Mike’s anti-gang unit, the assignment was elite, high-powered, and high-pressured. Dee Green was popular, a big-hearted cop who, following the beating, sought Mike out and suggested, gingerly, that talking with a therapist might be helpful. “I don’t really believe in that kind of stuff,” Mike said. But Mike appreciated her interest and considered Green a trusted friend on the force. Going to the ceremony was a chance to see her and others whose police work he respected.

The February 14 ceremony actually turned out to be one of the few times Mike had left his house for something other than an appointment with either his primary care physicians or any number of specialists. Mike continued to see a battery of doctors for his headaches, fatigue, dizziness, and unsteady gait. He saw a neurologist for his “post-traumatic amnesia,” and his doctors had another MRI done of his brain that, fortunately, “did not suggest intracranial bleeding or contusion.” Concern about his “left flank discomfort” and “persistent hematuria,” or blood in his urine, resulted in more blood tests and new examinations to assess possible damage. The day after his promotion to sergeant became official, Mike was on his back in another medical office while a urologist inserted a thin instrument called a cystoscope into his urethra and carefully pushed it up into his bladder. It was invasive, but the cystoscope allowed the doctor to look directly into his bladder into areas that typically did not show up well on X-rays. The procedure did not reveal any abnormalities in his bladder, urethra, or prostrate—which was good news. The bad news was Mike began peeing bright red blood and felt pain; the cystoscopy had caused a urinary tract infection. To his daily high dose of Tylenol and other medications, the doctor added antibiotics. It sometimes felt to Mike that he was still getting beat up.

One weekday near the end of February, Mike was walking down the hall at the police academy complex located in the city’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He might have been off the street due to his injuries, but that didn’t mean he was off the job entirely. Newly promoted officers had to attend classes. “I was still required while I was out injured to go to the police academy for superior officer training,” he said. It wasn’t heavy lifting, and Mike found time to go “in between doctor appointments.”

It was late morning, and Mike was headed toward the cafeteria.

“Hey, Mike, how are you doing?”

Mike looked up to see who was talking to him. He saw a black officer walking out of the cafeteria. “Mike,” the officer repeated, “how you doing?”

Mike studied the officer, but drew a blank. The man stood a good six inches shorter than Mike. He had a slim build. The face looked vaguely familiar, and he was certainly acting friendly enough. But Mike could not place him.

“What’s your name?” Mike asked.

“Ian,” the officer replied.

“Ian what?”

“Ian Daley, sir.”

It didn’t help. The name meant nothing.

The exchange ended awkwardly. Mike headed home. He worried he was supposed to know the officer but was unable to because of his clouded memory. Then at home that night he thought more about the encounter and experienced an epiphany. He realized suddenly where he’d seen the officer named Ian Daley.

“It came to me about his face,” he said. Daley, he realized, was the officer who’d tried to arrest him at Woodruff Way after he’d been beaten. It was as if Mike’s heart skipped a beat—he’d solved a piece of the puzzle that muddled his mind. He needed to contact Internal Affairs. They’d surely want to follow up on his breakthrough.

CHAPTER 11

Can I Talk to My Lawyer?

W
hen investigators for the Internal Affairs Division of the Boston Police Department sat across from police officer Ian Daley on the morning of March 2, much of the nation was riveted by the daily Court TV broadcasts of the trial of O. J. Simpson, the former football star charged with the murder of his ex-wife and her friend. It was the most highly publicized trial ever—all day with O.J.—with nearly 24/7 coverage. Meanwhile, in Boston, the police probe into the beating of Mike Cox was a local matter unfolding in quiet and secrecy, with barely a mention in the media.

The investigators set up in IA’s interview room on the fourth floor of police headquarters, located on Berkeley Street a few blocks from the Public Garden in downtown Boston. The small room looked out onto a narrow side street and a Bertucci’s pizza restaurant down the way. The lead investigator, Sergeant Detective Luis Cruz, was joined by Lieutenant Detective Jim Hussey. Hussey was in the process of taking over the inquiry from Cruz, who would soon be off the case with his transfer to the police academy.