The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (8 page)

The Conley homestead was only 3.8 miles from where Mike Cox and his family were living in Roxbury—but the two neighborhoods were a world apart. Southie was overwhelmingly white and Irish—and had been since after the Civil War when the first wave of Irish immigrants moved into the area.

In the other three-decker apartments and row houses surrounding the Conleys lived families much like their own, where the breadwinners mainly worked in the trades, the public utilities, Gillette, “the T,” or the police and fire departments. The median family income when Kenny was a toddler was $11,200 annually, and the majority of grown-ups never went to college. It was blue-collar through and through.

In the beginning, meaning back to the American Revolution, the grassy and hilly peninsula jutting into Boston Harbor was ideal for grazing livestock. In March 1776, the Colonial forces, led by General George Washington, used it as a base from which to drive the British out of Boston. By the early 1800s, South Boston formally became part of Boston, connected to the downtown by the new Dover Street Bridge.

Given its geography—nearby but separate and isolated—Southie became a convenient location to build the city’s prisons, hospitals for the mentally ill, and poorhouses. Iron foundries, machine shops, and shipyards on the waterfront all sprang up.

The potato famine from 1845 to 1850 that devastated Ireland triggered a massive exodus to the city, first to the tenements of the North End and then, in the decades following the Civil War, to Southie. The Irish eagerly took jobs in shipbuilding and along the waterfront unloading freight ships. The women traveled across the bridge where they cleaned the homes of the Brahmins on Beacon Hill. Life revolved around work, family, and the many new Catholic churches opening throughout a neighborhood that was only 3.1 square miles. In time, it was said that Southie was a “state of mind.”

“For those born and raised there, South Boston was a warm, friendly, comfortable community where people knew one another, shared the same values, enjoyed the same pastimes, and were safe from outside contacts and alien influences,” wrote the historian Thomas H. O’Connor, a history professor at Boston College. “Southie pride” became a powerful force embedded in the clannish, tight-knit neighborhood—an us-versus-them mentality between the neighborhood and the rest of the city, or world for that matter.

Kenny Conley quickly came to embody that pride and the neighborhood’s cultural emphasis on staying put rather than breaking away. “I did see myself growing old, sitting right down here, in South Boston. I’ve always said, and I think it’s the sentiment of everyone around here, Why leave God’s country?” From early on, in addition to working as a police officer, he’d say his dream was to marry and have a family. And his idea of making it was to find a house in the densely built neighborhood that actually had a garage and a driveway. “You know, something I could take a snowblower to.”

Kenny was nine years old when his parents realized their own dream and became Southie homeowners. His father paid $10,000 in cash for 78 H Street—the third in a cluster of six row houses they could see around the corner from their apartment. The house had white aluminum siding with black trim. There were four bedrooms—two on the second floor and two on the third—and two bathrooms, a luxury for a neighborhood where a single bath was the norm. The Conleys closed on the house on November 3, 1977, but could not move in. No one had lived in the house for years, and the inside was a wreck. “We did a total gut job,” said Kris, Kenny’s twin sister. They made the move three months later, just before the Blizzard of ’78, the nor’easter that dumped more than twenty-seven inches of snow on the city between the morning of February 6 and the next night. The renovation was not finished and the interior was always a work-in-progress. This was because Maureen Conley decorated the house herself, and then she’d do it over again.

Kenny’s bedroom was on the third floor at the top of the stairs. It had a sliding French door opening into a brown-paneled room his parents had carpeted wall-to-wall with navy-blue carpet. His mother chose a color scheme of red, white, and blue, and everything was matching. She decorated the room with ceramics she and her girlfriends made at a local shop.

The second bathroom was on Kenny’s floor. It had a rear window opening onto the second-floor roof. His parents stored an eight-foot ladder on it, and during the summer they’d climb out the bathroom window and use the ladder to get to the third-floor roof. They kept folding chairs up there for sunbathing. To the north, there was a view of the sprawling Edison utility plant and the shipping terminals along the waterfront. To the south was a steeple from the Catholic church on the next block.

The family room, or den, was in front on the second floor overlooking H Street. This was where the kids hung out, where the large TV console was stationed, where Maureen was at her most imaginative. One wall featured a fake fireplace that, when turned on, made crackling sounds and flickered with phony flames. “The room had a country feel,” Kris said. “It sounds tacky and crazy, but it worked.”

The move to 78 H Street was hardly a big one for Kenny, his two sisters, and their parents—just around the corner from the apartment on East Fourth. They now faced the side of the telephone company building instead of looking out onto Tar Hill, the parking lot behind the building. But there was one key difference—their stretch of H Street was atop one of Southie’s hills. Looking south on a clear day, Kenny was able to glimpse the ocean waters of Old Harbor off Carson Beach, the main beach in Southie.

The corner at H and Fourth Streets, along with the next corner—H and Fifth—defined Kenny Conley’s universe. “Nothing’s changed since I lived here,” he once said while standing on H Street as a grown man. As a little boy Kenny made friends who then became friends for life. His best friend, Michael Doyle, lived on East Fourth in a house located between Kenny’s old apartment and his new house. “In front of his mother we called him Mike, but 90 percent of the time he was just Doyle,” said Kenny.

Kenny, Doyle, the other Mike—Mike Caputo—and other pals turned the corner of H and Fifth into their own Fenway Park for wiffleball. Using the same kid ingenuity that had led to sledding down Tar Hill, they made the four street corners the bases. Home plate was located at the southwest corner—which meant hitters drove the wiffleball slightly uphill and upwind. Games were interrupted by passing cars almost always occupied by a neighbor or relative. Between games they’d take a break and wander into the variety store at the northwest street corner (third base). The store, where Kenny’s parents often sent him to buy bread or milk, was owned by Mike Caputo’s parents. Kenny usually bought a Pepsi and Reese’s peanut butter cup.

The boys owned the corner—a hangout after school and during the summers. In the ninth grade, Kenny scribbled an ode to his friends and their place inside the closet door in his bedroom. It read: “H + Fifth…#1.” Under that, Kenny then drew a shamrock and wrote “Southie” underneath the shamrock, and then he wrote his friends’ names.

Sports were king. Kenny and his friends played wiffleball, baseball, pickup football, just about any game they could come up with. Lots of kids in Southie laced up ice skates and became hockey players at the neighborhood rink, but Kenny never caught the hockey bug. Right away, his favorite game was basketball. He was always tall for his age, an advantage Kenny had right into adulthood, when he topped six feet and kept going.

But his height did not necessarily mean Kenny was the hot player everyone wanted when it came to choosing up sides. “I wasn’t usually the first pick,” he said. Kenny was not what was called a “skill player.” He wasn’t a fancy passer or ball handler whose slick moves faked and fooled players on the other team. He didn’t possess a sweet shot, either beneath the hoop or from far away. Kenny was the opposite of finesse. “My game?” he once asked rhetorically. “I don’t got game.” He joked: “I’m not known for anything except for standing there.” His game was physical, rugged, and without nuance. He pulled down rebounds. In fact, his game mirrored his personality—straight-ahead and no bull. There was never anything slick about Kenny Conley. On and off the court, what you saw was what you got—a hardworking, unpretentious kid without a shred of guile.

Kenny played most of his basketball one block away from his house in the second-floor gym of the Gate of Heaven Church. The brick church was built in 1863 during a period when the Irish immigrant population was exploding and spreading east across Southie toward City Point. Kenny practically lived in the hall, playing basketball year after year in the church’s Catholic Youth Organization, or CYO, league. He was ten years old when a young priest named Father Kevin Toomey came to Gate of Heaven. Father Toomey ran the CYO programs, and he became a mentor to Kenny and his friends who hung out at “Gatie.” Father Toomey drove the boys to their away basketball games. For a couple of years when Kenny, Mike Doyle, Brendan Flynn, and Bobby McGrail were teenagers, they picked up $10 each from the father for “breaking down the hall” after Bingo Night and getting it ready for Saturday CYO basketball. The boys worked late, and Father Toomey often came by to check on them. He would sometimes toss around a football to break up the monotony of folding tables and chairs at midnight. “He kept us straight,” Kenny said. When Kenny was a high school senior in 1987, he was awarded the parish’s Catholic Youth of the Year Award, and a plaque inscribed with his name was hung in the Gatie gym. The winner the year before was his best friend, Mike Doyle.

Kenny had everything he wanted within a five-minute walk from his house—his friends, school, church, the Gatie gym, the playing field at the corner of H and Fifth Streets, and the Italian cold-cut grinders at Mike Caputo’s parents’ variety store. His boyhood was simultaneously unexciting and fulfilling. “I just did what I was supposed to do,” he said. His horizon expanded a bit when he and his friends got their drivers’ licenses. “We’d drive to Castle Island to Sully’s,” he said, “which has the best hot dogs in the world.” It was a comment at once serious and comic. Castle Island in Boston Harbor, just off City Point, was connected to Southie by a causeway. In 1970, when Kenny was two years old, the island and the fort built on it during Colonial times were placed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was only about a mile from Kenny’s house. But to a boy on H Street, the five-minute drive there seemed really far away.

It wasn’t as if Kenny never left Southie. In the summers, his mom took him and his sisters to the Cape. They’d pile into the station wagon and visit Peg O’Brien at her cottage, nicknamed “Grump’s Stump.” They often went on weekend and vacation trips with their mother’s friends—Peg, Twinkie, Nancy, and Arlene. The kids swam and played while the mothers enjoyed “mothers’ medicine,” frozen lime juice and vodka.

The Conleys traveled to Disney World in Orlando, Florida, when Kenny and Kris were eight years old, and they drove another time to Niagara Falls, where they splurged and stayed at a Sheraton hotel. During summers they sometimes drove seventy miles north to York Beach, Maine, and stayed at the Sands Motel with its large swimming pool. During school vacations, families assembled at spots like The Elms, a ski resort in Manchester, New Hampshire, or the Brickyard, another skiing area in New Hampshire, where Kenny broke his leg when he was twelve.

The one dark shadow was his father’s drinking. “It was never really a problem at home or on vacations,” Kris said. “But if my parents argued it was about Dad’s drinking and his being out and carrying on.” Kenny’s father had a rough-and-tumble look about him; he was a heavy smoker with tattoos on his forearm; later, he shaved his head and had an earring in one ear. After working all day driving trucks he would hang out in the bars. “You knew when he was drinking, but he was never doing it around the house,” Kris said. Their mother wouldn’t let him. Over time, the tensions got the better of the couple. The marriage broke down for good soon after Kenny and Kris graduated from high school. Maureen and Ken never divorced, but they never lived together again. And it was during this troubled time that Maureen started drinking heavily. “I knew it was a problem when I saw her drinking at home,” Kris said. She saw it as her mother’s “mid-life crisis.” “She was always a doer, but now she had no kids to tend to, she was upset about the marriage, she had this freedom and was unhappy.”

Maureen had been working for some time as a waitress at the Park Plaza Hotel. She’d gone back to work when the twins were in the fifth grade. Having taken her role as a stay-at-home mother so seriously, she actually asked the eleven-year-old twins Kenny and Kris for their permission. “She explained we would only be home alone for about thirty to forty-five minutes between the time we got home from school and when she got home from work,” Kris said. “She was all concerned, but we thought it was great.” They’d go wild during the brief but daily stay of parenting. “We’d have these blow-out fights,” Kris said. But the shenanigans ceased once they heard their mom pushing open the big front door.

When it came to school, Kenny Conley—along with Mike Cox in Roxbury and Smut Brown in Mattapan—was a child of busing, the court-ordered remedy to desegregate Boston’s public school system. None of the three boys was ever directly in the line of fire. Their parents joined the legions of Boston parents who, during the busing era, avoided the tumultuous public schools and sent their kids elsewhere. Mike Cox was sent to St. Mary’s School in the neighboring city of Brookline, Smut Brown was enrolled in the METCO program and bused to the affluent Boston suburb of Wellesley, and Kenny Conley attended one of the Catholic parochial schools not far from home.

Kenny considered himself a “Gatie,” and the Gate of Heaven School was right around the corner, but he and his sister attended elementary school at St. Peter’s. The brick Catholic parish school with the tiny asphalt playground was located on Sixth Street, a “commute” of three blocks from Kenny’s house. He attended St. Peter’s because Cheryl had gone there and his parents liked it. The school was grades one to eight. Kenny’s classmates were the same year after year—another stitch in Southie’s tight-knit way of life. “Each grade was about thirty-five kids, and I basically went through with the same kids.”