The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (24 page)

I got back to my office after three weeks away, and I could feel some kind of undercurrent, an odd sense that things were not what they had been when I'd left. Kay Leary's desk was right outside the commissioner's office, and occasionally, when voices were raised, she could hear some of what was going on inside. It was her distinct impression that some of the superintendents had been ganging up on me, using the
Boston
magazine article as ammunition.

The long knives were out.

I HAD OFFENDED BOSTON POLICE DEPARTMENT SENSIBILITIES. IN MOST ORGA
nizations, you'd want a guy with the ambition and drive to become a leader. Not in the BPD of the early 1980s. I was too brash, too arrogant. I'd made my ambition clear and for all the world to see. “My personal goal is to become police commissioner” got translated within the department as “I am going to be the next police commissioner.” No one in the history of the department had ever said that out loud.

The Boston Police Department was steeped in Boston Irish culture. Irish Alzheimer's: You forget everything except the grudges.

Joe Jordan was coming to the end of his term. He had a hidden drinking problem that would soon become very public, and with a mayoral campaign around the corner, it was unlikely that he would accept reappointment. The people standing in line for his job sure as hell didn't want a thirty-four-year-old kid around. They weren't getting any younger, and I could be commissioner for a long time. And worse, I was one of those di Grazia whiz-kid types. In my capacity as superintendent, they'd had a taste of what it would be like to work under me, and they didn't relish the thought.

Ever since the
Boston
magazine article had come out, Jordan's cronies had hammered him day in and day out: You've got to get rid of this kid, he's killing you.

Rising quickly in your profession is a universal career goal, but one of the negatives about getting ahead at an early age is that you don't acquire the instincts that come with experience. I had not been around long enough to appreciate the level or intensity of the plotting.

Mary and I lived in a nice split-level house in the bedroom community of Canton. I was on vacation not long after coming back from PERF, outside on a hot day, pulling up weeds in the yard, when Mary came out and said Lieutenant Donald Devine, my staff assistant, was on the phone.

“Super,” he said, “do you know anything about an Inspector of Bureaus position?”

“No. What are you talking about?”

“Well, there's a car in the back alley of headquarters, an old, beat-up, marked cruiser, and it's marked ‘Inspector of Bureaus.’ Supposedly, it's going to be your car.”

“What?!”

“Yeah. The rumbles around here are that you're being transferred.”

I thanked Donald for the heads-up. My mind was spinning. What do I do? Who do I call? I called Dunleavy over at City Hall. I told him what I'd heard and said, “What's going on?”

“I don't know,” he told me. “Let me find out.”

A short time later, Dunleavy called back and said Jordan was planning to move me. They were creating this position, Inspector of Bureaus, so I'd keep my rank, but I was out of there. The car was meant as an intentional slight. When Eddie Connolly and John Doyle were transferred, each was given the trappings of power, an unmarked car and a driver. (In the department, an unmarked car was a status symbol.) The fact that I was being given a marked car, and a clunker, was meant to embarrass me. Jack Geagan, one of the conspirators, had jumped the gun by having it sent over early. They were playing hardball again. They intended to bury me.

I started wheeling and dealing to save my neck. Dunleavy said he was talking to George Regan, who was feeling bad for having arranged the magazine article, and that Regan was talking me up to the mayor. From a media perspective, how would it look for the public face of the department, the superintendent who embodied its renewed energy and youth and whom the press liked and supported, to take this fall? Dunleavy and Regan apparently convinced the mayor that it wouldn't play well, and Mayor White decided to put his arm around me.

I was still out as executive superintendent. But to give my new position more substance and to make it seem like a lateral transfer, I was also made
liaison to the city's various community groups dealing with minority and gay issues.

When my vacation ended, I went back to my office and was notified that the commissioner wanted to see me. I went next door into his office. Jordan was kind of rocking in his chair, his unlit pipe in his hand.

“I suppose you know what I want to see you about,” he said.

“Yeah, word's out.”

“It's just reached a point where it's causing too much friction up here. The other superintendents feel they can't get along with you. To bring some order to this organization, I think it's important that I move you.” He pointed to the chair he was sitting on. “I can't have you lusting after this seat.”

I didn't say anything. This was his show.

“Well, I'm sorry it didn't work out,” he said. “As you know, I'm going to be reassigning you as inspector of bureaus. Your office will be down in District A.”

“Thank you, Commissioner,” I answered. “I'll attempt to serve you well in that position.” Then I left.

What a difference a day makes. I had moved from the plush offices of the sixth-floor police headquarters to a small corner office on the fifth floor of one of the city's police districts, with no secretary and a five-year-old car. Mine was the only office on the floor—the rest of the space was used for locker rooms. Instead of plain clothes, I was back in uniform. Message to the organization: Bratton's dead.

The next day, I started packing up. Bob O'Toole, Kay Leary, and a bunch of cops from District 4 volunteered to help me move my furniture, my Billy Board, my potted plants, and all my memorabilia, including a collection of hats from each of my police jobs, over to District A. We ended up getting silly, laughing like crazy, and having a miniparty.

I packed my sign, “Youth and skill will win out every time over age and treachery.” Boy, was I wrong. Their plotting and intriguing had certainly paid off. Jack Geagan moved up from superintendent of labor relations into Frank Coleman's job as chief of the Bureau of Field Services; Geagan now ran all field operations. Coleman moved into my position as executive superintendent and eventually to a five-star post as superintendent-in-chief.

I was miserable, but my friends in the department did everything they could to soften the blow. Bobby O'Toole had been a motorcycle cop on the Tactical Patrol Force, and through his friends at the auto shop took that old
clunker and made it into the best-looking car in the department. It came back looking like it came off the showroom floor. It was an in-your-face gesture to the guys who'd moved me out, and in a time of pain, a gesture of real friendship I appreciated tremendously.

But O'Toole paid for it. Joe Jordan asked him, in essence, to take a loyalty oath. He was brought into the commissioner's office in front of Coleman, Geagan, and DiNatale, and told, “Things are going to change here. We know you've been very friendly with Bratton, and we want to know how that is going to affect you.” O'Toole said, “If you're asking me if I will do my job, I will continue to do my job. The position of police commissioner, no matter who is in there—whether it's you or a monkey—I will honor that position. If you're asking me to now say, ‘Bill Bratton is out and I will have nothing to do with him, I don't like the guy anymore,’ no, that's wrong. I'll do whatever I can to help him. I'll do it on my own time.”

Jordan was very straight with him. “Why don't you take a day off,” said the commissioner, “and we'll notify you where you're going.”

They sent O'Toole to the Police Academy. Coleman called Al Sweeney, who was director of the academy, and said O'Toole was to have no contact with the recruits. He wasn't to teach a class. They were basically sending him down there to be an errand boy.

We were laughing when I piled the rest of my things into my shiny marked car and headed home. We were laughing, but we were hurting.

Jordan, Geagan, and Coleman were in the commissioner's office looking out the window. Kay Leary heard Coleman say, “I hope when my time comes to go, I can do it with as much class as he's doing it.”

It was front-page news in all the Boston papers. The police department's number-two whiz kid was out on his ear. Maybe it seemed classy to the guys on the sixth floor, but no matter how calm a face I put on it, to me it was a complete humiliation.

At age thirty-four, I felt my career was over. My dream to become commissioner of the Boston police was finished. It had been made clear to me that I had enemies, and as long as these men were in power I had no significant place in the department. My whole life, my entire vision of my future had been wrapped up in the Boston Police Department, and the men who ran it didn't want me around. I didn't know whether I could stay, and I really didn't know where I could go.

I wasn't the first guy in the history of the department to get pushed aside. The internal politics were fierce, and you had to be good at it to survive. I'd been accused of being Machiavellian, but I probably wasn't
Machiavellian enough. I had seen some of my peers in similar situations, and they had lain down and died. All I'd ever wanted to be was a cop, and I decided not to let these guys kill me.

Joe Jordan had done me one favor; I was out of power, but I still had my rank. I stayed visible, I stayed active, I did my job. I tried to remain gracious in the face of humiliation and to keep on going. Out in the field, the troops liked me, and I listened to them and tried to make whatever changes I could. I used my experiences with the Boston-Fenway Program and with the gay community in District 4 to respond to minority and gay communities during a summer I hoped would turn out to be long but not hot.

I got an interesting call from Jim O'Leary, the newly appointed general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA). He had come into his position in an unusual way. While in his previous MBTA job, he had received an envelope containing $10,000 in cash. It was intended for the general manager, Barry Locke, and had been delivered to O'Leary by mistake. O'Leary went to the state attorney general, Frank Bellotti, and in the investigation that followed, Locke was indicted for graft. Massachusetts had just elected a new governor, Michael Dukakis, who was interested in transportation issues, and O'Leary, because he was such an honest guy, was named the MBTA's new general manager.

O'Leary then set about rebuilding the transit authority with Dukakis's aggressive support. The new governor rode the Green Line trolley from his home in Brookline to the State House every day, calling when he got there about any deficiencies, such as graffiti, he had noticed along the way.

O'Leary invited me to lunch at the St. Botolph Restaurant. “I understand fully what went on over there,” he told me, “and it doesn't diminish what I think you're capable of doing.” The MBTA police were a mess, he said. They were taking constant hits in the paper, with news headlines such as “Terror Trains” and a
Globe
series on police incompetence. He had to get rid of the guy who was in there and make some changes. Would I be interested?

I'd thought my career was over, and here was a good man tossing me a life raft. I thanked him and said yes, definitely.

“I have a lot to do,” he told me, “but I'll get back to you.”

Months went by, and I didn't hear from him. Meanwhile, after four months in abject exile in the wilderness of my fifth-floor office, in the fall I was brought back to headquarters, to the sixth floor, as the new superintendent in charge of labor relations. I'd like to think it was because they recognized my talents, I'd like to think it was because they needed me
back, but in reality it was to use me as the point man arguing the case for one-officer cars, a continuing residue of Proposition 2½ and the reduced size of the BPD. This was not going to be a popular position with the rank and file, and neither Coleman nor Geagan wanted to be out front on it. I'd been the fall guy in closing all the police stations and laying off the cops, so they passed it on to me.

The union, the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association (BPPA), was not happy with my return. They remembered my serving on the rules and regulations committee against their wishes when I was a police officer, and as one of the hotshot whiz kids developing accountability systems for Dunleavy and Wasserman. Most particularly, they remembered my being the voice of the BPD laying off five hundred of their members. Now, I was going to argue the case for one-officer cars.

The cabal of superintendents certainly broke Machiavelli's first rule of police politics: If you're going to kill somebody, kill him. If you're moving people, don't put them where they can come back and haunt you. I consciously turned what could have been a continuing embarrassment into a plus by involving myself wholeheartedly in the union world. I had no background in union issues, and union president Bob Guiney and legendary BPPA attorney Frank McGee were formidable adversaries. But the union's view was an important perspective for a police manager to acquire. Ultimately, one-officer cars were approved for the department.

There was an added symbolic bonus—I was back in the big house. My new office was right next door to the commissioner's. I got the unmarked car. I was working in plain clothes instead of uniform. Symbols are important in policing, and once again I had all the symbols and trappings of power.

A few months after we won the one-officer car battle, they transferred me to the Operations Division. They wanted to straighten out the 911 system. I went upstairs to the Turret and worked with a large unit of civilians and police officers.

O'Leary called. “I'm ready to make the move. Are you still interested?”

I wasn't sure. I'd gotten back into the department game and was slowly regaining power within the organization. I was enjoying the challenge, and I was working creatively. I was feeling pretty good. Who knows, maybe I could still get to be commissioner. They hadn't killed me, they'd wounded me, and now I was recuperating. The Boston Police Department had been my life's work. The idea of taking over the sixty-five-person MBTA Police wasn't as appealing as it had been a few months before. I stalled for time with O'Leary and told him I'd get back to him.