The Fence - Dick Lehr [105]
Then Joe Teahan and Gary Ryan invoked their rights against self-incrimination—a move that confused and surprised Peabody. He’d not suspected either in the beating—indeed, they’d attended to Mike—but once they joined Burgio and Daley as the only officers taking the Fifth, he was tantalized and began thinking they had information. “They might have heard something. I wanted to get that.” He sought immunity for both—a court order protecting them from prosecution in exchange for their testimony. But once under oath, Teahan and Ryan had nothing helpful to say; they said they’d arrived after the beating. Peabody was flummoxed. “I thought, ‘What? We went through all this for nothing?’” He realized he should not have immunized Teahan and Ryan without a proffer—a preview of what they had. “That was just also a learning curve for me.”
For all the effort, his investigation had not only failed to advance the case but it actually turned up less than Internal Affairs. Richie Walker, for one, was in full retreat. He’d told Jim Hussey he’d seen another officer running after Mike toward the fence. When Walker met with Farrahar, he described briefly seeing Mike run toward the fence, but made no mention of seeing anyone behind Mike.
With Jim Hussey, Walker had said Mike’s beating was the talk of the Roxbury station house later that night. With Farrahar, Walker flat-out denied anyone later discussed the beating. Walker was asked: “Did you have any conversation with either Officer Daley or Officer Jones or Sergeant Thomas in regards to the injuries that Michael Cox sustained?” “No, sir,” Walker replied. “I just asked how is he doing.” Peabody, unable to study any of the IA records, had no way of knowing about Walker’s about-face. Walker was like so many of the other witnesses he’d questioned; he saw nothing.
The grand jury also never heard from Bobby Dwan. Dwan told Hussey he’d seen two uniformed Boston cops, one white and one black, in a commotion by the fence. He said when he arrived he’d seen both Teahan and Ryan moving about the dead end. But Peabody and his investigators never interviewed Bobby or Kenny Conley. Both would have cooperated had they been summoned, but the summons never came. For his part, Kenny had put the contentious end to his last session with Hussey behind him. He wasn’t the sort who brooded. He’d resumed his life’s routines—his night shifts in the South End, his basketball playing. Kenny certainly heard the same rumors everyone was hearing—about Burgio and the others—but he wasn’t paying much attention. It didn’t involve him. “I pretty much forgot about it.”
Somehow, Kenny and Bobby had fallen through the investigation’s crack; Peabody did not realize Kenny and Bobby were at the dead end. He was not allowed access to their interviews with Internal Affairs, and he also apparently never received their written reports. “We somehow didn’t get our hands on that,” Peabody said later. The presence of Kenny and Bobby at Woodruff Way, Peabody said, “never came up.”
It all meant Peabody had less to work with, and by the time of his face-off with Williams on Friday, December 1, he’d lost the zip and confidence he’d started with. Sunday evening from his home, he typed an e-mail to Ralph Martin. The session with Williams, he told his boss, was “not what I hoped for.”
Peabody continued, “He stood his ground when confronted with damaging statements he supposedly made to others who have testified. He flatly denied yelling, ‘Stop, he’s a cop!’ when Cox was getting hit and denied telling Craig Jones later that night, ‘I think my partner hit your partner.’”
Williams, wrote Peabody, “said he saw and did nothing