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By Root 1235 0

It seemed even when he lost, he won. He got the result of the last excessive force case pending against him, the one involving teenager Valdir Fernandes, who claimed to Internal Affairs and in a lawsuit that Williams slapped him around on his porch. Williams learned he’d been found guilty of physically abusing the teenager. Two officers had backed Williams, brazenly submitting reports that were virtually identical, except for signatures and a few token changes in wording and grammar. But there was a glitch; the identical accounts didn’t quiet line up with Williams’s. The two noted that Williams, after the boy spit near him, “grabbed Valdir above the jacket.” Williams, in his report, never mentioned touching the boy at all. The discrepancy was enough for the Internal Affairs investigator to rule that Dave Williams’s account was “less credible” than the boy’s. Making matters worse were the photographs of the boy showing “bruises consistent with being slapped in the face.”

For once it looked bad. But appearances were deceiving. Once again, even an adverse result proved much ado about nothing. No disciplinary action was taken against Williams, and, eventually, the city paid Valdir Fernandes $7,000 in a settlement to end the lawsuit against the police.

Two months after making the Hail Mary proposal to his boss, Bob Peabody got his wish in early 1996 to take a final run at Dave Williams. He and Lieutenant Detective Paul Farrahar arrived at Williams’s lawyer’s office, located in a building near Quincy Market, the popular shopping area in the shadow of the elevated Southeast Expressway that cut through Boston’s downtown, on a gray February day.

Waiting in a windowless conference room was Williams and his attorney, Carol S. Ball. Peabody had known Ball for years; she was a former assistant district attorney and he’d long admired her feisty, high-energy advocacy. “I could talk to her and vice versa, and so I asked for this audience.” The meeting had come together quickly. Ball had been named to the bench and would soon leave her practice to become a Superior Court judge. She would have to quit representing Williams—and, for that matter, all her clients.

The ground rules were simple: The session was unofficial and off the record. Peabody’s hope was to persuade Williams to come around. He and Farrahar decided beforehand to do the “good cop, bad cop thing,” with Peabody playing the role of bad cop. His approach would be: “C’mon, Dave, here’s your chance. Tell us what happened. I think you know more. I think you saw more.”

The prosecutor began by explaining why he’d asked for the meeting. He told Williams his story about chasing Marquis Evans was contradicted by two other police officers. He urged Williams to “come clean rather than protect his partner that night.”

But Williams was unmoved. “He was terse,” Peabody said later. “He’s a big man. I’m a big man, too, but I’m not as big as he is, not as wide. He just said, ‘That’s all I know.’” It was as if Williams was saying: You’re not intimidating me with your hardball stuff.

Peabody quickly saw the last-ditch tactic was a bust. “We weren’t getting anywhere,” he said. “I just couldn’t crack him.” Reluctantly, he threw in the towel.

“It was a short meeting.”

Peabody’s last hope was Ian Daley, who initially struggled and asked Jimmy Rattigan for advice about what to do, but then clammed up. Like Jimmy Burgio, Daley invoked the Fifth Amendment when summoned to meet with Anti-Corruption investigators during the summertime. But by early March 1996, Peabody was talking with Daley’s lawyer, trying to turn Daley into a cooperating witness. Peabody believed Daley had had a “ringside seat” at the dead end and, if Peabody could flip him, Daley would make an ideal witness.

Peabody and Daley’s attorney, a former local prosecutor named Tom Hoopes, went back and forth. Hoopes was a seasoned practitioner. Before making any deal, he wanted Peabody to reveal the evidence gathered against his client. He demanded that Peabody actually let him read the transcripts of the secret grand jury testimony.