The Fence - Dick Lehr [111]
“We’ve sort of run out of gas.”
While Bob Peabody was realizing a year into the investigation that he was spinning his wheels, his colleagues happened to be on the losing end of a courtroom battle against another Boston police officer accused of corruption. The cop had been charged with stealing $6,352 in cash from a wallet a civilian turned in to police after finding it on the lobby floor of her apartment building. The officer insisted he had not stolen the money. He’d left the wallet on the counter, he said, and while he was attending to another matter, an unidentified man came into the station and took the cash. The officer certainly seemed caught in a bind prior to the trial—trouble of his own making. Investigators uncovered two incident reports he’d written. The first recorded receipt of the wallet, the $6,352, a Hermès watch, and an airline boarding pass. The second, replacing the first, mentioned a wallet, the watch, and the boarding pass—but no cash. Taking the stand to defend himself, the officer testified he wrote the second report not because he stole the money but to cover up the embarrassment of leaving the wallet on the counter. He was guilty of a lie, not larceny. The jury agreed, and, on a Friday in late April, the officer was acquitted.
The media called the verdict a “stinging defeat to Suffolk County prosecutors,” a reference to Ralph Martin’s losing track record against Boston cops suspected of wrongdoing. Earlier that year, a judge had thrown out the case charging a cop with raping a prostitute with a nasty public rebuke, and now this losing trial verdict. Not surprisingly, Tom Drechsler represented the cops in both cases, the lawyer of choice for cops in trouble. Jimmy Burgio’s attorney was fast establishing himself as Martin’s nemesis.
In the weeks following this latest setback, Martin entered into discussions with the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston about federal prosecutors taking over the Cox investigation. Peabody had not been able to uncover the kind of evidence he believed necessary to convict cops responsible for Mike’s injuries. Bob Peabody needed eyewitnesses. “We didn’t have anybody saying, ‘It was him, it was him, it was him.’” It was no longer enough to build a circumstantial case, not in the hothouse atmosphere of cop cases. “You want slam-dunk evidence,” Peabody said. “We certainly didn’t have it.”
Having come up empty, Peabody began directing his focus elsewhere. He was assigned to prosecute an electrician charged with involuntary manslaughter after three children died in a house fire sparked by the electrician’s faulty wiring. It was a complicated case, and Peabody started preparing for the trial in early January, when he would argue that the electrician’s work in a basement apartment was so atrocious and careless he should be held criminally responsible. Peabody’s career also took an important turn. Working alongside federal prosecutors in the Charlestown “code of silence” racketeering case, he’d made a strong impression. He was offered a job as an assistant U.S. attorney and would be leaving Martin’s office.
Nonetheless, Bob Peabody continued to chase a lead or two in the Cox case. One involved the municipal police officers. He got word one munie was overheard telling another, “You shouldn’t have hit him so hard.” He conducted interviews, but decided quickly the line was locker room banter. “Gallows humor,” he said. The remainder of 1996 was mainly about preparing for the electrician’s trial—his last as an assistant district attorney—and boxing up his Cox files for federal prosecutors. Maybe the feds would have better luck breaking down the police culture and getting cops to talk.
To help out the U.S. attorney’s office, Peabody typed up a four-page, single-spaced memo, “Status of Cox Investigation.” It was a confidential summary of the failed grand jury investigation. “This investigation is stalled,” he wrote. He covered Mike’s beating and then described