The Fence - Dick Lehr [113]
While preparing for trial, Sheketoff sometimes found it hard to focus solely on the murder. The reason was the Cox beating. It may have been ancillary, but the beating was like a giant elephant in the room. He thought he’d seen it all. “Maybe this is too cynical, but I don’t think there’s anything particularly unusual about police beating up suspects, you know, going overboard.” But Cox was different. “What’s hard to comprehend,” he said, “is when it turns out it was a police officer who was almost killed, but the police solidarity is such that no matter how old, how young, male, female, black, white, the police officers—they all keep quiet about what happened. That’s scary.”
Smut added to Sheketoff’s curiosity about the beating. From the time of his arrest, Smut told his public defender and then Sheketoff about witnessing the cop pile-on. “Long before the trial, I knew from Robert that he had seen the beating.”
The murder trial began on October 28, an overcast, 60-degree day, with the jury taking a bus ride to see the crime scene at Walaikum’s and travel the more than ten miles of the chase through Roxbury into Mattapan, and ending at the dead end of Woodruff Way. The restaurant was so cramped jurors were taken inside in three groups of five, five, and six. Throughout, the prosecutor served as tour guide, pointing out relevant sites—the locations, for example, where the men tossed the guns out of the Lexus during the car chase. When they reached the dead end, he urged jurors to study the layout. Looking around, Sheketoff, for one, was brought up short. “Wow, this is pretty small,” he said. He found himself wondering again about Mike Cox. “I couldn’t imagine how a couple dozen cops were there, and no one saw what happened?” He didn’t buy it.
The next day Lyle’s mother, Mama Janet, took the witness stand—the first of twenty-six witnesses who testified during the eleven-day trial. It was a good call by the DA to start with her. She vividly brought back to life for the jury the murder victim, her twenty-two-year-old son, the father of a five-year-old-boy, working at a department store and trying his best to make his way in the world. She described how she got a telephone call in the middle of the night and ran around the corner to Walaikum’s, where Lyle, riddled with bullets, was being loaded into an ambulance. Her son died six days later.
While the prosecutor was trying all four men as participating in a joint venture, he still had to settle on two as the actual shooters. From the witnesses police had assembled, he concluded the gunmen were Tiny and Marquis Evans. The proof came mostly from the one witness the DA’s office determined was most reliable—a twenty-eight-year-old Jamaican named Alton Clarke. Clarke had been a constable in Jamaica prior to moving to Boston. Clarke had told police he saw two gunmen run from the restaurant and climb into the Lexus. He said they climbed into the car’s front seats. The two shooters, therefore, were the driver and front-seat passenger—and that meant brothers Tiny and Marquis.
Smut was surely helped by Clarke’s testimony; for starters, Clarke got it right and wasn’t calling Smut one of the two shooters. But it got even better. Clarke went on to say that when the two gunmen jumped into the Lexus, he saw the other two men—namely Smut and Boogie-Down—were already in the backseats.
Sheketoff was delighted. In fact, Sheketoff learned prior to trial that the government had only one witness to argue Smut was part of a murderous joint venture, a friend of Lyle’s who claimed Smut pointed out Lyle Jackson seconds before the shooting started.
Marcello Holliday began by telling the jury he and Lyle socialized at the Cortee’s Lounge to “mess with women,” where he drank “one or two beers.” They headed to Walaikum’s after closing time. He said he saw Smut huddled with the Evans brothers and then overheard