The Fence - Dick Lehr [116]
During the meeting with Peabody, Ted Merritt and his investigators were given a quick rundown of the stymied investigation. The targets were identified—Jimmy Burgio, Dave Williams, and Ian Daley—as was the theory that Mike Cox was assaulted by at least one and possibly three cops. In the big leagues that belonged to the “feds,” the main strategy to break a logjam was to find a cop to “squeeze.” Best case scenario: This cop was on the periphery of the crime and either had witnessed or possessed information about the actual wrongdoers. Once identified, the feds would then go after the cop, apply their considerable legal muscle so that he suddenly faced a choice: Either get hurt by the government or cooperate. The pitch went something like this: We don’t want to hurt you; we want your cooperation. But if you don’t cooperate, we will hurt you. “This is how they work,” one veteran Boston defense attorney said. “They target people, they give them bad choices, and they hope they choose Team America.” In the end, the witness was a stepping-stone, a pawn in a larger prosecutorial game.
Paul Newman once starred in a film showcasing this classic federal strategy. The 1981 film, which also starred Sally Field as a newspaper reporter, was Absence of Malice. In it, a fictitious federal prosecutor named Elliott Rosen, based in Miami, is under intense pressure to solve the mob hit of a union boss. Rosen decides Newman, playing a liquor distributor and the son of a deceased crime figure, must know—or could find out—something. He puts the squeeze on Newman, having FBI agents tail him and IRS agents scour his books looking for something to pressure Newman into cooperating. Even though it’s bogus, Rosen then leaks to reporter Sally Field that Newman is the subject of a federal investigation into the murder. Rosen hopes Newman, feeling his life might be in danger from others in the underworld, will come around. But Newman knows nothing—has, in short, nothing to trade—and he spends the movie working his way out from under the intense federal scrutiny and exacting revenge against the corrupt Rosen.
Ted Merritt was no Elliott Rosen. (Rosen’s corrupt practices included having FBI agents illegally bug Newman’s telephones.) But, like Rosen, Merritt was inheriting a big case in the unsolved beating of Mike Cox, a case where every other investigator had come up short. The Cox investigation was no different, either, from the standard operating procedure. Find a cop to squeeze. The question was: Which cop?
During the fall, Merritt and his investigators began combing through all the files and transcripts from prior probes. They had everything, including early reports filed to the police department’s Internal Affairs Division, which had been off-limits to Bob Peabody. It was during this process of carefully reading their way into the case that they came across some of the material Peabody never had—namely, the incident reports originally filed on March 3, 1995, by Kenny Conley and Bobby Dwan. Merritt was fascinated by Conley’s. In particular, Merritt focused on where Conley described chasing Smut Brown: “I then observed a black male, about 5' 8" in height, wearing a brown leather jacket, who I observed exit the suspect’s motor vehicle from the right side, climb over a fence. With the suspect in view, I jumped over the fence and after a lengthy foot pursuit, I was able to apprehend the suspect in the rear of a building.”
To Merritt, it surely felt like a discovery—a diamond in the rough. Here was a cop saying he scaled the fence where Cox was beaten. Conley must have seen something. It only made sense. Yet nearly two years had passed since Conley’s report to Internal Affairs, and no one had pursued the matter further with him. Conley never even took credit for arresting Brown—that went to Richie Walker. It all seemed odd. Cops usually wrestled for credit. Was Conley hiding something?
It would be early 1997 before Merritt’s investigation was going at full speed, but Kenny Conley had high potential. The Conley report vaulted