The Fence - Dick Lehr [118]
By early in 1997, Smut Brown found himself a part-time job in a manufacturing plant. He also resumed what he knew best—selling cocaine. In February, he was arrested by Boston police and charged with dealing coke and pot. He made bail. The FBI came around Mattie’s house in Mattapan looking for him, but Smut wasn’t home. Bob Sheketoff then called and explained Ted Merritt wanted him to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the Cox beating. But first, Sheketoff said, Merritt wanted to meet. “I was reluctant,” Smut said. “I was telling him I didn’t want to be in the middle of that. I was like, you know, I’m out here on the street and, you know, I don’t want to be going against the police, man, because I’m nobody. Who’s going to believe me?”
Sheketoff urged him to tell Merritt what he’d been telling him for a couple of years. Smut thought it over. He talked to his mother and Indira and decided to talk. “I thought it was right,” Smut said. But he had other reasons for cooperating. The first had to do with his ill-will toward the Boston police. “In my own way it was like getting back at them for what they did to me. I’m not gonna sit here and say I wasn’t bitter.” Finally, there was Mike Cox. He respected Cox. “He always treated me fair.”
The next month, he and Sheketoff showed up at Merritt’s office. Besides Merritt, the lead investigator, an FBI agent named Kimberly McAllister was there. Smut told the feds what he saw in the seconds after he scaled the fence and before he took off on foot. He described Cox—who, at the time, Smut thought was Marquis—getting beaten. He identified Dave Williams as one of the beaters.
Then Smut said that standing next to the melee was a “tall, white guy.”
Tall, white guy?
Yeah, Smut said. Tall, white guy—standing there by the beating.
Did he know the cop’s name?
No, Smut said.
Ever see him before?
No, Smut said. Except he was the same cop who arrested me.
Merritt was eager to get Smut Brown before the grand jury.
Kenny Conley was half asleep in the living room of his second-floor apartment in South Boston. His tall, muscular frame was stretched out on the couch. It was Wednesday, March 26, raining outside, and Kenny was trying to get some rest after his overnight shift. There was a loud bang at the door.
He scrambled up off the couch. He’d been living in the second-floor walk-up at 720 East Seventh Street for only a couple of months. The triple-decker was owned by his twin sister Kris’s boyfriend’s brother. It sounded complicated, but that was Southie. Couldn’t beat the friendly rental. Kenny was also feeling good about something else in his life—Jennifer Gay. He had been seeing Jen, pretty, petite, and brown-haired, since they met during Octoberfest on the waterfront. It was getting serious. For her work as a nursing home administrator, she’d moved during the winter to the town of Lee in western Massachusetts, but they were spending most weekends together in Boston.
Kenny pulled open the front door. The landing did not get much natural light and was a bit dark. Standing there were a woman and a man, both well-dressed.
The woman identified herself as Kimberly McAllister of the FBI.
We’d like to speak with you, she said. We think you can help us with a case we’re investigating.
Sure, Kenny said. Come on in.
CHAPTER 15
The Perjury Trap
Five months later in New York City, the police assault of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was the talk of the nation. Louima had been arrested following a disturbance outside a nightclub on August 9, 1997. Taken to the 70th Precinct station house in Brooklyn, he was beaten and sodomized in the bathroom by a patrol officer named Justin Volpe. Volpe kicked and pummeled Louima, and then, with Louima’s hands cuffed behind his back, shoved a plunger up his rectum. By month’s end, thousands of demonstrators were protesting outside city hall and the precinct station as part of a march