The Fence - Dick Lehr [121]
“You saw him go up the fence and get down on the other side?”
“Yes,” Kenny said.
“And where did you make these observations from?”
“As I was running towards him.”
Merritt then loaded up and asked Kenny a set of rapid-fire questions about Mike Cox: Did you see “another individual” running after Smut Brown? Did you see “anyone else in plainclothes” right behind Brown? Did you see an officer in plainclothes at the fence “standing there, trying to grab” Brown as the suspect scrambled over the fence?
To every question, Kenny said: “No, I did not.” Openly and politely, he answered everything Merritt threw at him—to a fault. Merritt, finishing up, masterfully baited Kenny with a hypothetical question incorporating information he was gathering from others about the events at the fence: “If these other things that I’ve been describing, a second—another plainclothes officer chasing him and actually grabbing him as he went to the top of the fence, you would have seen that if it happened?”
Kenny, without hesitation, said, “I think I would have seen that.”
It was the kind of exchange that makes any prosecutor’s list of greatest moments. A more sophisticated witness would know to avoid this sort of hypothetical question that was like a bed of leaves concealing a steel trap. But Kenny was being Kenny—ever-helpful, straightforward, and even naive. Yeah, if Mike Cox was hard on Brown’s heels and grabbing at Brown at the fence, I think I would have seen that.
Kenny hadn’t seen Mike, but Merritt, in that quick repartee, had finessed it so that Kenny had concurred with the very argument Merritt was planning to use to prosecute him: Kenny Conley himself says he would have seen Mike Cox if Cox and Brown were at the fence together; ergo, dear jury, the fact that Conley denies seeing Cox means Conley is lying! Case closed.
Next to losing his mother, the federal indictment on perjury charges was the worst day in Kenny’s life. He was immediately suspended without pay from the force. The department seized his badge and gun. But while he tumbled into an emotional free-fall, his two sisters and close friends rallied the only way they knew how.
The tickets—about the size of a business card—began selling early in November. Poster-sized versions appeared in storefronts around the neighborhood, one-by-two-foot slabs of cardboard announcing, “A Time for a Friend.” The party was scheduled for Friday night, November 28, nearly three years to the day from the death of Kenny’s mother. The ticket promised a “DJ” and “Raffles” and requested a donation. Kenny first learned about the fund-raiser when he spotted a poster in Java House, the shop on East Broadway around the corner from his family’s house on H Street, where most mornings he grabbed a light coffee. Then, as the end of November approached, a flier circulated in his old district station, where Kenny was now officially persona non grata. “Let’s Go Folks!” the flier began. “Ken Conley Time.” The date was included, along with the names of the contact persons: “McDonald, Mags or Hopkins.” Danny McDonald had been Kenny’s partner, except for the night he rode with Bobby Dwan. Billy Malaguti was a veteran cop and union representative. Tommy Hopkins was one of Kenny’s pals.
Kenny had specifically told his twin sister, Kris; his sister Cheryl and her husband, John; as well as his boyhood pal and fellow cop Mike Doyle, that he did not want a party. He didn’t want to be the center of attention; he was ashamed about the fix he was in and just wanted to hide. But that was like asking them to deny their roots. Holding a “time” for a friend was the Southie way; it was in their DNA.
The night after Thanksgiving,