The Fence - Dick Lehr [122]
Besides friends, plenty of off-duty cops were in attendance. Bobby Dwan, for one, was there. So too were a few sergeants who were Kenny’s patrol supervisors. Cops who knew Kenny and, like Bobby Dwan, knew Kenny was a straight-shooter. But Kenny also realized there were cops showing up, cops he didn’t know very well, who assumed he was lying about Woodruff Way to protect fellow officers. Kenny got that feeling when some came over to offer a thank-you with a knowing wink and a nod. But, said Kenny, they were wrong to think that about his grand jury testimony. “I was telling the truth. I was not going to risk my career and family. I was just getting started with Jen.”
It led to awkward moments. Kenny was standing in the hall drinking a beer, talking with friends, when a hand came up and over his back from the crowd behind him. Kenny grabbed the hand. “I didn’t know who the hell I was shaking hands with,” he said. He turned to look and froze. “It was him.” Jimmy Burgio was pumping his hand. Kenny walked away, “pissed off, I would say.” And Burgio wasn’t the only unwelcome guest. Dave Williams showed up, but as soon as word got around among Kenny’s friends, he was asked to leave. The cold shoulder was hardly the stuff of a one-for-all-and-all-for-one.
Kenny would go back and forth in the months afterward on whether the party was a lousy idea. Celebrating a cop accused of perjury and obstruction of justice certainly looked bad. But he could not fault what was at its core—family support. “Maybe it was bad timing, but it was out of the kindness of these people, getting together. No one was thinking about the politics of it.” Kenny couldn’t worry about appearances. Besides, the party did serve its purpose. It buoyed his spirits, knowing his family and his many friends from the old neighborhood believed him, even if federal prosecutors, the FBI, and the Boston police brass did not. And over time, the grassroots support for Kenny continued to spread. Stickers appeared on car bumpers, and signs were propped in the windows of homes around Southie: “Justice for Kenny Conley.”
But no matter what Kenny believed in his heart, the “time”—a standing-room-only affair that ran deep into the night—proved a public relations disaster. The party played right into Merritt’s theory that Kenny was standing tall for his brothers in blue; now fellow cops were rewarding him by turning out in a show of support. The media bought into this notion of the party as a symbol for the sinister side of police solidarity. Tipped off, a team of Boston Globe reporters staked out the hall, and, as part of what amounted to the first in-depth report by the city’s media about the unsolved Cox beating, the newspaper ran a photograph artfully capturing a police cruiser and a throng of men entering the hall. The story, examining the failure to solve the assault, was headlined: “Boston Police Turn Against One of Their Own: Years After Beating, Officer Has Seen No Help from Colleagues.” Echoing Merritt, the message was clear: If Kenny Conley agreed that he had been in a position to see Cox but insisted he didn’t, then Conley must be lying.
Once Mike’s lawyer, Steve Roach, caught wind of Merritt’s new twist in the investigation, he added Kenny Conley as a defendant to Mike’s lawsuit, joining Jimmy Burgio, Dave Williams,