The Fence - Dick Lehr [127]
Why risk it? Merritt was looking foremost to squeeze Kenny Conley. He’d rather have Kenny fold than actually take him to trial. But if Kenny was determined to stonewall, Merritt was going all-out, a full-court press. For that, Merritt had secured from Smut the evidence he needed, a circular but nonetheless compelling inference that sounded like Smut was directly fingering Kenny. There was “no prosecutorial purpose” to trying to verify Smut’s account with a photo array. It was useful as it was: a virtual identification. “For the purposes of the case, that was sufficient,” Merritt said later.
Seeking the truth apparently wasn’t deemed necessary.
Smut Brown warily made his way down the third-floor corridor of the federal courthouse, flanked by Indira and his mother, Mattie. They were looking for Courtroom 11. Finding it, they sat on a wooden bench outside. It was Friday, June 5, 1998, the fourth day in the perjury trial of the United States of America v. Kenneth M. Conley. Outside, the midmorning weather was comfortable, with partly cloudy skies and temperatures in the high 60s. Inside, the windowless hallway was stuffy and stale. With a new $225 million U.S. District Courthouse due to open in September on the South Boston waterfront, majestically overlooking Boston Harbor, the government wasn’t much interested in the upkeep of the old and worn-out, landlocked facility.
Smut looked around, sizing up the other people hanging out in the hallway. Friend or foe? He was outside his turf; it was as if he’d wandered into a Roxbury or Mattapan neighborhood where he wasn’t welcome, controlled by a street gang he had no ties to.
He’d promised to testify, but that didn’t mean he was happy about it. He was convinced Boston cops were after him for cooperating in the Cox case. Soon after testifying at Merritt’s grand jury, he was busted for selling coke at a Sunoco gas station in Dorchester. He’d driven his red Nissan Maxima to meet a buyer who’d beeped him. Unfortunately for Smut, cops were conducting a stakeout. Initially they thought Smut was his younger brother. Smut was taken in, booked, and put in a holding cell. That’s when things got screwy. Figuring out who he was, one of the arresting officers confronted him. The officer acted as if discovering he’d busted Smut Brown had made his day. “He said to me, ‘You ain’t nothin’ but a piece of shit,’” Smut said. The cop then stuck his hand in the rear pocket of Smut’s pants and, after fiddling around, magically pulled out a plastic bag of crack cocaine. Oh, look what we have here! More evidence!
Eventually, Bob Sheketoff exposed the fact that police had planted the drugs on his client. During the suppression hearing in court, the lawyer vented his frustration. “This case does make me want to make speeches,” he told the judge. “Twenty Boston police officers at the scene of an ‘attempted murder’ of another Boston police officer, and the only one that will speak up and say anything about it is a drug-dealing, car-stealing citizen who, the second he speaks up and says anything about it, finds himself with one problem after another with the Boston police department.” The judge brushed aside the lawyer’s rant, saying it was unnecessary for him to decide the motive for the police misconduct and that the wrongdoing was what mattered. The judge ruled the crack cocaine was inadmissible, and, with that, the case against Smut fizzled.
Smut was left thinking, however, that he wore a bull’s-eye on his back. He sat in the courthouse, slated to be the third witness