The Fence - Dick Lehr [135]
It was unbelievable to Mike, the glares he’d gotten from the off-duty cops in the courtroom while he testified at Kenny Conley’s trial, the cold shoulders he got when walking the halls of police headquarters. When he supervised a detail of officers working a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, he got looks from some of the cops under his command. He’d overhear bits of their muffled talk. “He’s the one,” or, another time, “That’s the one, Cox.” Mike used to like doing the games; he’d work an average of about four a month. But no more. Even though the Sox, led by their ace, Pedro Martinez, opened the 1998 season on fire, going 18–8 in April, Mike quit signing up for the Fenway Park details. They made him too uncomfortable.
His wife and family wanted him to quit. One sister-in-law living in Michigan who worked at the Ford Motor Company mentioned she could help him find work with the automobile giant; a sister who worked at Gillette headquarters in South Boston said the company often hired former police officers in corporate security; the father of one of his son’s teammates on a youth baseball team was a senior executive at Fidelity, and he offered to help land him a position with the financial services company. In police circles, he was approached about joining the Massachusetts State Police or the FBI. Each time Mike said, No, thank you. His dream about police work in Boston may have been shattered, but he wasn’t going to walk off the job. First, he needed the paycheck—he had three kids and a wife just starting a medical career—and while he couldn’t quite explain it or say it made sense, he felt “being a police officer I’m also a lot safer.”
So Mike stayed on, although his work performance was on a steady decline. He struggled to keep up with the cases assigned to him in the Internal Affairs Division, and he was regularly apologizing, he said, “for lagging behind.” It wasn’t just the stress and distraction of the looming civil rights case; persistent headaches dogged him, and he had trouble concentrating. It seemed to take forever to write up his reports. Looking for relief, he was taking daily doses of Duradrin, a powerful prescription painkiller for migraines. By the summer, Jim Hussey, his boss, decided to lighten his workload.
When one of his mentors tried to recruit him to apply for an opening in the homicide unit—to work on a new squad looking to solve cold cases involving the street gangs—Mike said no way. The old Mike would have jumped at the choice assignment, but he’d decided he couldn’t work again on the frontlines. “It has to do with my ability to trust the individuals that I work with,” he said. “Trusting people with my life.” Too much had happened, and he avoided police officers and police talk. “I’m not the person you would want to hang out and be around if you want to improve your career.”
He was looking to lower his profile, not raise it. Instead of the prestigious homicide unit, he expressed interest in an opening in an obscure, pencil-pushing unit within the IA division—the audits and review section. “They go around and do audits of the drug unit, the seized money section, the tow log,” Mike said. It was the antithesis of the old Mike to prefer paper over street action. The audit section was buried inside a division that was already isolated from mainstream policing. But that was its very appeal. “It involved, I’d say, less contact with police officers and their supervisors, less people,” Mike said. “More isolated.” Mike was trying his best to be the invisible man.
Not all the calls to the house after the Conley conviction were hateful. Jim Hussey checked in to see how Mike was holding up. He wasn’t surprised by Mike’s reticence. “He’s not a man of many words,” Hussey said later. The two chatted, and Hussey said he wanted to resume surveillance of Mike’s house for a few days. Hussey was well aware of the crank calls and other harassment, and he wanted to take “all precautions necessary, just in case there was a loose cannon out there.” Hussey was hoping to