The Fence - Dick Lehr [138]
From Smut’s point of view, he’d gotten nothing but trouble for testifying. The Conley trial had left him confused, the way his testimony was twisted, but the big picture wasn’t his concern; to the contrary, he wanted to get in and get out. Keep it as simple as possible. He didn’t even want anyone knowing about his involvement. “I gotta live on the street,” he said, “and I don’t want people seeing me with the police and they thinking that I’m doing something that I have no business doing, and I end up getting found dead somewhere.” If not for giving his word he would have told Craig and Mike he was done with Woodruff Way. But he’d told Bob Sheketoff he would do the right thing, and he was going to finish what he’d promised. Yeah, yeah, Smut said. “I’m gonna be there.”
By the year of the trials—Kenny’s trial for perjury and Mike’s upcoming civil rights trial—the Boston media had finally ended its Big Sleep and was following the Cox scandal extensively. Columnists and editorial writers at the city’s two major newspapers, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, joined the news coverage with increasingly pointed commentary about the failure of Police Commissioner Evans and other law enforcement officials to break through the blue wall to bring the beaters to justice.
For his part, Evans demonstrated a keen interest in public opinion. Following a series of police screw-ups, ranging from the tragic death of the retired black minister during a mistaken drug raid to the uncovering by the Globe of years of corruption by two veteran officers, Walter “Mitty” Robinson and Kenny Acerra, he wrote an op-ed piece in the Globe heralding his new public integrity and anti-corruption initiatives. He said the inference in media coverage that his administration was not interested in rooting out wrongdoing was unfair. “This impression cannot be allowed to go unaddressed.”
Not long afterward, he went on the public relations offensive to counter the Globe’s ongoing investigation into Boston police misconduct. For a meeting at the newspaper’s headquarters with editors and reporters, Evans brought along data showing a statistical improvement in the department’s self-policing. “One thing I feel strongly about is that we have to clean up our own problems,” he told the roomful of journalists.
Then, in the wake of another Globe exposé in late 1997 about testilying, Evans joined court officials and Ralph Martin, the district attorney for Suffolk County, to announce a crackdown on police perjury that could result in botched trials, wrongful convictions, and few repercussions for officers caught lying. They unveiled a new reporting system by which judges who suspected an officer was lying would notify police and prosecutors for a follow-up inquiry. The plan seemed a step forward and made for a great sound bite. But the talk was more stunt than substance. “I honestly don’t remember anything about this,” Ralph Martin said years after the much-ballyhooed reform was first announced. It turned out the reporting system was never implemented.
By the fall of 1998, the Globe’s editorial writer Larry Harmon, who specialized in criminal justice matters, was leading the growing view that Evans and all the other law enforcement agencies had mucked up the Cox case—a tragic comedy of errors and lack of will that hit a new low with the criminal conviction of Kenny Conley. “The US attorney is supposed to squeeze witnesses and send tough messages about the fate of any officer who commits perjury or tries to cover up knowledge of a crime. But he is supposed to squeeze the right people,” read the Globe editorial of October 10, 1998.
Then came the dart aimed at the police commissioner. “While Conley readies for prison, at least three Boston police officers who likely have greater knowledge of the case—James Burgio, David Williams and Ian Daley—remain on the