The Fence - Dick Lehr [154]
Epilogue
Following the verdict, the spotlight turned from the individual officers to Police Commissioner Paul Evans and Boston Mayor Tom Menino. Based on Judge Young’s plan for Mike’s civil rights action, a second trial against the department and the city was scheduled to start in early 1999.
The court of public opinion was now fully behind Mike. Leading the charge was Brian McGrory, a popular metro columnist in the Boston Globe, who decried the city’s determination “to do battle with the decorated cop it failed to help, in a civil trial scheduled to begin next month.”
In one column McGrory wrote: “There is a single, significant difference between the brutal beating of Michael Cox in Mattapan by a group of Boston police officers and the savagery committed against Rodney King on a Los Angeles highway in 1991: a videotape.
“Picture the consequences if a neighbor at the end of Woodruff Way stepped outside with a camera in those pre-dawn hours of Jan. 25, 1995, to record a group of cops kicking and pummeling Cox as he rolled into a fetal position on the frozen ground.
“CNN would have replayed the tape at the top of each hour for days, highlighting the horrific twist that the victim was, in fact, a plainclothes Boston police detective mistaken for a suspect. A blue-ribbon commission would have been named to address the brutality within the Boston force. Shouts for sweeping reform would have echoed across the political landscape.
“Instead, the quiet rustling coming from the city government is the sound of Mayor Thomas M. Menino and Commissioner Paul Evans seeking cover from controversy.”
Menino and Evans soon changed course. In early February, their lawyers worked out a settlement with Mike’s attorneys. There would be no trial—no opportunity for jurors to consider whether Menino and Evans condoned a police culture that turned a blind eye to police brutality and lying. The city would pay Mike and his family about $900,000 plus attorneys’ fees, which pushed the package to more than $1.3 million.
Mike was relieved to be done with it. The financial settlement was fine, to be sure. For him, though, the case was never about money. “I’d gladly give every dime and some to go back to how my life was back before this ever happened.”
Just before the settlement was made public, Mayor Menino finally uttered his first public comment in four years, telling the Boston Globe the Cox case was “an occasion we’ll never be proud of. It’s not a happy day, a good day, for the Boston Police Department.”
In the end, the only justice would be Mike’s justice. “We have hit a blue wall,” Donald K. Stern, the U.S. attorney in Boston, said on January 27, 2000, at a press conference called to announce he was shutting down Ted Merritt’s investigation.
The deadline for bringing criminal charges—known as the statute of limitations—had expired on January 25, the fifth anniversary of the beating. “We do not feel we have enough evidence to charge anyone with the underlying beating,” Stern told reporters. “The federal investigation is in an inactive state.”
Burgio, Williams, and any others may have been found liable in Mike’s civil rights case, but they’d eluded any criminal prosecution.
The blue wall notwithstanding, the federal probe had faltered in a huge rut of its own making—the misguided squeeze play and perjury conviction of Kenny Conley. Merritt had banked the investigation on Kenny—a miscalculation from which the effort to solve Mike’s beating never recovered. Stern, however, would have none of it; he stood by his prosecutor and always defended the controversial conviction of Kenny Conley.
Indeed, Ted Merritt was in for some high praise. The very next year, he was one of