The Fence - Dick Lehr [155]
Over at the Boston Police Department, a seemingly wayward cleanup involving key officers in the Cox affair continued. By the end of 1999, Jimmy Burgio, Dave Williams, and Ian Daley were kicked off the force. They were dismissed for a variety of departmental violations—Burgio and Williams for the use of excessive force and for the cover-up of the beating, and Daley for failing to stop the beating and for lying.
The trio vowed to fight and filed labor grievances. Attorney Tom Hoopes, calling Ian Daley’s firing a disgrace, insisted his client was a scapegoat. But in a ruling that followed twenty-five days of testimony stretched out over two years, the labor arbitrator concluded otherwise; Ian Daley was a liar, and his termination had been for just cause.
Jimmy Burgio fared no better. Testifying for the first time in any proceeding, he said he’d jumped out of the passenger side of his cruiser, run around the front of the car, and pounced on Ron “Boogie-Down” Tinsley. He said he pointed his gun at the back of Tinsley’s head. “I told him if he moved, ‘I’ll send you to your maker.’” Burgio said he never took his eyes off the suspect, and the two remained frozen until more help came.
His arbitrator did not buy the do-no-evil account, calling Burgio’s story, replete with the Hollywood line about sending Boogie-Down to his maker, “implausible” and “demonstrably false,” and ruled “substantiated misconduct” warranted his firing.
Burgio went to work as a pipe fitter and moonlighted as a bouncer. Nancy Whiskey’s was long closed down, so he took a job working the door at another infamous Southie bar that for decades was controlled by crime boss Whitey Bulger. Back then the bar was Triple O’s and nicknamed the “Bucket of Blood” for all the underworld shakedowns and much worse that went on in the back rooms. Following the bust-up of the Bulger gang in the late 1990s, and by the time Jimmy Burgio became regularly employed there, the pub had been renamed the 6 House.
Burgio tried marriage a second time in September 2004, but two years later the marriage was over. He missed being a cop. Burgio did not budge when asked about Woodruff Way: He did not know who beat Mike Cox, but if he had to guess, he said Ian Daley probably had something to do with it, and, of course, as his lawyer always argued, “the munies.”
Lastly there was Dave Williams; he appeared before a labor arbitrator who might as well have said, Dave, this is your lucky day. The arbitrator overturned Williams’s firing. He ruled Williams deserved only a one-week suspension for filing the false report about him and Burgio being in two cruisers. He said Williams’s testimony about chasing Jimmy “Marquis” Evans and knowing nothing about the beating was believable. The arbitrator discounted Mike Cox’s testimony as unreliable, dismissed Smut Brown’s account entirely, and ignored the jury’s verdict in Mike’s civil rights trial.
Williams was on the comeback—reinstated and paid an estimated $300,000 in back pay. He went through a refresher course at the police academy in the fall of 2005 and was on the street by early 2006, working as a patrol officer in downtown Boston.
It was a reversal of fortune many familiar with the Cox case found shocking. “A jury of twelve good citizens made a fair decision,” said Rob Sinsheimer. “I find it appalling to the point of shocking the conscience that this could be effectively overturned by a single arbitrator. Every citizen who cares about policing and the courts should be outraged.”
Smut Brown stood at the gas pump at the Mobil station in Mattapan Square one spring day after the trial when Mike Cox pulled up to another pump to fill up. During their chance encounter, the two found they shared a common ground: Both had long felt harassed by ghosts from the Boston Police Department.
“He told me about getting phone calls in the middle of the night,” Smut said later. For his part,