The Fence - Dick Lehr [3]
No one noticed them as cops. Craig was dressed in blue jeans and a black-hooded sweatshirt underneath a black leather jacket, while Mike wore a three-quarter-length black coat—the kind of puffy, hooded, goose-down parka popular in the ’hood. Underneath he had on black jeans and a black sweatshirt. A black Oakland Raiders wool hat was pulled over his head. Mike had assembled the outfit for assignments like this, borrowing the parka and skullcap from a teenage nephew.
Mike’s getup was the more elaborate of the two, which was no surprise. He was clothes-conscious—and always had been. Craig had certainly noticed this during the five years they’d been partners. There was another cop in their unit who sold jackets, sweatshirts, T-shirts, and hats featuring Boston police patches and logos. Mike was a regular customer. The Windbreaker he wore most nights while on patrol had come from this guy. “Mike liked those police clothes,” Craig said.
They walked to one side of the club to sit in a couple of empty chairs. Together they made quite an impression. Mike was six feet, two inches tall and weighed 215 pounds or so, and Craig was even taller, by two inches. They were both strong and fit and athletic. Mike’s parka was long enough to conceal his handcuffs, badge, and semiautomatic handgun, a gun smaller than the one issued by the department that fit snugly into a tiny holster.
The two were members of the department’s elite Anti–Gang Violence Unit, or AGVU, a collection of forty cops who roamed the meanest streets of the city in pursuit of street gangs, drugs, and guns. “You had more freedom to investigate much more serious crime,” Craig once said about why he found satisfaction in the role as street-gang fighter.
Their call sign, for police radio purposes, was Tango K–8, or TK–8.
“Tango” stood for the gang unit.
“K” meant they worked in plainclothes.
“8” stood for them—Cox and Jones.
By 1995, Mike had been on the force for six years, Craig for eight. Mike was twenty-nine and Craig was thirty. Through work, they’d become close friends. Craig brought his daughter to Mike’s house for his son’s birthday party, and Mike went to Craig’s house for his daughter’s party. Sometimes they’d go out together and shoot pool, and, for a bit, they played basketball on the same team in the police league. In fact, Craig was probably the only one in the gang unit who knew anything about Mike’s background and personal life—that Mike, for example, had grown up in Roxbury a few blocks from the gang unit’s offices at 364 Warren Street. Or that Mike had attended a private high school in western Connecticut. Mike was especially sensitive about that. On a police force where the officers were mostly working class, white, and mostly educated in urban high schools, no way he wanted to be seen as a black prep-pie. Indeed, when it came to his personal life, Mike went mute.
They worked as a team in plainclothes. The public often confused working in plainclothes and working undercover. The two were vastly different. Undercover meant assuming a phony identity to infiltrate a criminal organization. Plainclothes work meant simply not wearing a uniform on the job. It also meant driving an unmarked car—a police vehicle without the blue bubble on the roof and the blue-and-white coloring and lettering on the exterior. Mike and Craig drove a dark blue Ford with no blatant police markings. But it was equipped with a siren; blue lights concealed in the front grille; wig-wag, or blinking lights, in the rear; and a blue light on the front dashboard.
By blending into the street, Mike and Craig were looking for an edge. It was unrealistic to think street-smart gang members would not spot them or their unmarked car. But what they were looking for was a few extra beats before the click of recognition. “It helped me, you know, you’d be right on the scene, or very close to someone before they recognized you as a cop,” Mike said. The gang unit cops valued those extra seconds, whether during