The Fence - Dick Lehr [45]
Once again, he’d managed to stay on the street. The stay-out-of-jail card meant when Smut walked into the club Cortee’s on the night of January 24, 1995, he was on probation from the Mike Cox bust.
Once he was inside, Smut never noticed that in back, Lyle Jackson was seated at a table playing cards, dressed in Boss blue jeans and a purple-colored Champion sweatshirt. Years had passed since Smut and Mama Janet’s son played together, either at Lyle’s house off Humboldt Avenue or at Smut’s Franklin Hill housing project.
Lyle quit the card game just after midnight and hooked up with a couple of his friends, one named Marcello and the other named Stanley. They drank and mingled around for a while, and by 1:30 or so, Lyle and Marcello decided they were hungry. One of them mentioned Walaikum’s, a tiny hamburger joint about a half mile away on Blue Hill Avenue in the Grove Hall section of Roxbury. Of the three, Stanley was the one with a car, a red Hyundai, so they asked him for a ride. Stanley said fine; he was hungry too.
Like Lyle and his friends, a lot of people at the club were starting to pull out, including Smut and his crew of Tiny, Tiny’s brother Marquis, and Boogie-Down. Closing time was approaching, and the club had stopped serving drinks. The music was winding down. Tiny was still on edge after seeing Little Greg. He might have recovered from the leg wound from the summer before, but there was no recovering from their beef. Smut tried his best to keep Tiny distracted. “I told him to chill.” The four discussed a nightcap. Smut suggested they head down to Mattapan where he knew an after-hours place. Tiny liked the idea because his mother lived in Mattapan and he wanted to swing by her house.
Meanwhile, Mike and Craig were outside turning their car around to resume their surveillance position on the hill overlooking the club. During the dustup with the girls, other members of the gang unit had not blown their cover. Donald Caisey, for one, was still in the decoy cab right on the street across from the club, while Joe Teahan and Gary Ryan were not far away in their unmarked cruiser.
But they were not the only cops waiting for something to happen. Unknown to the gang unit, another cop was nearby. Dave Williams also knew Hip-Hop Night at the Cortee’s might get interesting. On a typical night, his Dorchester station’s “batting order” for patrolling the district included four or five “service units” manned by a single officer, another two or three “rapid-response” units manned by two officers, and usually one “anti-crime” unit manned by two officers dressed in street clothes. Williams had begun the night working alone in a service unit known as the Harry 411.
Williams was assigned to patrol the Savin Hill neighborhood, a sector located on the east side of Dorchester, bordering Boston Harbor. It was several miles from the Cortee’s on Washington Street—basically from one side of the district to the other. But Williams was nonchalant about straying so far from the patrol sector his shift sergeant had assigned. “They pretty much tell you, you have the Savin Hill area, but you can go anywhere you want,” he said later. No one was really looking over his shoulder.
On the force, Williams was known as a “working cop.” It was a label to distinguish cops like him from those seeking uneventful shifts that might even include a nap. Williams was action-oriented—so much so that he’d actually drawn some supervisory concern about a tendency toward “physical abuse during arrests.” In fact, along these lines, Williams had had a rough few months. In September, a Dorchester woman complained to Internal Affairs Williams punched her out. She’d saved a clump of hair she claimed Williams had pulled from her scalp. The charge stemmed from a confrontation involving police and partygoers one Sunday morning over an illegally parked car. Williams admitted he hit the woman, but said he did