The Fence - Dick Lehr [48]
Burgio could see a combination of unmarked units used by the gang unit as well as marked cruisers. Blue lights flashing. Cops in uniform and in street clothes milling about. Young people were scattering quickly into the night. Burgio recognized some of the cops. He knew the gang unit team of Joe Teahan and Gary Ryan. He was recently engaged but had once dated the woman who ended up marrying Ryan. He knew Donald Caisey from work. Burgio did not know Mike Cox, but he did know Mike’s partner, Craig. He had little use for Craig, considering him “an arrogant bastard,” a glory hound.
When they got back to the Cortee’s, Mike and Craig jumped from their cruiser to help the others canvass the scene. Mike was wearing the three-quarter-length black parka he’d borrowed from his nephew over a black hooded sweatshirt. He’d left the wool Oakland Raiders skullcap in the cruiser. It turned out the gunfire happened in a dead zone—a spot along the street where no officer saw what exactly happened. Mike and Craig tried talking to the patrons leaving the club, asking what they saw, who fired the shots. They studied faces, looking, said Craig, for “someone who looks suspicious.” At one point, Mike spotted Dave Williams, and Dave spotted him. They knew each other pretty well and ate together sometimes at Carney Hospital. They exchanged a quick greeting.
No one was having any luck getting a lead on the shooters. The club’s patrons were looking to avoid the police, not talk to them. “No victims came forward. No witnesses came forward,” noted the spare police incident filed later about the shooting.
“Everybody just kind of got in their cars and left,” Craig said later. Within minutes, the cops found themselves standing there looking at each other. It was quiet in an eerie sort of way.
The street was empty and the gang unit was empty-handed.
“We didn’t get anybody,” Mike said. “People were just pretty mad.”
CHAPTER 7
The Murder and the Chase
On Wednesday, January 25, in Providence, Rhode Island, residents were abuzz about a videotape that captured a police officer kicking a black man on the ground during a disturbance at a rhythm and blues concert. The response by city leaders was swift and decisive. The Providence police chief suspended the officer without pay while the apparent police brutality was investigated, and he did not mince his outrage: “I’d like to fire him if everything is as it appears to be on that tape,” the chief said.
On Wednesday, in Boston, the city’s mayor, Tom Menino, was trumpeting new crime statistics showing a marked drop in homicides, aggravated assaults, auto thefts, and burglaries. The eighty-five murders in 1994 represented a 13 percent decrease from the ninety-eight murders in 1993. The mayor called Boston a “safer city,” although residents of Roxbury and Dorchester told reporters they still lived in fear.
Ironically, on that same day, Boston’s police commissioner was finalizing disciplinary action in a tragic controversy hounding the department. The previous March a botched drug raid had resulted in the death of a retired minister. Using a no-knock warrant, heavily armed officers from the SWAT team and the drug unit barged into a fourth-floor apartment in Dorchester. The only person inside was the seventy-five-year-old Reverend Accelyne Williams. Officers chased the minister, wrestled him to the floor, and handcuffed him. The frail Williams suffered a heart attack and died. The stunning mistake made national headlines. The minister’s widow sued the city for $18 million. Ending an internal investigation that fingered breakdowns in supervision, Commissioner Paul F. Evans was busy preparing for a press conference during which