The Fence - Dick Lehr [89]
It was the end of April when Jim Hussey got the order to suspend the Internal Affairs investigation and make way for Martin’s criminal inquiry. Hussey walked away from the case believing he and his colleagues had made some progress, zeroing in on Jimmy Burgio, Dave Williams, and Ian Daley as the “pool of suspects.” But the leads were circumstantial. There was much more to do. The IA’s focus had been narrow: on the first to arrive at the dead end. Fifteen officers were interviewed, when another forty-five were known to have some connection to the chase. IA had not tried interviewing civilians living on Woodruff Way, and it had not interviewed officers from other police agencies who showed up at the scene. It had not tried interviewing the foursome in the gold Lexus who, quite possibly, had seen everything: Smut, Tiny, Marquis, and Boogie-Down.
Smut Brown and the others had been behind bars ever since their arrest, charged with first-degree murder. During the several months that Internal Affairs looked into the beating, Smut met several times with a public defender assigned to represent him. He was held in the Nashua Street jail, a new, $54 million facility built in the shadow of historic and highbrow Beacon Hill and near Massachusetts General Hospital. The public defender found him “very scared, very worried.” The lawyer tried to reassure Smut, “to make sure he understood he’s got help and not to lose hope.” The two mostly went over the shooting at Walaikum’s that started it all, and Smut was freaking out he’d been accused of murder when he’d been as shocked as everyone at the hamburger joint when gunfire broke out. Smut talked about the car chase to Woodruff Way. He said that after scaling the fence he could have outrun the cop “because the cop was thirty yards away when he called out to stop.” He stopped when he could have kept going and escaped in the woods. It was the kind of detail the attorney noted. Fleeing was typically seen as “consciousness of guilt.” But when Smut stopped instead of escaping, that was something the attorney could argue showed consciousness of innocence. Smut stopped because he had nothing to hide.
In these early meetings, Smut also mentioned the beating at the fence. Smut had continued to think Marquis was the one who had taken the blows. While they were being booked later at the Roxbury police station, he had not had a chance to talk to Marquis. The only thing he knew, Marquis was taken to a hospital for treatment. Smut then found out that was all wrong—from rumors, from his mother and Indira during their visits, from Marquis himself when they both were eventually in the same jail. “That was a cop!” Smut got to thinking. It seemed surreal. Cops beat another cop like that? This, Smut knew, was heavy. When winter turned to spring and he heard talk about the inability to solve the beating, Smut sat in jail awaiting trial for murder knowing he’d seen plenty at the fence.
“They took affidavits and reports from everyone who was on duty that night but nobody has talked to our clients,” one of the defense attorneys said about the police investigation into Mike Cox’s beating. The murder suspects might know something, the attorney noted, but no police official had reached out to them. “No one has contacted me to say, ‘Would you mind if I talk to [them] about this other incident?’”
Ralph Martin and his immediate circle of advisers weren’t the only ones in the district attorney’s office who’d taken notice of the bizarre beating case during February and March. Assistant District Attorney