The Fence - Dick Lehr [96]
Then, of related interest, there was the resolution to the police brutality case in nearby Providence, Rhode Island, that had been making news since the week before Mike Cox’s beating. Four months after his suspension the rookie cop who’d been caught on tape kicking a black concertgoer was allowed back to work. There were strings attached to the reinstatement. The officer was required to repeat his training at the police academy and would not be allowed to work on the street until he did. He had to take a course on cultural diversity. He forfeited $12,000 in pay. Finally, he was required to write an essay. The topic: what it meant to be a police officer as it related to human rights.
But all of those were breaking news events that the media then reacted to and covered. The Cox case was different. No one was holding press conferences or handing out press releases. In fact, no one connected to the scandal wanted any coverage—not the police commissioner, not the mayor, not the police union, not even Mike Cox, given his nature. Boston did not have its own Reverend Al Sharpton, the New York Baptist minister and vitriolic activist, to inflame public interest. Instead, the Cox case belonged to that category of news story the media uncovered by being investigative, enterprising, or “pro-active” in its reporting—and in this instance the Boston media had dropped the ball.
Bob Peabody, the assistant district attorney leading the new criminal investigation, was just returning to the office, fresh from finishing a special assignment working alongside federal prosecutors in winning the racketeering convictions against a number of gangsters from the city’s Charlestown neighborhood. The verdict on March 22 followed a grueling five-month-long trial, and an investigation that had taken several years. The outcome was hailed as a major break in the largely Irish neighborhood’s notorious “code of silence,” where residents, or “Townies,” were loath to testify against one of their own for fear of retaliation from neighborhood thugs. Deeply embedded in Charlestown’s insular ways, the code was a key factor behind a shockingly high unsolved murder rate. In two decades, nearly 75 percent of the fifty murders remained unsolved—far exceeding the rate in any other section of Boston. It gave credence to the local slogan: In this town you could get away with murder. But the trial verdicts now suggested otherwise. Led by a young, aggressive federal prosecutor named Paul V. Kelly, investigators convinced residents to cooperate and even persuaded some gangsters to turn against their cohorts. The government spent nearly $1 million to protect and relocate up to eighteen witnesses. “We’re not going to turn around 100 years of history with one case,” Kelly said afterward. “But hopefully we have dented the code.”
Bob Peabody was on trial with Kelly when he’d first read about Mike’s beating in the newspaper in late February. Once the trial ended in late March, he began working his way back into the district attorney’s office, and during his transition one of Ralph Martin’s top aides asked about his interest in taking on the Cox case.
“Yeah, absolutely,” Peabody said. He liked the idea of digging deep into a new investigation, and he hoped to apply some of the tips he’d picked up during the federal investigation. “I’d had practice and experience on the federal side doing this long-term investigation in the Charlestown case, so it actually was a great chance to do it again.”
In a way, he was going from one “code of silence” case to another. The two worlds were obviously different in so many ways—an entire neighborhood, on the one hand, compared to a police force. But both were tightly knit, insular, and seemingly impenetrable. Police officers here and there had offered tidbits, but the blue wall of silence was proving durable. Police Superintendent Doherty, the department’s chief of internal investigations, acknowledged as much, writing at one point in court papers that