This Land

by Dan Barry

  Now it was his job to be with the wounded security guard, who had been rushed to the University of Massachusetts Hospital. His assignment: to collect evidence—the man’s belt, his clothes, the bullets—and, if at all possible, to talk to him.

  The detective watched the frantic struggle to save the guard’s life under the surreal lights of the emergency room. He would never forget the bloodied uniform, the empty holster, the man’s last breath. Ed Morlock was 52.

  Soon after, a ringing telephone broke the quiet in a yellow Cape about 45 miles away in Athol. Jeannette Morlock was making the beds upstairs when she picked up. She did not quite believe what she was being told, even when two Athol police officers appeared at the front door, in confirmation.

  Screaming, Ms. Morlock began pounding one of the officers on the chest. “He kept telling me he was dead, and I said, ‘No, he’s not.’”

  Ed Morlock’s wife and son never moved on; they just moved about. “When Ed got killed, my life—I just didn’t care,” Ms. Morlock recalled, crying.

  She spent years helping to write and distribute a newsletter for families of homicide victims. She sang alto and soprano in the choir at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church and worked the post-Mass coffee break, where her confetti angel cake sold for a dollar a slice. She bought a .22-caliber Ruger and learned to shoot at the Woodsman Rifle and Pistol Club.

  She also met a man named Bob Mathews at the McDonald’s near her house. They’re engaged now, but he knows she’ll never marry again.

  “You don’t really forget things,” she said. “It stays there. You push it aside—but it’s always there.”

  As for her son, Ed Jr., he went on the road, working for a traveling zoo and an indoor circus, then for a series of retail outlets, then for a private school’s horse stable. He married, had a daughter, divorced, remarried.

  During his wandering, he collected more than a dozen tattoos that cover his arms and torso, including one of Anubis, the Egyptian god who watches over the dead.

  By August of 1991—three months after the fatal Worcester holdup—Mr. DeMasi was many years divorced and living in the Pines campground, nestled among the woods and marshes of Salisbury. His furnished, tarp-covered campsite was conveniently close to his children and ex-wife, who had briefly strayed from their marriage while he was in prison. He had forgiven her, she said, but she could not forgive herself.

  Jeannette Morlock

  Once again, the career criminal was being shadowed. Not long ago, he had boasted of his penchant for robbing armored trucks to a Massachusetts State Police officer working undercover on a drug investigation. “That’s always been my thing, always been my thing,” he was recorded saying. “Like I say, I love to go and get the cash.”

  He went on: “We put our thing together. We clock it, we clock it, we clock it, we clock it, we clock it, right? The guard’s taking the money in the bank, or he’s bringing it out or whatever. Then boom, we catch him. Boom, boom, quick—it’s over.”

  Mr. DeMasi has many sides to his personality. He was so tough in prison that he pulled his own teeth, his ex-wife said, and spent years in solitary confinement rather than obey an order to sleep on his cell’s mattress. He was also inordinately generous, known for giving away much of the money he stole.

  “We did an armored car up in Taunton, and I don’t know, he got maybe $50,000—and he’s broke like two weeks later,” recalled Mr. Fiore, his former partner. “I mean, gee, you just got $50,000. But he never forgot anybody, and he’d say like, you know, ‘Ah, this guy’s in jail, and his wife don’t have this; his kids don’t have that.’”

  As his conversation with the undercover officer revealed, Mr. DeMasi also liked to brag, as if to prove that he was his own man, the head of his own crew—which by the summer of 1991 included a couple of degenerate gamblers, a hanger-on distrusted by other gangsters and an aimless young man from the campground.

  Now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was watching as the DeMasi crew monitored armored-truck deliveries to a strip-mall bank in Newburyport, not three miles from the campground. One afternoon, the men were photographed having a picnic in the parking lot, making and eating sandwiches around the trunk of their car while conducting surveillance.

  We clock it, we clock it, we clock it…

  Two undercover F.B.I. agents, both women, were also assigned to monitor Mr. DeMasi at the campground, but the case agent, John Egelhof, warned them to be extra careful. “This guy’s extremely dangerous,” he remembered telling them. “Any issue with him, blast him.”

  After several weeks of planning, Mr. DeMasi and his crew made their move on a warm September morning, guns at the ready. But as their stolen green van crawled toward the armored truck, F.B.I. vehicles raced up from every angle, disrupting the shopping center’s ordinary rhythms.

  Within minutes, five would-be thieves were under arrest—including a defeated but still defiant Ralph DeMasi, a bulletproof vest covering his chest and the nylon stocking on his head now looking silly. “He was cold,” recalled James Mullen, a Rhode Island State Police detective who assisted the F.B.I. “No emotion. Nothing.”

  A few months later, Mr. DeMasi was sentenced in federal court to more than two decades in prison. When the judge asked if there were any other motions, the gangster said, “Kiss my ass.”

  “Motion denied,” answered the judge.

  Soon after, Worcester detectives visited the modest Morlock house. They explained that they knew who killed Ed Morlock, though they couldn’t quite prove it. But at least there was this: Those responsible were now serving long prison terms.

  The point, the younger Mr. Morlock recalled, was that his father’s killers “were not out there whooping it up”—which gave him some peace.

  “At least they got them on something,” he remembered thinking. “And they were spending time in prison.”

  His mother took no such comfort.

  “No,” she said. “Not me.”

  So began another protracted prison stretch for Ralph DeMasi. The Clinton and Bush administrations came and went. Pay phones all but vanished. Email replaced handwritten letters. A black man became president.

  Released finally in 2013, Mr. DeMasi said that he received some walking-around money—about $5,000 or so—from an emissary of Raymond Patriarca Jr., the son of the old mob boss, dead now 30 years and more. The gift would be in keeping with mob tradition, a recognition of a man’s long and faithful service, but the younger Mr. Patriarca said through a spokesman that it never happened.

  By now deep into his 70s, Mr. DeMasi melted back into a New England that had largely forgotten him. Continuing a kind of institutionalized existence in the squat house in Salisbury, he exercised, corresponded, followed a vegetarian diet, kept his cell of a bedroom neat. He also dreamed.

  “I might rob an armored truck before I die,” he told me on that summer day’s visit.

  Sitting beside his ex-wife, Sue DeMasi, at the kitchen table, Mr. DeMasi seemed not to remember many specifics of his wild criminal past. After she recounted her dramatic appeal for leniency at one of his many sentencings, he could not recall the case at all, even when she mentioned his accomplice, Tommy.

  “Come on,” Ms. DeMasi said. “You don’t remember any of that? Wow.”

  “I remember Tommy,” he answered. “Is he still alive?”

  “No-o-o,” she said. “Remember he got run over by Billy King and them guys? Ran him over so many times they had to shovel him up.”

  Ms. DeMasi got up to leave. Through the years she had held things together for the children while Mr. DeMasi was in and out of prison; she even did long-haul trucking. The two had had their ups and downs, and at times she had feared his facility for violence. But they continued to share an intense private bond impervious to outside judgment.

  “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing,” she said. “I still tell people today: Nobody on this earth—past, present or future—will ever love the way me and Ralph loved.”<
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  “Thanks for coming by, Sue,” Mr. DeMasi said as she gave him a peck.

  “O.K., Ralph, I love you,” she said. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

  “All right. You take care.”

  A quiet, domestic moment. Here, on this pleasant summer’s day, was a mobster in twilight, about to go out for a vegetarian lunch that he would wash down with a bourbon and Coke.

  Four months later, with the imminence of winter in the mid-December air, people with guns approached this same Salisbury house. Given the reputation of their target, these law enforcement officials, including two detectives from the Worcester Police Department’s unresolved-homicide unit, were braced for anything.

  But Mr. DeMasi went quietly.

  That night I was Christmas-shopping at a mall in New Jersey. To be exact, I was in a Sephora cosmetics store, watching my 13-year-old daughter select stocking stuffers that were clearly not for me. Then Marc Smerling of the “Crimetown” podcast called, and my daughter would later imitate what I said:

  “Ralph DeMasi? Arrested for murder?”

  I had been planning to write a profile of Mr. DeMasi in the new year—something about the reduced circumstances of an aging, forgetful gangster reflecting the state of New England organized crime. But here was a murder charge.

  I felt foolish.

  The next day, Worcester County’s district attorney, Joseph D. Early Jr., announced the arrest at a news conference. He then introduced the clean-cut Worcester police chief, who, 25 years earlier, had been the young detective dispatched to the hospital to be with the mortally wounded Ed Morlock.

  As Chief Steven Sargent donned his glasses to read from a statement, he struggled to navigate his many emotions. The satisfaction and pride he felt were tempered by memories of having seen a man in a bloodied uniform die in the emergency room.

  “This has always been a personal case for me,” the chief said. “And today, it gives me a measure of satisfaction to say justice has been served for Edward Morlock and his family.”

  The two law enforcement officials declined to explain the break in the old case. Three men believed to have been involved in the fatal holdup had died, Mr. Early said, but he left open the possibility that others besides Mr. DeMasi were still alive.

  “Maybe someone didn’t want to talk before,” he said. “Maybe they want to talk now.”

  Mr. DeMasi pleaded not guilty that morning, his cuffed hands holding a piece of paper, his expression somewhere between confusion and concern. Since then he has been in the Worcester County jail, awaiting a trial that may not begin until 2018.

  “He strongly denies having any involvement in this armed robbery, which led to the death of Mr. Morlock,” his lawyer, Michael Hussey, said.

  As Mr. DeMasi was led out of the courtroom, someone in the gallery shouted “Dad!” It was his daughter, Sue DeMasi, who later told reporters that he was a loving grandfather who had been exhibiting signs of dementia—but who was still preparing Christmas cards to send to all his friends.

  Also sitting in the gallery that morning was a small, bespectacled woman of 74 who had spent the past few years dealing with health challenges that included diabetes, lung disease, kidney cancer and heart problems so severe that her doctor had told her she might die at any time.

  This was Jeannette Morlock, the murder victim’s widow. And like the man charged with killing her husband, she too kept old photographs, among them a portrait of the family: a young boy of about 10, a short, smiling woman and a large man with half-moon shadows under his eyes.

  Ms. Morlock had risen in the dark of early morning. She had bathed. She had chosen an outfit fitting for the occasion, a pale purple suit coat with slacks to match. Then she had taken the hour’s drive down to Worcester from Athol, intent on being in court in time for the arraignment of Ralph DeMasi.

  She wept at the sight of him.

  PART FOUR

  Intolerance

  I’m always chasing rainbows

  Yes, the Ill Will Can Be Subtle. Then, One Day, It Isn’t.

  GREENWOOD, LA.—JANUARY 21, 2007

  Midnight in a handsome one-story house on Waterwood Drive. Hours after Ernest and Shirley Lampkins say good night to their teenage daughter, Brett, and to the first Sunday of the new year, a Sunday of church-going and turkey and chili and some of those sweet frozen grapes that Ernest likes so much. Two bullets pay a call.

  They explode through the living room window. They tear through the soft-yellow curtains that Shirley ordered from a catalog. They rocket past the Easter basket containing family snapshots, past Brett’s bedroom door, past Ernest’s antique upright piano, past the framed portrait of father, mother and daughter in serene pose.

  One bullet strikes a golden candelabrum and splits: half whistles into a wall near the kitchen; half crashes through a French door—turning smooth glass into a spider’s web of shards—and into the sunroom, four steps from the master bedroom.

  The other bullet slams so hard into the living room wall that it has to be pried out. “It was a piece of lead about the size of my thumb,” Mr. Lampkins recalls. “They use that for killing deer.” There are no deer in the Lampkins home. Only Brett, 17, a high school junior, who has just learned to drive and wears slippers that look like kittens. And Shirley, 62, a retired high school English teacher and administrator, who enjoys gardening and makes a delectable fig cake. And Ernest, 78, a retired educator who has a doctorate in ethnomusicology and is known throughout Louisiana for reaching children through music.

  Oh. One more thing about Ernest. He is also the mayor here in Greenwood, a quiet town of 2,600 a few miles west of Shreveport. Greenwood has a Dollar General store, a Mexican restaurant and some antebellum homes, including one once used as a Confederate hospital. It is predominantly white.

  Oh. And one more thing about the Lampkinses. They are black.

  On that night, Mr. and Mrs. Lampkins hear no gunshots, but their home alarm sounds, and they leave their bedroom to investigate. They stare at the shattered glass, and then at the holes in the front window. It does not register. Then it does.

  As the police arrive to interview and to collect the shell casings from the street, it is hard to forget that several days earlier, the black mayor in Westlake, about 230 miles south of here, was found shot to death, and that some people there dispute findings that he killed himself.

  The Lampkins family does not return to bed.

  Ten days later, the mayor and his family sit in their sunroom, with its bullet-twisted Venetian blinds, and talk about music, food, Brett’s love for dance. But the shooting has reduced these joyous subjects to fleeting diversions from two central questions: Who? Why?

  “The town of Greenwood is not a racist town,” Mr. Lampkins begins, noting that he was elected mayor with 56 percent of the vote. “There are racist people in Greenwood. That’s different.”

  That said, he asserts, this was a racist act. A racist act perhaps stemming from the heated politics in town, but racist still. As racist as the For Sale sign he recently found planted in his lawn.

  When asked how he can be so sure, Mr. Lampkins drops his voice, as if to emphasize that we are no longer discussing music and food. As if to underscore that this is a slave’s grandson speaking, someone who heard his century-old grandfather talk of being the “house nigger” on a Kentucky plantation.

  “I’m 78 years of age,” the mayor says. “Don’t you think I know what racism is in the South?”

  Mr. Lampkins was elected to the Board of Aldermen in 2002, and he immediately sensed corruption. He was right: The town clerk was in the midst of stealing at least $130,000 from the municipal coffers. She is now doing eight years’ hard labor.

  He became the town’s first black mayor in 2004, beating an incumbent who did not believe in graceful transitions of government. On the day Mr. Lampkins took office, he had to find a locksmith to gain access to Town Hall.

  The steps he has taken to change the way of doing business, including firing several p
eople from the old administration, have brought praise and vitriol. The monthly board meetings have at times devolved into shouting matches, with some spectators openly ridiculing the mayor.

  Ellise Wissing, a board member, says the mayor often endures subtle racism. “These people can’t stand the fact that there’s a black man that’s in control of this town,” says Ms. Wissing, who is white. “That’s so much smarter than they are.”

  Contributors to a website frequented by those from the anti-Lampkins faction—they like to mock the articulate mayor’s pronunciation, for example—reject his assertion that racism is at play. A few even suggest that he orchestrated the shooting to shift attention from his administration.

  The sadness of the suggestion is felt most acutely in the violated house on Waterwood Drive, where a decoy of a police car sits in the driveway, and a father confides that his daughter will suddenly just—cry.

  Mrs. Lampkins tells her husband that he ought to return a call she just took from a political opponent of his. Maybe the man wants to express his concern, she says.

  The mayor calls the man back. But the man never mentions the shooting. Instead he wants to know why a town building is closed.

  Mold infestation, the mayor says. Mold.

  The Names Were Separated, Though the Lives Collided

  BUTLER, GA.—MARCH 18, 2007

  The cool, busy lobby of the Taylor County courthouse features a bulletin board, a Dr Pepper vending machine and two framed rosters honoring local veterans of World War II. It is easy to spot the slight difference in wording that justifies displaying two plaques instead of one.

  This list says “Whites,” and that list says “Colored.”