Legends of Winter Hill: Cops, Con Men, and Joe McCain, the Last Real Detective

by Jay Atkinson

  Al DiSalvo raced his vehicle alongside the ballpark, turned right onto Wood Avenue, and skidded to a stop. He leaped from the car and went sprinting toward the front door. En route he heard six or eight gunshots and watched as an unidentified black male ran out the front door with the silhouette of a shotgun in his hand.

  The suspect hurdled a chain-link fence surrounding the front yard, and at the same instant Al DiSalvo noticed Biff McLean coming around the side of the house. Just then someone called out, “I've been shot,” from the vicinity of the front porch.

  “I'm a police officer,” shouted McLean to the suspect. “Stop.”

  A moment later McLean leveled his pistol and fired three shots at the suspect, who threw the shotgun aside and dashed into the street. As the man was sprinting away, McLean, an accomplished runner, decided to conserve his remaining two rounds and give chase.

  Coming along the sidewalk, DiSalvo raised his weapon and was about to pull the trigger when the suspect lost all motor control and fell onto the pavement. Only then did DiSalvo notice Gene Kee and the other members of the takedown team coming from the van, which had just pulled up to the left of the house; they were directly in his line of fire. Kee looked at DiSalvo and made a grim little wave.

  At the same instant Cronin opened the back door and went through the house. In the kitchen he saw an overturned chair and Brighton's crumpled jacket on the floor. The hallway was filled with smoke and the acrid smell of gunpowder. Out front Cronin heard officers yelling and the approach of sirens.

  Detectives Kee, Honan, and McLean walked up to the fallen suspect with their guns drawn. The unidentified black male was bleeding from a wound in the center of his chest and lying facedown over the curb. Next to him on the ground lay a police revolver and Chris Brighton's car keys.

  Jack Honan picked up the gun and the keys, and even though the suspect was unconscious, following procedure Honan applied the handcuffs while Kee and the others moved toward the house.

  “We need an ambulance,” Honan said over his radio. “Somebody's been shot.”

  Just then DiSalvo turned for the house and saw McCain stagger down from the porch, his revolver in one hand, the other clutching his midsection. He emptied his revolver onto the ground.

  “I've been shot,” said McCain. His voice was steady and calm, and he shook his head like he was disgusted with the fact. He walked a little ways toward the street, and DiSalvo grabbed for him just as McCain's knees buckled. “Al, I've been shot,” he said. McCain lapsed into a sitting position on the front walk and then slumped over on his side, holding his abdomen. “Say an Act of Contrition with me,” he said. DiSalvo took his hand, and the two detectives prayed together.

  Hutchinson was still up on the porch, gun drawn, covering the front door. His walkie-talkie had been destroyed. “I've been hit, and Joe's hit,” he called out.

  “You all right?” asked McLean, returning to the yard.

  “I'm okay. Joe's hurt pretty bad.”

  McLean ran up to McCain, bent over him, and placed a hand on the wounded man's shoulder. “Joe, it's me,” he said.

  McCain grimaced, looking up at him. “Helen is gonna kill me,” he said. “This is a brand-new fuckin' coat.”

  When Cronin emerged from the house, McCain was lying on the front walk, attended by McLean and DiSalvo. Crouching beside McCain was Detective Brighton, eyes wide, his face red and marked by scratches. Hutchinson was nearby, holding his left shoulder, with Kee beside him. They looked all right.

  Cronin approached McCain. “Joe— ” he said, his eyes filling up.

  Out on the sidewalk, Gene Kee gestured toward a black male lying in the street in a puddle of blood. “Joe got the shooter,” he said. “He's dead.”

  McCain had gone very pale. His hand was pressed over his abdomen, and the other detectives looked on as water ran from the wound— he had been shot through the stomach. Holstering his gun, Cronin knelt on the ground beside him. “Joe,” he said. He struggled to say more but couldn't, and dropped his head into his arms. The street was bright with headlights and keening with sirens.

  An ambulance arrived, and Joe McCain was rushed the four and a half miles to Brigham and Women's Hospital. Although he didn't attend Mass very often, McCain considered himself a religious man. Keeping with his early training, he said three Hail Marys every day, and on those rare occasions when he did sneak into St. Clement's, he stood in the back of the church and put a couple bucks in the poor box, hedging his bets in the event that there was indeed a heaven. So Joe had to laugh to himself when he was wheeled into the emergency room and discovered that three priests had been summoned. A crowd was gathering, and they were all looking at him like he was the governor or something.

  Extreme Unction was administered, and Joe McCain spent the entire night in surgery as the lower floor of the hospital filled up with colleagues, family members, and friends. Among them were Joe's old partners, Leo Papile and Jack Crowley; Deputy Superintendent Al Seghezzi; U.S. Secret Service Agent Stew Henry, a tough son of a gun from White Plains, New York, who had worked undercover for Joe and spent many a night drinking with him at the Parker House; Jim O'Donovan and one of his five boys, twenty-four-year-old Brian, noted street fighter and hell raiser from Ball Square, a kid who McCain saved from a jail cell more than once and who represented all those Somerville guys that turned to big Joe for advice and guidance. And barely noticed among the throng was a young medical student from Boston University whom Joe had befriended, a woman who had been beaten and sexually assaulted by a notorious serial rapist. Joe had spent a great deal of his scarce free time tracking the rapist and making a case against him, escorting the woman into the courtroom the day the scumbag was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. She had never forgotten that, and disguised in a hospital johnny to gain admittance to the ward, the young rape victim became one of the first people to see Joe in his room after the surgery.

  At one point the doctor came out and told Helen McCain that he did not expect her husband to live through the night. But Joe hung on.

  While members of the Special Investigations Unit waited for news about McCain, they learned that the shooter was a twenty-two-year-old from the South End whose real name was Vladimir Lafontant. Paul Hutchinson's radio had deflected one of Lafontant's bullets and saved his life. Melvin Lee had escaped the house but later turned himself in; he claimed not to know “Stoney” very well and said that he had no part in the shooting. Thomas E. “Tommy” Lofgren was discovered lying on the roof of 276 Wood Avenue and arrested.

  Detective Hutchinson was treated for superficial wounds at Boston City Hospital, where Lafontant was also taken and pronounced dead. Joe McCain had fired five times at Lafontant; four rounds had struck the drug dealer, and one of them went straight through his heart. Fueled by adrenaline, Lafontant was, in effect, already dead when he ran down the stairs and into the street.

  Gene Kee and his wife, Ellen, stayed at the hospital until 3:00 A.M., when Joe McCain's chances of survival were still very much in doubt. But the Kees had two young children at home, and on the drive back to Tewksbury, Gene, who considered McCain a second father, turned to his wife and said, “He's going to die.”

  “Gene, he's going to be all right,” said Ellen. “Joe McCain is too stubborn to die.”

  McCain survived but lost a piece of his stomach, his gallbladder, spleen, and pancreas, becoming an instant diabetic. Ironically, the McCain family was haunted by diabetes, but during that physical examination just before the shooting Joe had been told that his blood sugar was normal, which had been a great comfort to him.

  Joe stayed in the hospital for a month, gradually acquiring enough strength to be discharged, but he looked like hell when he got home. “He was such a strong guy, I used to wonder, is he going to be like this for the rest of his life?” Helen said. Joe didn't want to leave the police department, but he was such a brittle diabetic that there was talk of a forced retirement.

  After just a few months, and while still we
aring a corset to hold his long, jagged incision together, Joe started talking about getting back into the action. There was money to be made in the private detective business, he said, and a way to keep his hand in police work and stay in touch with his old friends. Helen didn't try very hard to talk him out of it. Joe was moody, getting under her skin at home and generally making a nuisance of himself. And she didn't think there was much danger in private investigations. As Joe himself had said, “Helen, what do you want me to do, sit in a chair and look out the window?”

  For their actions on January 29, 1988, Joe McCain, Paul Hutchinson, and Christopher Brighton all received the George L. Hanna Medal of Honor, the highest honor awarded to police officers by the state of Massachusetts. Later that year, big Joe retired from the police department and founded McCain Investigations.

  This is that story.

  PROLOGUE

  School of Hard Knocks

  LAST WINTER I WAS COACHING youth hockey with a guy named Mark Donahue, who said he had a great idea for my next book. Upon hearing that phrase, I almost always change the subject, but Donahue is not the sort of person who usually suggests literary topics to me. With his square Irish face, jug ears and modified high-and-tight haircut, Mark Donahue's appearance belies his roots in the tenement district of Somerville, Mass., a hardscrabble town right outside of Boston. He's kind to children, solicitous to his wife, and cheerful enough with the other hockey coaches, but he's not a bookish fellow and has a real city kid's edge to the way he goes about things. Donahue and I both live in Methuen, a quiet place about twenty-five miles north of the city, on the New Hampshire border. (I often kid Donahue that, like everyone who grew up surrounded by pavement, a lot of Somerville guys moved here when they saw their first pine tree, thinking they had reached the White Mountains.)

  In Methuen, the local grocery store puts out three copies of The New York Times every morning, and two of them are still there, unsold, when the store closes at nine o'clock. It's pretty much a blue-collar town, and most of the people I know are too busy roofing, paving, installing boilers, growing apples, or fighting fires to even consider what I might be interested in writing about. Even after I've published two books and seen my work appear in newspapers and magazines across the country, the first question I hear whenever I see someone I know is “You still writing?” like it's an affliction that I'm bound to get over. And if I'm ever approached with any enthusiasm, it usually means someone wants me to write about his impending divorce, or a piece for The Eagle-Tribune on his snow-plowing business.

  So when Mark Donahue told me that he was a cop and a private detective, and that his mentor, the recently deceased Joe McCain, Sr., put all fictional detectives to shame, I became intrigued by the notion of working for McCain Investigations and writing such a book. Like all the kids in my neighborhood I grew up on detective stories, and when I was quite young thought that the English actor Basil Rathbone was Sherlock Holmes and that old black-and-white films like The Hound of the Baskervilles appearing on the Saturday matinee were some kind of primitive home movie. Sometimes I even crawled around with a magnifying glass, wearing two baseball caps back to front as I searched for clues to God-knows-what in the dusty reaches of my basement.

  My favorite television show was The Rockford Files, and its star, James Garner, who lived in a beat-up house trailer in Malibu and kept his revolver in a cookie jar, was my idea of the ultimate detective. Forget Ironside and Cannon and Mannix, I was a dyed in the wool Rockford guy. Whether zooming up the coast in his gold Firebird or hurting his knuckles after punching a wiseguy, ex-con Jim Rockford was Everyman in a checked sport coat, a guy who, like me, enjoyed eating tacos and drinking beer and kept his accounts on the back of a wrinkled envelope. For nearly five years I was occupied on Friday nights, lost in the gritty details of Jim Rockford's caseload, and therefore predisposed when Mark Donahue uttered the words “private” and “detective” in the same sentence.

  What Donahue was offering was a chance to go beyond the realm of television detectives, where the moral boundaries are black and white and even the most convoluted cases are wrapped up in under an hour. Roughly the same age, size, and complexion as Jim Rockford, Mark Donahue is an affable, gregarious man who dotes on his seven-year-old twin son and daughter. But on the street, he can change mien very quickly when challenged or threatened: his eyebrow arches up, his face darkens, and his voice drops into a guttural throb. Big Joe McCain and his operatives were all trained at the School of Hard Knocks, and almost all of the dudes opposite them— the junkies, bank frauds, and rogue cops— were a lot more experienced at the game than I was. At McCain Investigations, I'd be sent looking for people who didn't want to be found, following guys who didn't want to be followed, and entering neighborhoods in Somerville and Roxbury and Hyde Park where I was not at all welcome. It would be entertaining, no doubt, but there would be no commercials, no time-outs, and no “do-overs” if somebody got shot or stabbed or run over. These guys were playing for keeps.

  Headquartered at 106 Fulton Street in Boston's North End, McCain Investigations has been in business for the past fifteen years, tackling everything from wife beatings and warehouse rip-offs to international smuggling and gangland murders. Staffed by tenacious, hard-nosed detectives with years of experience, the company specializes in covert video camera, environmental, and “general” investigations. Cases last from a few days to several months, and their client list includes jilted spouses, nervous business executives, endangered celebrities, wary corporations, and suspicious attorneys.

  One area in which McCain Investigations has excelled is the recruitment and training of new investigators. Good thing, since other than an eye for detail, a good ear, and the ability, inherited from my late mother, to size people up upon meeting them, I have zero experience as a detective. Mark Donahue noted that it takes a solid year to break in a new investigator, as it takes that long to encounter the various types of cases. That was all the time any of us had.

  Joe McCain, Jr., president of the company and its founder's namesake, is a police sergeant in Somerville, drummer in local bands, motorcycle enthusiast, and father to three rambunctious young sons. McCain's childhood pal Mark Donahue has recently been appointed to the police department in Salem, New Hampshire, has a young family of his own, and is working the graveyard shift in a cruiser. And Detective Kevin McKenna, a Boston Housing cop, has started working part-time for a P.I. firm closer to his home. In the months since big Joe's death, the three men have tackled enough cases to keep the doors open at McCain Investigations but have reached the sad conclusion that the business should be dissolved. At the end of the year, McCain Investigations is going to be sold to a guy interested in big Joe's client list and office space. By joining Mark and Joey and crazy Kevin McKenna for their last run, I'd have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to walk in the footsteps of Joe McCain, Sr., one of the most decorated cops in Boston history, and to steep myself in the history of a company and a profession whose core values are straight out of the Old School.

  * * *

  BENEATH THE LEGEND “WE NEVER SLEEP” and the world-famous logo of the unblinking eye, the former Scottish barrel maker Allan Pinkerton opened his Chicago private investigations firm in 1850. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was the first of its kind in the United States, and Pinkerton and his sons, William and Robert, were involved in some of the most notorious cases of that century: the pursuit of Jesse and Frank James and shooting of the Younger brothers; the disruption of the “Wild Bunch,” including George “Butch Cassidy” Parker and Harry “Sundance Kid” Longbaugh; the conviction and hanging of the Missouri Kid; and a foiled assassination attempt on Abraham Lincoln aboard a train to Baltimore in 1861.

  In 1875 the undercover Pinkerton man James McFarland infiltrated a secret terrorist organization known as the “Molly Maguires,” resulting in the execution of nearly two dozen of its members. And early in the 1900s, an ambitious young man from St. Mary's County, Maryland, named Samuel Dashiell
Hammett worked a series of cases as a Pinkerton operative. His experiences formed the backbone of his indelible character Sam Spade and filled in the plots of The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key, literary detective novels that are still being read the world over.

  Even more than its most celebrated cases, however, the legacy of the Pinkerton Agency lies in the structure and intelligence of its investigative methods. Its Chicago headquarters became the original database of criminal activity, where meticulous files were kept on an ever-growing collection of wanted men and women, each of them adorned with another Pinkerton innovation— the “mug shot.” And although Pinkerton himself was reported to have an outsize ego and botched some high-profile assignments, he was known as dogged, indefatigable, and incorruptible.

  Despite all their state-of-the-art equipment and access to global information, the detectives at McCain Investigations are not that far removed from the golden age of sleuthing. Big, bluff Joe McCain, Sr., was, like Allan Pinkerton, a determined fellow who could handle himself and handle a gun, yet understood that his brain was a more potent weapon than his fists or what he wore on his hip. Both men knew their way around a courtoom and a barroom, and their daily lives brought them in contact with some of the most dangerous and influential figures of their time. When confronted with the facts of Joe McCain's life, few would disagree that he was what used to be referred to as “the genuine article.” In a city where, for some inexplicable reason, chefs and restaurant owners are considered celebrities, and in a society that often confuses victims with heroes, Joe McCain is as close to the Greek ideal of the hero as an Irish kid from Somerville is ever going to get. His highlights are exemplary: taking a bullet while gunning down a homicidal drug dealer; going toe-to-toe with the ferocious mob hit man Joe “the Animal” Barboza; unraveling sophisticated criminal activities leading to hundreds of high-profile arrests and convictions; the list goes on.