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

by Jay Atkinson

  “It used to be, in the thirties, forties, and fifties, that three generations would stay together as a single family unit,” McCain tells me. “That's the main reason we stayed in Somerville: I wanted to raise my kids in the same house as the greatest guy in the world, my father.”

  Just to give me an idea of the influence his dad had on him, as well as the impact of the old man's death on such a wide range of people, Joey McCain has shown me the notes he kept while sitting beside his father's bed in Mount Auburn Hospital last fall. The day before he died, Joe Sr. was lying on the ward listening to jazz music with his only son and telling stories about the old days. During the gangland murders back in the late fifties and early sixties in Somerville and Charlestown, Joe Sr. was a key witness for the prosecution. Joey writes:

  He had to testify before the grand jury against some heavy hitters and found out that my mother was getting [threatening] phone calls at the house. He found out who it was when he recognized the moron's voice one day. It was Rocco “Bobo” Petricone, later to land the role in the movie The Godfather as Moe Greene. The old man went to the club they were hanging out at on Winter Hill. He found the whole group of them sitting together inside the club. He went in and asked Bobo if he could talk with him privately outside. Bobo signaled his buddies that it was OK, figuring that the old man was going to tell him he was scared to death and was going to back off of the investigation. He figured wrong. The old man grabbed [Petricone] by the throat and slammed him into the plate glass picture window in the front of the establishment and told him that if his wife got one more phone call at the house he was going to come back here with a shotgun and take care of all of them, he said he didn't care that much about the job. The phone calls stopped. Dad testified, several of them went in the can. . . .

  Dad and me are listening to Chet Baker now. It's a recording made in West Germany two weeks before he died. He has the most beautiful tone. Dad just fell asleep listening to Chet blow ‘My Funny Valentine.' I'm beginning to feel a strange sort of comfort when I am here; although it's hard to see him this way, I'm glad I'm here. Life is coming full circle. I was just looking at him laying there. He looked uncomfortable. It made me think of a book I read some time ago about Christ; I thought about the suffering he went through before he died. I guess we all have to go through some type of suffering before we die. We all have a cross to bear, so to speak.

  At the conclusion of his shift, Joe McCain takes me through the dispatcher's room, into a dingy hallway and out past the lockup. We pause at the head of the corridor that runs between the jail cells, empty but for a pair of boots and rumpled clothes set on the floor. They belong to the unit's sole prisoner.

  “Hey, Richard,” says McCain, hailing the guy in the cell. He's a regular tenant here, a fifty-year-old wheelchair-bound man who likes to get drunk and roll into traffic and has been in protective custody for forty-eight hours.

  A man's voice echoes from the last cell. “What?”

  “Where's your chair?” McCain asks.

  “I don't know.”

  McCain stands there with his hands on hips, glancing into a nearby closet and down the adjoining hallway. “Well, we're gonna give you a fucking bicycle and you can pedal it with your hands,” he says.

  The prisoner laughs and swears at us and we duck out of the corridor and McCain presses a button on the wall and the heavy steel door of the mechanic's bay climbs up its track. We emerge onto the lot, and as we go across the wet pavement, my head is teeming with Angels and Outlaws and Rocco Petricone and big Joe McCain dying at Mount Auburn and Chet Baker at the end of his life playing “My Funny Valentine.” Like it or not, realize it or not, life is about measuring up, finding out whether you can hang with the big boys. I wonder aloud what use I'm going to be at McCain Investigations. I have no law enforcement training and no real connections in the city, other than reporters at a couple of newspapers.

  Joey McCain laughs and tells me not to worry about it. “Cops notoriously think they know everything,” he says. “We'd rather have a college guy who doesn't know a thing, so we can teach him the job.”

  “When are we going to get a case?” I ask, getting into my car.

  McCain grins at me. “Soon,” he says.

  As I weave my way through the jumble of old paved-over cart paths that form the nexus of downtown Somerville, past the muffler shops and taverns and the boarded up frontage of the Union Square Redemption Center, it occurs to me that I've got my first case: looking for Joe McCain, Sr.

  On the night that his father died, Joe Jr., his fellow P.I. Mark Donahue, and another Somerville cop named Mike Mulcahy drove out to visit big Joe's old partner, Leo Papile. In Leo's reckoning there were two kinds of people in the world— cops and assholes. The seventy-seven-year-old retired detective lived alone in a modest, brick-faced Colonial just over the Neponset Bridge in Quincy. He and Joe Sr. had worked MDC cases together for over a decade, locking up shitbirds of every variety: bank robbers, murderers, drug dealers, pedophiles, even dirty cops. Leo was Joe McCain's comrade in arms, his best friend, and as young Joey knocked on the door, hauling along a bag full of imported beer, he swallowed hard and set his jaw.

  Tall and slender, Leo had always been well-dressed and well-groomed, with the slicked down look of the old Vegas Rat Pack, clean shirt, nice tie, his hair shining and parted to one side. But when he opened the door on Joey and his friends, he was an old man in battered pants and a mothy brown cardigan, rheumy-eyed, his hands shaking. Nothing inside the house had changed since Leo's beloved wife, Susan, died of cancer in 1973. The kitchen floor was still covered in the original worn linoleum. Around the table were metal chairs with hard vinyl seats, and the wooden cabinets and simple black clock were right out of the mid-seventies; even the color scheme was from another era, everything in brown, light green, and yellow. It was like time had stopped.

  The men all shook hands. The beer came out of the bag, and someone fumbled through the drawers for an opener. Leo was a good-hearted, friendly man but abrupt and rather gruff. At a banquet one time he found himself sitting beside the mother of Joey McCain's former girlfriend. “Do you know who I am?” he asked. “No,” the woman said. “I'm afraid I don't.” Leo glared across the table at the younger McCain. “Joey, who is this fucking broad?”

  On this particular night, Leo is adamant about the ground rules for big Joe's funeral. “There'll be no crying,” he says. “There's gonna be no bullshit.”

  Suddenly he rises from the kitchen table. “Let me show you guys something. Come here. Come in here,” says Leo in his husky voice, leading his visitors into the next room. Spread over the dining room table are a raft of newspaper clippings, about his son Leo Jr., who is director of player personnel for the Boston Celtics, and stories about his grandchildren playing high school and college sports. When he wants to visit that part of his life, Leo explains, he goes into the dining room.

  “Come over here,” Leo says. He directs the three men back into the kitchen and opens up a cabinet just to the right of the sink. Taped on the back are three calendar pages, two of them yellowed and one from the current month. The first is from March 1973, with a date circled in red.

  “See this right here?” Leo asks. “This is the day my wife died. And this other one, this is the day I retired from the cops— a job that I loved.” The retired detective stabs his finger at the third calendar page, October 22, 2001. “And this is the day Joe McCain died. There are just three days. Guys, that's my life right there.”

  Four months later, Leo Papile himself would be dead.

  There's steady drizzle over Somerville now, as I drive by the Boys & Girls Club and beneath the railroad underpass, a steady mist falling on heavily laden trees and the streets gleaming in the wet. Detectives are in the business of reconstruction, piecing together crime scenes, motives, patterns of behavior, even the trajectory of a life when the situation calls for it. But when I think of Leo Papile and his calendar pages, I can't help recalling something else that
Joey had written about his father when he was laying up in that hospital bed at Mount Auburn.

  We are all supposed to bury our parents; it's the way things should work. Still, it doesn't come easy. I just wish he could have stayed around a little longer so that my children could have really known their papa. Before my first son, Joseph, was born, Dad said to me, “Remember something, if you are not a success with your family, you are a success nowhere; measure your success by how much time you spend with your kids and your wife and how you treat them; because when all is said and done nothing else matters in this world.”

  I believe those words, and try like hell to live by them myself. And as I set out on my year at McCain Investigations, it occurs to me that my most difficult case will be reconstructing the life of Joe McCain, Sr., to conduct my own private investigation into the force of his personality and so come to know the man after he has gone.

  TWO

  The Wild, Wild East

  AT THE START OF THE SEASON back in the 1950s and early sixties, thirty Metropolitan District Commission policemen in their dress blue uniforms, each over six feet tall, would march out of the Revere Beach station two abreast. As families crowded the platform of the gigantic Cyclone roller coaster and the kids all cheered, the Mets would mount the steps in formation and take the first roller coaster ride of the year. When they disembarked, the cops would say, “How you doin', kids? Wanna take a ride?” while handing out fistfuls of tickets. And a lot of the Mets kept a couple extra passes tucked in their wallets so children with little or no money would be able to take a ride later in the summer.

  Joe McCain loved the action on Revere Beach and he loved the Met uniform, which he first donned in 1959. Throughout his career, whenever he ran afoul of departmental politics and some vexed lieutenant threatened to bust him out of plainclothes and back to uniform, shipping him to someplace like the Quabbin Reservoir, where he'd have to patrol the old fire roads after midnight, McCain would laugh and say “Go ahead,” because his pride and joy was the double-breasted Met tunic with the brass buttons. He intended to be buried in it.

  The Metropolitan District Commission, originally known as the Parks Commission, was established by the Massachusetts state legislature in 1893, for the purpose of “suggesting a method of securing and holding a twelve mile area about Boston ‘for open spaces for Exercises and Recreation.'” Initially composed of Boston and thirty-six surrounding cities and towns, the MDC grew to include fifty-three municipalities with a combined population of over two and a half million people. Administered by a commissioner and four associate commissioners, today the MDC presides over a vast array of passive and active recreation facilities that encompasses five major land reservations, seventeen artificial ice-skating rinks, two golf courses, seventeen major saltwater beaches and four freshwater beaches; a ski tow and slopes; two golf courses, dozens of playgrounds, tennis, handball, and basketball courts; foot trails and bridle paths; picnic areas, two urban zoos, a museum, the Hatch Memorial Shell on Boston's Esplanade, and a number of historical sites including the Bunker Hill Monument and Fort Warren on Georges Island in Boston Harbor. Assisted by local authorities, the MDC is responsible for operations in six major areas: parks, water, sewerage, engineering, construction, and in Joe McCain's heyday, municipal policing.

  The Metropolitan District Commission police had a long and distinguished history when Joe McCain signed up to take the qualifying examination in 1956. The first officers were hired in 1894, and within two years, a sergeant, seven uniformed patrolmen, and four call men were given full police powers. The original Mets were also responsible for park maintenance and the supervision of laborers, an odd combination of law enforcement and municipal duties that survived until the modern era and fell under the purview of Met captains— a management two-for-one that represented an incredible bargain for the commonwealth. In the 1890s, a Metropolitan police officer's pay was $2.25 per day. However, a patrolman's uniform was $21.00, minus the cost of the brass buttons. In a typical bureaucratic irony, the commonwealth paid for the buttons while the officer was responsible for the uniform itself.

  When Joe McCain applied to become a Met the force boasted 628 members and the salary was $48 per week, which was a considerable pay cut from the $150 he was earning as a roofer for the Hurley brothers, who ran a local construction company. In those days, the Chinese laundry would starch your shirts for ten cents apiece and bookies like Joe Rennaro walked up and down Marshall Street collecting the daily numbers from housewives in kerchiefs, teamsters on their way to work, and disabled soldiers and sailors. By law, women were not allowed to sit on barstools, and the horse-and-wagon junkman rattled up Winter Hill every morning at sunrise, calling to his team in Yiddish. Steel-wheeled trains ran from the car barns in Teele Square down the middle of Broadway, and young war vets like Joe McCain played hi-lo in Pop Travila's pool room and hung out at joints like the Capitol Café and the old 3-1-8 Club. Joe was making good money at Hurley Bros., with an extra fifty cents an hour for driving the truck.

  But the romance of the cop job appealed to him, as well as the broad jurisdiction of the Mets. In the postwar era, business was booming in places like Somerville and Medford and Chelsea, and so was organized crime. Big Joe, his hands covered in tar from scratching out peastone roofs all day, spent his nights in the back row of Professor Bloomberg's law class at Suffolk University, prepping for the Met exam. Like many men of his generation, McCain possessed native intelligence and a great deal of common sense but never went to college; the police entrance test was the only blue book examination he ever took, earning a 100 percent on the law portion (“What is a crime? A crime is an act committed or omitted in violation of public law either forbidding it or commanding it to be done”) but proving his city kid's weakness in geography. The one question that stumped him— what is the largest river flowing through Western Massachusetts?— had Joe McCain wondering, Jesus Christ, where the hell is Western Massachusetts? The correct answer was the Connecticut River, but Joe put down the Merrimack, which meanders through Lowell and Lawrence, 25 miles north of Boston.

  McCain earned a 90 percent overall and went to third on the Met waiting list. Meanwhile, the Hurley brothers, two skinny, indefatigable men in their forties from Joe's old neighborhood on Winter Hill, kept their raw-boned young apprentice busy from sunrise to dusk, climbing up and down ladders and hauling buckets of tar. Joe also moonlighted for the teamsters hauling sides of beef, and while waiting for his appointment onto the police department, he surveyed his life and found it lacking in only one area. He needed a girl.

  In the fall of 1957, twenty-year-old Helen Dunn was in her second year of nurse's training at Somerville Hospital when a middle-aged woman named Isabelle McCain was admitted to the floor to have her gallbladder removed. On the eve of the surgery, her three grown sons visited Mrs. McCain, and after they departed, with a sly glance Isabelle McCain asked the pretty young nursing student if she had liked any of them.

  “Who's the tall one?” asked Helen Dunn. “He's handsome.”

  Isabelle McCain's tall, handsome son, the oldest of the three, was Joseph Elmer McCain, twenty-seven years old and a Navy war veteran. McCain was lean and brown from working all day in the sun and wore his dark hair in a crew cut. He had prominent ears, a sturdy jaw, and the long, bony face of a young Lee Marvin. That first evening he was dressed in khaki pants and an oxford shirt, the sleeves turned back to display the tattoo of a sailor wielding a mop on his right forearm. Helen learned that Joe had grown up on Marshall Street in the Winter Hill district of East Somerville, during the Depression. “If you came from there, you were either a criminal or a cop,” she used to say.

  The Dunns were “lace curtain Irish” from the west side of town, and Helen was a slim, lovely girl with auburn hair and blue eyes. The day after their meeting in the hospital, when Joe McCain returned to his mother's bedside alone, he asked young Helen if she would like a ride home after work.

  Her heart fluttered; certainly, she wo
uld. But no sooner had Joe descended to the lobby to wait for her than Helen approached the female patient in the bed next to Isabelle McCain's. The young nurse explained that she was taking a ride home with Mrs. McCain's son, but that she really didn't know him. “If I don't come back tomorrow, call the police,” she said to the startled woman.

  Of course, Joe McCain was the perfect gentleman, a bit taciturn perhaps, but over the course of his mother's hospital stay, he told Helen a little about himself. He had attended St. Ann's grammer school and was an altar boy at the church. A natural lefty, Joe had had that hand tied behind his back by the nuns, who taught him the looping right-handed penmanship he was known for. In those days, Joe worked as a pinsetter in a bowling alley and a busboy in a downtown hotel and couldn't wait to get out of school. He enlisted in the Navy on his sixteenth birthday, April 20, 1945, intent on getting back at the Nazis after his father, a Navy veteran of World War I and also named Joseph, shipped out with the Merchant Marine and was torpedoed and wounded off Long Island. Joe grew six inches and put on forty pounds in the Navy, earning his high school equivalency before he was discharged.

  Helen's mother loved Joe, who often joked upon his arrival at the Dunn residence that he was there to visit Mrs. Dunn, not her little girl. But Mr. Dunn, a cantankerous fellow, used to say, “What's he hanging around here for? He's too old for you.” After Joe's father died of his war wounds in 1949, the family had lived for a few years in Miami, where Joe supported them by working as a steel erector. Mr. Dunn used the fact that Joe's car had Florida license plates as evidence that he was bound to take off at a moment's notice. But Joe McCain was home to stay.

  After a year of dinners at the Venice Café, fancy dress balls, and long drives in Joe's old black Ford, which now had a set of Massachusetts tags, he proposed to Helen, and they were married at St. Clement's Church on October 12, 1959. Joe still hauled beef at night and worked every weekend for the Hurley brothers, but his new day job was the envy of other men who'd grown up on Winter Hill and dreamed of trading their labors for a real career. After two and a half years on the waiting list, Joe McCain was appointed to the Metropolitan Police shortly before his wedding day, and when the couple returned from their honeymoon journey through New Hampshire and Canada, he took up his duties patrolling on Revere Beach. Helen would stand at the door of their tiny apartment and watch him drive off in his uniform, the most handsome sight she had ever seen.