by Jay Atkinson
* * *
JOE MCCAIN WAS A SOFTY when it came to kids, dogs, and little old ladies, but early in his career he earned the reputation of a guy who could punch his way out of a tight corner. One night he and another cop named Tom O'Malley were injured when their cruiser rolled over during a chase. A large, fierce-tempered man with a round head and beetle brows, O'Malley had also grown up on Winter Hill and was known as a malingerer. After the accident, McCain stayed out a week; O'Malley remained on sick leave for a year. Shortly after Officer O'Malley returned to active duty, he ran into McCain inside the old Baltimore Post VFW, a small, ivy-covered brick building on the corner of Walnut Street and Broadway in Somerville.
“You went back to work just to embarrass me,” said O'Malley, looming over Joe McCain, who was seated at the bar. “You should've stayed out as long as I did, and collected.”
Joe remained on his barstool. “Well, Tommy, you're you and I'm me,” he said.
“Fuck you, McCain,” said O'Malley.
A crowd of teamsters and cops and their dates followed the two men out to the alley. Joe McCain removed his false tooth and bridge and placed it on the lip of a tractor trailer, then squared off with the much bigger man.
Three punches and O'Malley was on the ground. Eschewing the Marquis of Queensberry Rules, he tried to kick his opponent, and McCain leaped on him and administered a pretty good beating. “That's it,” said O'Malley. “I had enough.”
While McCain was retrieving his false tooth, he heard someone running over the gravel and turned to see the vanquished O'Malley charging at him. Stepping aside, McCain used the other guy's momentum to smash him into the solid steel hull of the tractor trailer. Again Joe pummeled him.
Back inside the Baltimore Post, McCain washed up in the men's room, tidying his nicks and bruises. Afterward he went to the bar and purchased two bottles of beer, carrying them across the room to O'Malley, who was alone and brooding at one of the tables.
“Hey, Tom, we're both cops,” said Joe. “Have a beer on me.”
“What're you, a fucking asshole?” asked O'Malley. He grabbed the beer bottle and cracked McCain across the forehead with it, then kicked him in the leg. The room erupted in pushing and shoving, and after McCain got a couple more punches in and the two were separated, he went home to discover that he had suffered a broken fibula in his right leg. He had accumulated very little sick time and dragged himself into work the next day barely able to stand up. After roll call, a grizzled lieutenant named Armitage told the young patrolman to see him in the office.
“Make yourself scarce, McCain,” said Armitage, who had heard about the fight and, like everyone else, despised O'Malley. “Gimme a call in a couple of days.”
McCain didn't say a word. Out the door he limped and climbed into his car and went home. Every other day McCain would call the station and tell Armitage that his leg was getting better but he still couldn't put any weight on it.
“When you can walk without a limp, come on back,” the lieutenant said.
“Well, what about my— ”
Armitage interrupted him. “Don't worry about it,” he said.
After a week McCain returned, and nobody said a thing about his paid leave of absence. But he always worked like a bull when he was there, and McCain soon distinguished himself as a cop who could use either his fists or his noggin.
Sometimes patrolmen were assigned to a cruiser, but often they were on foot. As a “walking man,” Joe McCain wore his dress blue uniform, a visored cap, and his traffic belt with a nightstick and his service revolver attached. There was no patrol car, no radio, and no partner out on the beat; if there was an emergency, Joe was supposed to find a call box and ring the station. On the boulevard one day, Officer McCain received a complaint that an intoxicated man was disturbing the peace. A short distance along Joe found a heavyset, forty-year-old guy with several drinks in him, bothering families and harassing members of the crowd that had gathered.
“Let's go,” said McCain, taking the man's wrist. “You're under arrest.”
The man tried to run away and McCain, still grasping him by the arm, ran alongside. Up and over a parked car the man went, with Joe right beside him. People in the crowd were encouraging him to pull out his nightstick and bash the guy's brains in, but Joe never used a baton in all his years on the job. He knew it was the quickest way to incite a riot. The two men ran, side by side the whole way, and as passersby stopped to watch, Joe McCain laughed to himself when the drunk began to tire and stopped in front of a hamburger stand, panting like a dog.
“Have you run out of gas yet?” asked McCain.
The man nodded, unable to speak. On the sidewalk half a dozen onlookers were clapping, and one of them said, “Hey, that's pretty good, Officer.”
Another time McCain was working the night shift when a caller to the station complained about a large group of men dressed as women making noise in front of a bar. The duty sergeant assembled a handful of patrolmen including Joe McCain and ordered them to round up the loiterers and bring them in. Most of the cross-dressers were performing at Mede's Log Cabin, a nightclub on Bennington Street that featured drag shows. (The proprietor, Eddie Mede, was a well-built fellow who possessed a black belt in karate and taught self-defense to the Revere Police.) Apparently one of the shows had spilled over to the street and was creating a nuisance.
Two dozen cross-dressers were arrested that day and shepherded into the paddy wagon. The Revere Beach station house contained a half dozen six-by-eight cells on the lower level, a padded cell, and three cells for women upstairs. While the prisoners were being booked, the sergeant noticed something and hailed Joe McCain, who was escorting groups of two and three to the men's cellblock in the basement.
“Hey, Joe, we got a problem here,” said the sergeant. “Some of these people we got downstairs are women.”
McCain looked over at a pair of them who were being fingerprinted; they wore curly blond wigs and makeup, and were lacking in facial hair. They were almost pretty.
“What are you talking about, Sarge?” asked McCain.
“They don't have an Adam's apple,” his boss said.
The sergeant was right. “What are we gonna do?” McCain asked.
The old desk sergeant looked at Joe McCain like he was about to assign the most important task in the history of police work. “Why don't you go downstairs and find out?” he said.
“Excuse me, Sarge, but how the fuck am I going to find out?”
“One by one,” said the sergeant. “You know what I mean.”
It dawned on McCain what was required of him, and taking another cop along, he trudged downstairs and had his partner open each of the cells in turn. “Come out here, you,” said McCain, who reached down and felt each of the prisoners between his or her legs. “Upstairs,” he said. “You stay here,” he told another.
Half of the group was sent upstairs, and McCain called after them, “Hey, Sarge, how am I doing?”
“You're doing fuckin' wonders, kid,” the sergeant said.
That sort of perseverance marked Joe McCain's early career and won him notice from his superiors. And he made some lasting friendships on Revere Beach, including Al Seghezzi, the son of a cement and terrazzo worker from Bergamo, Italy, who eventually rose to the position of deputy superintendent of the Mets, and the first and most legendary of Joe's detective partners, the colorful Leo Papile. But even a hero must have an idol, and when he was starting out Joe McCain found his in a cop named Bill Parsons. Shot by a Japanese sniper on Guadalcanal at age seventeen and drafted by the New York Giants, Parsons was a formidable presence on Revere Beach for nearly four decades. Despite his size— six foot five and 250 pounds— Parsons was known for his gentleness and the sympathetic way he dealt with a beat cop's problems. When he came across a seven- or eight-year-old who was crying because he'd lost at one of the carnival games— where the basketballs didn't quite fit through the hoops and the milk bottles were made of concrete and couldn't be knocked
over— Parsons would fix the carny with a stare and say, “Give his money back,” then carry the kid over to Khor's for an ice cream cone.
From Bill Parsons the young Joe McCain learned that a good cop remained in control of himself and the situation at all times. The little things were paramount: how you stood and how you conducted yourself and how you interacted with the “motoring public.” One night in the Revere station, Parsons was having coffee with a patrolman named Moretti who had been his teammate on the only Revere High football team to go undefeated when an ill-tempered sergeant named Bob Smith walked in and said, “What the fuck are you guys doing here?”
Sitting in the corner was Joe McCain, new on the job and happy just listening to the old football buddies reminisce. Six years younger than Bill Parsons, Joe modeled himself on the ex-Marine and even wore his cap at the same angle. So he was surprised to hear another cop talk to Parsons that way, as the bald-headed titan was respected like no one else on the beachfront. Young Joe raised his eyes when the sergeant made his remark, and watched as Parsons came around the booking desk and stood in front of Smith.
“Watch what you say,” said Parsons.
“Why, who's going to stop me?” asked the sergeant.
Parsons shot out a tremendous right hand— bop— and knocked Bobby Smith cold on the station house floor. Joe McCain leaped to his feet, wondering what to do, and Parsons grinned at him and said, “Relax, kid, you got thirty years. You're going to see it all, and it's going to be over before you know it.”
Many a Saturday afternoon Joe McCain and Bill Parsons went to the practice range together, where both men were terrible shots with a handgun. They'd pull their targets up on the wire and look at the silhouettes and laugh, saying, “Good thing we never get in shoot-outs.” But just a few years before Joe shot Vladimir Lafontant on Wood Avenue and won the Medal of Honor, Bill Parsons responded to a call with his partner Bill Delaney in the middle of the summer at the beach. Two stickup men from Dorchester had robbed a bank and were trying to go the wrong way down the boulevard. Parsons and Delaney stopped short in their cruiser and cut the bank robbers off. The two men jumped out with their guns ablaze; one of them shot Bill Delaney in the leg, and he went down.
The sidewalk was roiling with beachgoers, and women screamed at the noise of the gunfire. But carefully taking aim, Bill Parsons leveled his .38 on the roof of the patrol car and shot the bank robber through the head from forty feet away.
A bronze plaque commemorating Officer William Parsons's bravery is fixed to the wall just inside the door to the old Met station on Revere Beach, which is now manned by the State Police. When Parsons retired in 1985 after thirty-five years as a uniformed patrolman, he took a job in security at the Suffolk Downs racetrack, just a couple of miles from his old stomping grounds. But he wasn't happy there and could be found walking the beach at four and five o'clock in the morning, reliving the horror he'd witnessed as a young rifleman on Guadalcanal. Then one May afternoon in 1986, Parsons walked into a men's room at the racetrack, entered one of the stalls, sat down, and shot himself in the head.
Joe McCain managed the funeral, just as he'd handled the investigation on behalf of the department when Bill Parsons had killed the bank robber. There were rumors that Parsons, who still lifted weights and walked every day, had been diagnosed with the same form of cancer that had subjected his father-in-law to an excruciating death. But nobody knew for sure, and when the Marine Corps honor guard and the mounted policemen and all the young Mets he had tutored over the years were gathering for the funeral, Joe McCain walked up to the coffin, leaned over, and kissed Bill Parsons on his big, bald head.
“You asshole,” said Joe. “Why didn't you call me?”
THREE
The Strange Case of Joe Jr. and Mr. Hyde
The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are as bold as a lion.
— PROVERBS 28:1
FOR MY FIRST CASE AT MCCAIN INVESTIGATIONS, I expected to work the late night repo detail with Mark Donahue, retrieving cars from remote or inhospitable locales on behalf of an insurance company. If I was fortunate, I'd get to sit in the cab with the tow truck driver and tell him when to back up. But Joe McCain, Jr., called me late one Friday afternoon to say he needed my help with a countersurveillance, right there at the McCain residence in Somerville. It seemed a neighbor had reported to Joe's wife that early on the previous Monday morning, after Maureen McCain had carried the family's trash out to the curbstone and gone back inside, a brown-haired stranger wearing a “carpenter's coat” had approached the McCains' house, grabbed the four bags of trash, pitched them into the trunk of his car, and driven away. The neighbor described the man's car as a plain, dark blue Crown Victoria— an undercover cop's car, Joe said.
Snatching a guy's trash is an old detective's trick, Joey told me, often used when trying to “do” somebody. Using the early morning darkness as cover, you tiptoe up to somebody's garbage, haul it away, and then pore over the receipts, phone bills, discarded bottles and wrappers, and any unusual or illicit paraphernalia that turns up. The goal is to determine what your subject is doing, buying, drinking, smoking, or snorting. What was unusual about this case was grabbing the trash at 7:00 A.M., after the light had come up; the dark blue Crown Vic, which indicated that the trashman was a fellow police officer; and the fact that the guy getting “done” was none other than Joe McCain, Jr.
Joe had a theory, too, about who it was. After his late father's high-profile career and his own propensity for grabbing headlines, Joey has his share of enemies both inside and outside the Somerville P.D. Working off the detail of the trash taker's “carpenter's coat,” he surmised that his early morning visitor could have been a Somerville cop attached to the DEA named Jimmy Hyde.
A burly veteran cop, undercover operative, and martial arts expert in his mid-forties, Hyde often wears a scally cap and a lined, midlength canvas jacket like the one noted by the witness. An old enemy of Joe McCain, Sr., Jimmy Hyde is “no fucking good,” according to Joe Jr. In 1999, two plaintiffs, Christopher Mittell and German Alfonso, brought a successful civil lawsuit against Jimmy Hyde, after alleging that he inflicted a beating on them and a handcuffed prisoner named Michael Henderson in 1994. The jury found that Hyde had used excessive force against Mittell. Both McCains went ballistic when they heard about that particular rights violation, but Joey says Hyde got off easy by intimidating the victim and his fellow police officers. Joey goes on to compare Hyde's use of force against Mittell with an episode his father was involved in several years earlier. On that occasion Joe Sr. got into a fistfight with another cop in the rear lot of the Revere police station because the guy had struck McCain's handcuffed suspect.
“Look. I've made three hundred arrests and pissed off about four of 'em,” Joey says. “I treat 'em like human beings. I don't find it necessary to belittle people.”
The day after the incident with Hyde and Mittell, Patrolman Timmy Doherty, who was an eyewitness, came to visit Joe Sr. and asked him what to do. Doherty was troubled by what he had seen happen to Michael Henderson that same night, but was reluctant to break the law enforcement code of silence. Nobody likes a rat.
“Tell the truth,” said Joe Sr.
His young colleague wasn't so sure. But McCain Sr. repeated that Doherty had to tell the truth— if only to avoid being named a coconspirator when the real story came out. When the case against Jimmy Hyde for violating Alfonso and Mittell's civil rights eventually went to federal court, Doherty testified that he had watched the beating of Henderson through a two-way mirror. Henderson had a couple of teeth knocked out, his eyes were swollen shut, and at one point an enraged Hyde had leaned over and bitten him on the chest, according to Doherty. At trial, however, Michael Henderson contradicted Doherty's testimony by saying under oath that nothing had occurred, even though he had previously told news reporters that he had been bitten on the chest by Hyde. The police department never disciplined Jimmy Hyde, and a line was drawn between him and the Mc
Cains, who had sided with Doherty.
This is the sort of thing that Joey McCain fears the most. It's not difficult to damage someone— to ruin a career or a life, especially a cop's. With even the slightest taint to a good cop's reputation, he can be passed over for promotions, ostracized by his colleagues, and distrusted by his neighbors. McCain always believed that Henderson's waffling was a result of pressure from Hyde. Now he wondered if he was feeling some of that pressure himself.
Over the years, the McCains had accumulated a few enemies on the police force. An unscrupulous cop might be expected to rummage among Joey's trash for a few weeks, then produce some “evidence”— perhaps a tiny amount of planted cocaine, syringes, or a bogus record of drug transactions— showing enough to procure a search warrant. During a subsequent tossing of the house, the dirty cop could slip a bag of coke into the McCains' bureau, let another cop find it, and voilà, the demise of Joey's career, as well as four decades' worth of a sterling family reputation.
It's not easy to get a search warrant, particularly for a cop's house. Joey was hoping that whoever it was (and wouldn't he like to know) would come back to gather more phony evidence, and he had arranged this countersurveillance to catch him in the act. The idea was, as Joe Sr. always said, to “think like the criminal” and thus head off his next move. If Joey could videotape the person who was grabbing his trash in the act of doing it again, I.D. the person, and then take the tape to the chief, he could make the argument that it was a setup. Then, later, when the guy went in to the chief and said, “Acting on a tip, I've been pulling McCain's trash for two months and found cocaine residue and syringes— I think we should get a warrant,” the chief could turn around and say, “Yeah, Joe's been watching ya do it, and has a videotape, and this case you're trying to make is bullshit.” The big question, then, is who's got the jump on whom right now?
