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

by Jay Atkinson

  In case I have doubts regarding Jimmy Hyde's ability to orchestrate a conspiracy that includes cops lying on the witness stand, as well as persecuting the one guy who told the truth, Doherty has offered to tell his story, as long as it's done outside of Somerville, away from those who still have designs on him. Here in the coffee shop there's a rehearsed, almost metronomic quality to his utterances, which aren't responses to my questions, because I'm not asking any. Rather, they are declarations of what Timmy Doherty and his family have been through, delivered in the flat and disinterested tone of someone with post-traumatic stress disorder.

  “The city chose to protect those guys over the truth, and the city is gonna have to pay,” he says. “Big.”

  Last February, after enduring more abuse from his fellow police officers than he could stand, Doherty filed suit against the police department, the mayor's office, and the city of Somerville under the federal Whistleblower Protection Act. In his complaint Doherty itemizes many of the indignities he has suffered, both on and off the job: repeated late night telephone threats to his home; posters on the wall in the station featuring his likeness beside that of a rodent; the word “rat” scrawled over his name on the daily roll. Right now he and his lawyer are waiting for a judge's decision on the city's motion to dismiss. He's optimistic that the judge won't allow it, and that the trial will begin next year.

  Doherty says he's put on fifty pounds because of the stress, and has thoughts of suicide. Three years ago, shortly after he testified against his fellow police officers, he nearly drank himself to death, and Joe McCain, Jr., and another cop buddy carted him off to the Winchester Hospital. His blood alcohol content was 3.5, more than three times the legal limit, and while Joey and the other cop sat outside the detox unit, Doherty kept returning to the tiny window to give them the finger.

  “It'd be quiet for a while, and we figured he'd passed out,” says Joey. “Then he'd be back, telling us to go fuck ourselves.”

  Under whistle-blower's protection, Timmy Doherty says that he's entitled to three times the amount of money asked for in the 1999 civil rights trial where he testified against Jimmy Hyde and the others (the two men arrested with Michael Henderson were asking for $1.5 million), retraining in a new career (“I'm gonna tell 'em I want to go to Tufts and be a fucking brain surgeon,” Doherty says), and his full-time pay for the remainder of his life.

  “There's two captains whose paychecks I want,” says Doherty. “And I'll come in every Wednesday and pick them up. Fuck direct deposit.”

  Doherty figures it'll take four years for his litigation to wend its way through the federal court system. “Then my career's over,” he says. “The big bucks.”

  And through the emotional accounting of someone who's been torched on the job, Doherty is familiar with all the recent instances of Massachusetts cops who have been left to swing in the wind by their fellow officers. Ironically, Doherty was a high school friend of Kenny Conley, a Boston cop who has fought a long and public battle over what occurred late one night in Mattapan.

  On January 25, 1995, a black plainclothes cop named Michael A. Cox was mistaken for a suspect during a foot chase and suffered a terrible beating at the hands of his fellow police officers. Cox was out of work for six months with a severe concussion and other injuries; the initial police investigation blamed his “accident” on a patch of ice.

  In a subsequent civil lawsuit, Cox named James J. Burgio, Ian A. Daley, and David C. Williams— all Boston cops— as his assailants. Boston Police Officer Kenneth Conley was reportedly the fourth cop on the scene. In his grand jury testimony, Conley denied ever seeing Michael Cox or witnessing the assault.

  Conley, whose recollections were contradicted by Cox, one of the original suspects, and Police Officer Richard Walker, was found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice and sentenced to thirty-four months in prison. The three assailants were found liable in civil court and lost their jobs. But not one of them ever faced criminal charges. The only cop on the scene that night who went to jail was Ken Conley— who never laid a finger on Michael Cox.

  Over time public opinion has come down on the side of Conley; most people think he got railroaded for doing what a large number of police officers do every day— clam up to protect each other. Certainly, the “blue wall of silence” and petty-minded corruption are as old as law enforcement itself. Even the Praetorian Guard probably goofed off when Julius Caesar wasn't around. But as we exit Dunkin' Donuts, I recall that it was the black police officer, Michael Cox, who was beaten senseless and wanted his fellow cops to own up to it, who had his tires slashed and received threatening phone calls for simply telling the truth. Maybe it's just a case of the Irish sticking up for the Irish, but it seems to me that Timmy Doherty's situation is closer to Cox's than to Conley's. However, Doherty never says a word about Michael Cox. That strikes me as odd, since Doherty and Cox both learned the same hard lesson, a lesson that was very familiar to a guy like Joe McCain, Sr.: You don't always get a medal for doing what's right.

  FIVE

  It All Comes Home to Papa

  You don't hate him because you think he killed your brother.

  You think he killed your brother because you hate him.

  — DASHIELL HAMMETT

  IN THE 1960S, WHEN A STRANGE CONFLUENCE OF SEX, money, celebrity, and immense political power turned a brightly lit honky-tonk in the Nevada desert into the biggest playground in America, a smaller, uglier version of that drama was unfolding on Revere Beach. In Las Vegas, the mob boss Sam Giancana pimped for Jack Kennedy while Sammy Davis, Jr., hoofed across the stage of the Flamingo and Frank Sinatra pleaded with Ava Gardner to take him back. At the Ebb Tide Lounge in Revere, the notorious hit man Joe “the Animal” Barboza downed glasses of cheap Mr. Boston Scotch poured out of a Chivas bottle as Fats Domino, pounding the keys of an old Steinway and sweating under the lights, warbled through “Blueberry Hill.” Girls from Charlestown and Medford shimmied in their tight-fitting dresses while big touring cars filled the lot and the manager, Richie Castucci, parked his shiny new Cadillac out front, with “E.T.”— for “Ebb Tide”— monogrammed on the tail fin.

  Less than a mile away, at the apex of the General Edwards Bridge, separating Revere from Lynn, Joe McCain and Leo Papile stood outside their battered Crown Vic, jotting down license plates and swapping jokes. The boulevard was illuminated from the Tiger's Tail to Kelly's Roast Beef with the glittering hulk of the roller coaster in between and the wind steady from Nahant, carrying off snatches of music from the various barrooms and the heavy, sweet odor of fried food. A black Caddy with Rhode Island plates rolled up and over the General Edwards and Papile said something about imported dagos and McCain flicked his cigar over the rail and laughed, then the two detectives climbed into their car behind a thudding of doors and glided down toward the beach.

  Long before he made it into plainclothes, McCain was aware of organized crime and how it was strangling the towns around Boston as well as the city itself. On a patrolman's salary, he always found it necessary to hold down a second job, roofing for the Hurley brothers, driving a cement truck for Boston Sand & Gravel, and unloading freight cars and lugging meat at the Stop & Shop warehouse in South Boston. Joe used to hook each two-hundred-pound hindquarter of beef, lean it on his shoulder, reach up with his left hand to twist it off the rack, and then stagger out with the meat slung over his back. After Stop & Shop conducted a time study indicating that it took a pair of experienced men three hours to unload each freight car, McCain and a club fighter from Southie by the name of Berry used Joe's technique to get it done in two. On a good night, they'd unload four cars in eight hours and get paid union wages for twelve, which no one else on the docks could match.

  While Joe McCain was breaking his back on the freight platform, all the connected teamsters from Winter Hill were enjoying cushy jobs inside the warehouse. As soon as each hind was carried in, one of these wiseguys would rip out the fillet, stuff it in a bag, and later stow the bulging bag
under his smock. They'd steal anything they could get their hands on: meat, produce, fish, even stacks of Campbell's soup cans. A lot of the truck drivers were in cahoots with them; and each warehouse for every company from Lynnfield to Quincy had at least one mob bookie, fence, and loan shark on the payroll. It was one-stop shopping for just about every type of criminal activity under the sun.

  Each evening the bookie hands out the “armstrong,” a list of horse and dog races being held around the country the next day, as well as the local daily number slip for what used to be called “the nigger pool.” All the truck drivers and warehouse workers and even the guys in the office place their bets with the connected bookie, and eventually, inevitably, they lose. So the bookie says, “Hey, you're behind three hundred bucks here. You better go see Charlie for a loan.” The next thing the poor working guy knows, the mob is into him for the loan and the weekly “vig,” a form of interest that allows him to stay even. He falls further behind and tries to think of new ways to steal from the company to pay it off. If he refuses to settle up, the mob sends a leg breaker to extract payment, which inspires the rest of the delinquent borrowers to come up with the money. There's no end to it, and this cycle repeats itself in hundreds of union and nonunion shops every day.

  There's a saying associated with this kind of activity: “It all comes home to Papa.” That is, a piece of all the thousands of little pieces that get extorted from Mr. Average Citizen in a given territory always goes back to the top mob guys, and for many years in Boston, that meant the Angiulo brothers in the North End. In the sort of ruthless expansion that would've made the Borgias jealous, the Angiulos extended their gambling and loan sharking systems into the prisons and grabbed up most of the street action by using a simple ploy. Gangsters would visit every little dive and pizza joint on lower Broadway in Somerville to offer the owner an “insurance policy” for a thousand dollars a week. When they were refused, the mob would send a group of kids to block up the toilets or slash the leatherette in the booths. Then the gangsters would make another call: What about this insurance policy? Are you interested? And the bar owner would say, Please come back.

  The Angiulos would replace the managers of these joints with their own people, and if a particular owner was easy to get along with, they'd consider making him an instant millionaire by giving him money to lend out. The newly appointed loan shark was given the money at 1 percent interest and told to put it on the street, anyplace he wanted, at 10 or 15 or 20 percent plus a weekly stay-even payment. If a guy borrowed $100 and couldn't pay it back at the end of the week, he had to pay a vig of $20. Each week the vig was due, and even if the guy was ready to settle the loan after a while, he still had to come up with $120 for the final payment. The loan shark could live pretty well on his end of the vig coming in every week. Multiply that by all the loan sharks operating under the Angiulos' control, and it was easy to see that big money was rolling in.

  The Boston Mafia ran their operation like it was the home office. They granted dealerships to various handpicked associates, and those satellite offices were expected to funnel their profits back to the corporation. If anyone bucked the system, the North End would employ guys like Joe Barboza and Jimmy and Stevie Flemmi and the McLaughlin brothers as collectors and leg breakers. Sometimes they took a baseball bat to the delinquent borrower's head, or they shot him in the back and dumped his body in the Neponset River. At the start, the tough Irish guys from Somerville's Winter Hill were like pull toys for the Angiulos. But when the Irish gangsters decided to grab their own territory and the shooting started, big Joe was nearly caught in the crossfire.

  The entire mess began at a party on September 2, 1961, in a cottage on Salisbury Beach, a run-down seaside resort twenty-five miles north of Boston. It was a hot day, and at a motley gathering of teamsters and longshoremen from Somerville and Charlestown, nearly all of them involved in the rackets, the beer was flowing when a Charlestown thug named George McLaughlin leaned over and groped the breasts of Margy Hickey. Her husband, Bill, was a Somerville teamster, and he and the teamster George Lloyd seized McLaughlin and beat him like a rented mule; his nose and jaw were broken, and he suffered a laceration of the right cheek, fractured left elbow, and a severe concussion. Afterward, Hickey and Lloyd and two other Somerville teamsters loaded the battered victim into a car and drove to Newburyport, where they dumped him at the entrance of Anna Jaques Hospital.

  Joe McCain was not in attendance at this lighthearted shindig, but for the next thirty years he made his bones on what had occurred there. Of course, the three McLaughlin brothers and their Charlestown pals were not about to let George's beating go unpunished. They visited the leader of the Somerville gang, a rugged longshoreman named Buddy McLean, and asked him to give up Hickey and Lloyd. McLean told them to go screw; besides, the two assailants had already left town. Early the next morning Buddy McLean was awakened by the barking of his German shepherd and ran outside, carrying a .38 revolver. Three men were hovering around McLean's car, and as they ran off, McLean raised his pistol in the midst of the crowded neighborhood and emptied the clip at the fleeing men. Walking back, he noticed that several wires were hanging from the grille of his car. McLean dropped into a push-up position on the street and looked underneath: four sticks of dynamite were attached to the chassis.

  Buddy McLean used his police contacts, especially the head of the Somerville detectives, a man named Gleason, to avoid gun charges and hush up his attempted murder. Suspecting, because of his Army training in explosives, that Bernie McLaughlin had wired the dynamite, McLean made it clear around town that Bernie was his principal target. Joe McCain was acquainted with all these guys, Buddy McLean and Bill Hickey and Georgie Lloyd; as kids they had played ball together in Foss Park and shot pool at Pop Travila's; most of them had joined the service together, gone off to catch the end of World War II or to fight in Korea, and returned home to join the teamsters. Even after becoming a cop, McCain drank with some of the guys at the Capitol Café and the old Baltimore Post, but he knew how to “divide the paper down the middle” and refused to take part in gambling or payoffs or anything else that stunk of the rackets.

  Joe McCain probably could've avoided the McLean-McLaughlin feud altogether if he hadn't been driving up Winter Hill, on his way back from looking at a used De Soto with Met Sergeant Billy White, when a bulletin came over the car radio that Bernie McLaughlin had been shot dead in Charlestown's City Square. Three assailants, one of them wearing a “townie” football jacket, had fled the scene in a black Oldsmobile with its trunk open to hide the license plate.

  As he and White ascended Broadway, McCain caught a glimpse of what he thought was Bobo Petricone's black Oldsmobile turning into a side street on Winter Hill. McCain had seen the car earlier when he was waiting for Billy White to pick him up: Buddy McLean, wearing a football jacket, sat beside Petricone up front, and the dirty Met cop Russ Nicholson was in the back. McCain told Billy White to turn right and go around the block, saying, “I'll bet we find Bobo's car, and I bet they did Bernie.”

  White ran back around and parked half a block from Dawn's Donut shop. Walking up the alley, McCain found Petricone's black Oldsmobile pulled off the street, the engine still warm and its trunk lid in the fully upright position, obscuring the license plate— all of which fit the description from the bulletin Joe had heard. Immediately McCain telephoned one of the most honest cops he knew, a Boston Police detective named Delbert Williams, who was looking into organized crime in Somerville, and told him what he and White had observed. Minutes later, Williams and his partner arrived, covered the front and rear doors of the donut shop, and arrested McLean, Petricone, and Nicholson for Bernie McLaughlin's murder.

  Near eleven o'clock one night thereafter, McCain was working in the rain on Revere Beach when the light atop the old brick station began to flash and the foghorn sounded, instructing all walking men to go to the nearest call box and “pull the hook.” The desk sergeant told McCain to come back in— the Boston police wa
nted to speak to him. Waiting for him by the night man's desk was Captain Joe Fallon, an impressive, silver-haired man with a deep baritone voice. Being pulled from your shift to talk to the brass was rare enough; but seeing a captain from another department set Joe's heart to pounding. He knew Fallon had to be there to ask about the McLaughlin killing; the first thing the captain said was that Joe's information had made the probable cause hearing a success. He went on to recite the facts of Joe's biography: his military service, young family, and growing reputation as a police officer.

  Then came the bad news. Captain Fallon knew that Joe came from Winter Hill and would encounter tremendous difficulty if he testified against his old buddies from the neighborhood. His family might be in serious danger, too. Fallon said he'd tried to keep Joe out of it, but he needed his testimony to make the case.

  Big Joe stood there in his dripping mackinaw with his gaze locked on Fallon. There was no bullshit in the captain's eyes; here was an honest cop. “What more can I do?” McCain asked.

  “I'd like to assign you to detectives,” said Fallon. “You know as much about these guys as anybody. And it's going to get worse.”

  Joe McCain had been on the Mets less than two years; even a hardworking, motivated cop might wait ten years to become a detective. “Don't worry, Cap'n Fallon,” he said, thrilled with his new assignment. “If I walked away from this, I might as well take off the blue suit and become one of the rats myself.”

  The threats started right away. Helen got phone calls when Joe was on the beat in Revere, saying that if he testified they'd kill little Joey and burn the house down. Because McCain and the Boston detectives feared a leak in the Somerville P.D., they decided not to file written reports on their investigation leading up to the grand jury hearing. Instead, they would meet in person for what they called “need to know” exchanges, trading bits of information on the gambling and loan sharking that had emboldened the two factions, and discussing what Joe knew about the Winter Hill gang. During one of these meetings, McCain learned that Bobo Petricone was the one making the calls to his house. In an episode he would relate on his deathbed, big Joe, after becoming fed up with the threats to his wife and infant son, went down to the Capitol Café by himself and knocked on the glass when he saw Petricone inside.