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

by Jay Atkinson

  During this conversation McCain learned that Black Jimmy had been on his own since the age of fifteen, just trying to get something going and starving half the time. The South End was like Skid Row in that era, not the tony enclave it is nowadays. Jimmy's father, who was a toy maker, died of tuberculosis when he was very young, and his mother was an alcoholic, shuttling in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Although he was shattered by his father's death, Jimmy's loyalty to his mother and retarded sister, Evelyn, kept him hustling for a couple of bucks to take home. On the street he made friends with a kid named Billy Dennett, whose father was a wino and who was even poorer than Jimmy. And he made the acquaintance of a Canadian heroin addict named Maxie, a kind of surrogate father who taught him how to shortchange.

  Shortchanging is a small-time hustle that combines sleight of hand with a bit of mental confusion. In its simplest form, the hustler sandwiches a five-dollar bill in the middle of four ones. Approaching the sucker, he says that he needs a five-dollar bill to enclose in a birthday card for a little kid and hands over his money. The sucker hands back a five, then discovers that he's been given a five himself: he's now holding nine dollars and the hustler has his five. Gimme back the five, I got another dollar, says the hustler.

  The hustler sends the sucker “back to school” by starting him off in a false count (“your four and my six is ten; gimme ten”) and in the wink of an eye has handed all the money to the sucker and then taken it all back, for a net gain of five dollars. End of transaction.

  Jimmy and Billy Dennett would start each morning by shortchanging the milkman, going on from there to hustle the grocers and butchers and florists when their shops opened up. For protection, they joined a local gang and ended up clashing with the blacks who were crossing over Mass. Ave. into the South End. The gangs fought with knives and garrison belts, and although Jimmy was only “the third or fourth toughest” in his outfit, he “could talk a little bit,” and black activist Mel King recruited him in an attempt to make peace between the two races. On the stoop in the fifties, the higher up you were, the more seniority you had. The kid sitting on the top step was “the judge,” and Jimmy was respected enough on both sides of Mass. Ave. that he was allowed to climb up to the black judge and shoot the shit for a few minutes.

  Years later, Mel King's strength as a community leader and colorful bow ties would propel an unsuccessful but groundbreaking campaign for mayor of Boston. In the late fifties King was director of a neighborhood drop-in center called the South End House on Rutland Street. He coached the local baseball team, which included fifteen-year-old Black Jimmy at catcher, and the two met often to discuss what was going on in the neighborhood. A giant of a man who tilted his little car to one side when he drove along, King was “on the square,” always true to his word, and would loan Black Jimmy small amounts of money. On occasion, Jimmy would shortchange King a few bucks, just to stay sharp.

  But not even Mel King could keep Jimmy out of juvenile detention. He and Dennett went to jail for stealing cars, and for fighting. While they were locked up, they got stabbed a couple times and stabbed other kids. Out on probation that first time, Black Jimmy got his one and only legitimate job, working for a shoe manufacturer at seventy-five cents an hour. The crowded, smelly factory and low pay taught him a valuable lesson: only suckers work for a living. Soon he was shortchanging again, making a couple hundred bucks in just a few hours, out in the sunshine, talking to girls. “Everybody was a thief in them days,” according to Black Jimmy. At least, everybody that he knew.

  * * *

  WHILE THE JURY PONDERED THE FATE of James Vincent Flemmi, Joe McCain sat in Black Jimmy's cell at the Charles Street jail, and the two men cemented a bond that would last for thirty years. It was a classic illustration of McCain's most valuable trait, the asset that more than anything else made him a cop's cop: his ability to empathize with people from all walks of life. Even the crooks loved him for it.

  When the trial resumed the next day, James “the Bear” Flemmi was nowhere to be found. After several minutes of hubbub, his attorney informed the judge that his client had not appeared. Still, the jury was brought in and Flemmi was convicted in absentia of assault with intent to murder.

  Joe McCain and the D.A. were elated; Black Jimmy was wary. With Flemmi on the loose, Black Jimmy was in serious danger, and McCain took Jimmy back to his house to strategize on their next move. Helen made corned beef sandwiches and coffee, and the two men sat in the kitchen all night talking about the case. To soothe Jimmy's fears, McCain recounted a conversation he had engaged in with his captain and the D.A., who were concerned about the expenses associated with protecting Joe's informant.

  “We have a guy who testified against the commonwealth's biggest killer,” said McCain. “Do you want me to abandon him, or would you always want me to be at his beck and call?”

  And Joe McCain always was. The next morning, he rented a truck in his second cousin's name and loaded Black Jimmy and his wife and baby into the U-Haul, and followed them up Route 2 in his own car. He had arranged new identities for Jimmy and his wife: driver's licenses, social security numbers, a little bit of cash. And in the middle of the Concord rotary Joe McCain pretended to have engine trouble and stopped his car, backing up traffic while Black Jimmy drove off to start his new life.

  ELEVEN

  The Chief Gets His Hair Cut

  A WEEK AFTER THEIR CHRISTMAS PARTY, I walk into the Somerville police station and meet Timmy Doherty walking out. It's payday and he's trussed into a camel-hair topcoat like the ones my father wore when he sold insurance, and Doherty's tie and shirt collar are pin-neat and he's had a fresh shave and shoeshine. His gaze veers over to mine and there's a moment of recognition, and I stop and shake his hand.

  “Hi, Timmy. I— ”

  He smiles at me but his face is grim. “Not here,” he says.

  I glance around the empty concrete hall, adorned with the mayor's portrait, an American flag, and the blue-and-white flag of the commonwealth. The only other person in sight is the woman in the reception area, and she's behind several inches of bulletproof glass. Timmy Doherty's eyes are small and hard, steady on mine. “Never in here,” he says. From what I've heard, Doherty's harassment at work continues, and he prefers to keep even the minutiae of his life private.

  “I just want to wish you happy holidays.”

  “Yeah. Merry Christmas,” says Doherty and goes out.

  The woman behind the glass says that Joe McCain is expecting me and unlatches the door. “You know where to go,” she says.

  I cross behind the dispatch area and knock on the door to the division commander's office. As usual, Joe McCain sits in the near dark, his bald head shining like a mushroom. There's a big, heavy-faced cop with red hands opposite, and he gives a start when I come through the door.

  “Jesus, I thought it was Caliguri,” the cop says.

  Apparently I bear a resemblance to Donald Caliguri, the ex-chief, a lean, stone-faced lawyer who was named in Doherty's whistle-blower's lawsuit and who, like me, favors a wardrobe of nylon wind pants and fleece sweatshirts. “You got the same old-fashioned haircut, too,” says McCain.

  “I prefer the term ‘classic,'” I tell him.

  “If you just walk around, ignoring anyone that says hello and treating them like pieces of shit, they'll all wonder why the old chief is here,” says the other cop, laughing. He stands up, and he's about six and a half feet tall, with gold hash marks up the sleeve of his leather jacket. “All right, I better get back to traffic duty,” he says. “High-level stuff.”

  Joey laughs and walks over to the door with him and asks E-911 operator Scott Lennon to order us some red chicken sandwiches from Lacascia's Bakery in Medford.

  “I'm like your bitch,” says Lennon, a self-professed music-and-movie freak. He and McCain are good friends and are looking forward to attending the Henry Rollins spoken word show next month at Avalon. The tall, amiable Lennon lives with his brother in his grandmother's old house an
d spends every cent he has adding to his collection of three thousands CDs and over four hundred DVDs. He's always reminding Joe McCain that without the “nonsense” in life we'd all go crazy.

  During lunch we shut ourselves into the office. Joe plays a little Miles Davis on his MP3 player to muffle our conversation and with the lights down low, it's more like a cocktail lounge than the police station. When he first came on the job in 1988, Joe was assigned to a patrol car with a veteran cop who carried a list of things to do on a clipboard with the number “3,232” written on the bottom. The list varied every day and contained items like “pick up dry cleaning” and “return videos” and the number kept being reduced by one.

  Joe asked his partner about it, and the man explained that any police officer worth a shit took care of his errands while on duty. “The chief never gets a haircut on his day off,” said Joe's mentor, adding that the number on the bottom of the clipboard represented the number of days before he could retire.

  Joey keeps his own retirement number in the back of his head somewhere. As much as he enjoys being a cop, in just a few years he'll have served his twenty. He'll buy a little place up north with a pool for the kids and teach history at a regional high school and play his drums every night. Nobody within two hundred miles will realize he was a cop or have the slightest interest in the contents of his trash.

  In the bar the other night I didn't get the whole story on Vinnie Carbone and Johnny Barnhardt and the DEA surveillance, and today we're supposed to hash this over and come up with a little strategy to counter. Here's what happened: Vinnie Carbone got a call from a Nahant cop who overheard “four task force guys” talking in a hallway at the Lynn District Courthouse. “We like this Somerville cop as being a coke dealer, this Johnny Barnhardt,” one of them said.

  The task force guy also said that Barnhardt was a friend of a sergeant in Somerville named McCain. In turn, McCain was seen hanging around the North End with Vinnie Carbone, a former corrections officer who was arrested for steroids last June.

  “That's their drug ring?” I ask Joe.

  Joey nods, smoothing the edges of his mustache. “Look, this narcotics work ain't rocket science. You get some real morons in there,” he says. “Let me tell you this: Johnny Barnhardt is getting divorced. If he's a drug dealer, he's the worst drug dealer in history. Drives an old shitbox. Can't keep his phone turned on.”

  I want to know how the DEA connected Joe and Carbone to Johnny Barnhardt, besides the fact that McCain and Barnhardt work together in Somerville.

  Joey says the vendetta against Johnny Barnhardt arose out of an incident between Barnhardt and Jimmy Hyde's old partner, a cop named Richter. Last summer at a pool party where a bunch of cops drank beer and their families played in the water, Barnhardt scolded one of Richter's kids when a fracas broke out. Richter took offense at Barnhardt singling out his kid, and angry words were exchanged. As Joe describes it, Richter took a swing at Barnhardt, a much younger man, and the ex-Marine punched Richter out.

  “Made him look like a fool,” says Joey. “For these idiots, that's enough.”

  In the dimness I notice a weird little object on Joe's desk. It looks like one of those hairy plastic trolls we used to collect as kids. But it's the disembodied head of a Barbie doll, complete with long, wavy yellow hair. Joe says that his wife made a joke about how stressed out he was and threw the doll into his cruiser just before he went out on patrol.

  “Whenever you get upset, you can think about a little head,” said Maureen.

  Scott Lennon arrives with the sandwiches: broiled chicken coated in Ah-So sauce on warm, crusty Italian bread. Nobody eats like the cops.

  “How is it?” asks Joey.

  “It's great,” I tell him. “Chicken basted in carcinogens.”

  Joe laughs. “Something's gotta kill you.”

  Joe McCain makes and takes phone calls with the frenetic industry of an AT&T operator. His eleven-year-old, Joseph, calls to finalize their last-minute Christmas shopping plans, and Joe confirms that right after work he and his three boys will ride the T into Harvard Square so they can pick up something for their mother and grandmother. A moment later Maureen calls, fretting over what to buy her mother-in-law, who lives downstairs and has everything she needs.

  Joe is soothing. “Look at it like this: my father is easy to buy for this year. He's dead.”

  While Joe is talking to his wife, Mark Donahue's voice breaks in, using the intercom feature on his cell phone. “Hey, fuck nuts,” he says. “Pick up.”

  Joe hangs up with Maureen and answers the intercom. “What do you want?” he asks.

  Donahue is working a police detail up at Rockingham Mall in Salem, New Hampshire, part of the twenty-four hours he's worked in the last thirty, including two midnight-to-eight shifts in the cruiser. He's working another graveyard shift when the detail ends, taking him through to Christmas Eve day.

  “Fucking new guy,” says Joe. “I hope you get a sudden at seven-ten tomorrow morning and have to work all day.”

  “What's a ‘sudden'?” I ask.

  Donahue's voice crackles over the intercom: “A sudden death.”

  “Just as long as it isn't your sudden death, who gives a fuck,” says Joey.

  Donahue wants to know if Joe has gotten in touch with Billy Simpkins at the DEA. “That's a roger,” Joey says.

  Joe reached Simpkins, who is the number-two operations guy in the DEA, at Baltimore/Washington International Airport the morning after the Somerville P.D. Christmas party. Of Billy Simpkins, who acted as a pallbearer at Joe Sr.'s funeral, Joey says: “He's a tough, grizzled prick, and he cried like a baby. He loved my father.”

  Back in the 1980s, when Billy Simpkins was an up-and-coming DEA agent, he and big Joe worked on a number of big cases together. During one memorable escapade, they chased a Harvard-educated drug runner around Miami Beach in a taxicab, with Simpkins pretending to be the driver and McCain his fare. In front of the coke dealer's hotel, Simpkins made the cab overheat so big Joe could take some photographs without being noticed. The guy got away but crash-landed his plane at sea and died of an overdose when he tried to offload the coke and absorbed too much of it through his skin.

  In their recent phone conversation, Joey impressed upon Simpkins that the Boston DEA guys think Jimmy Hyde “walks between the raindrops— that he can do no wrong.”

  “Hyde has all kinds of juice with these local feds,” Joe said to Simpkins.

  “Joe, he doesn't have any juice with me,” Simpkins said.

  Billy Simpkins proposed a meeting with the head of the Boston DEA office so McCain and his lawyer could go in and put their cards on the table. “They're a thousand miles off base,” says Joe. In the meantime, he's been trying to find out if Jimmy Hyde has put in an overtime slip for the Lynn District Courthouse over the last couple of weeks. That would confirm his suspicion that Hyde was one of the “task force guys” Carbone's friend overheard talking about him.

  “I may ride a fucking motorcycle and drink too much, but I'm the antithesis of a dope dealer,” says Joe, recalling one of his father's favorite sayings, “I might be fat and my mother dresses me funny, but I'm not stupid.”

  Joe calls his lawyer Joe Doyle next, to discuss their meeting with the DEA. Playing devil's advocate, Doyle suggests that meeting with members of the task force might be like walking into a hornets' nest. For instance, what if Jimmy Hyde is there, saying that McCain is a scumbag? Doyle asks. The Boston DEA agent in charge works under Billy Simpkins but has, presumably, a close relationship with Hyde, who is attached to his office. What if it's all a setup? What if they've already briefed Simpkins and convinced him there's something there?

  Joey holds the tiny cell phone in two fingers, but the veins in his forearm are popping out. His eyebrow flutters, and the muscles in his jaw are delineated into two vertical strips on each side.

  “Bad guys knew which side my father was on, and they know which side I'm on,” he says. “Does it mean that if Danny Rizzo
went away for three and a half years, I can't go to the Ocean Reef and eat fish with him? Do I have to look over my shoulder every time I go to lunch? Does it mean that every time I see a bad guy on the street, I'm involved in bad things? I say prove it, or shut the fuck up.”

  TWELVE

  Cold, Cold Heart

  EIGHT A.M. ON THE LAST DAY OF A PRETTY TOUGH YEAR, and Maureen McCain goes downstairs in the cold to answer the bell. Stomping his feet on the front porch is her husband's colleague Lieutenant Jimmy Paulito, dressed in uniform with his car running at the curb.

  “Is he home?” asks Paulito.

  Joe McCain has been out sick for five days with a miserable combination of the flu, chronic allergies, and a bout with his asthma. During a recent appointment Dr. Joel Blier of Medford told him, “You are allergic to everything inside the house and everything outside. You'd have to live in a bubble not to have problems.”

  “You want me to get him?” Maureen asks Paulito.

  “No, just give him this,” the lieutenant says. He hands Maureen an envelope printed with the city seal and beats it back to his car.

  Amidst the post-Christmas clutter of toys, games, and frazzled decorations, the three McCain children are up, playing and fighting, as boys will do. Roused by the commotion, Joe lurches into the kitchen, hacking and coughing. Maureen puts on the kettle for tea, and her husband spies the envelope on the counter and tears it open.

  SERGEANT MCCAIN: