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

by Jay Atkinson

  Pursuant to M.G.L. c. 31, sections 41–45, you are hereby notified that you are suspended from the Somerville Police Department for a period of three (3) days, without pay. Your suspension shall occur on January 3, 4, and 5.

  This suspension is a result of your conduct on December 18th, while out of work allegedly due to illness, you were at a liquor establishment (Tir na nOg) shortly after midnight and were observed by Captain John O'Connor drinking an alcoholic beverage (Guinness Stout). The following morning you remained out of work, again allegedly due to illness.

  The letter cites Joey under Departmental Rules and Regulations Section G, Rule 8: “feigning an illness or injury.” Captain John T. O'Connor has signed it.

  Seeing the look on Joey's face, Maureen shepherds the kids into the other room to play with their new Xbox. Joe picks up the phone and calls his good friend Somerville Patrolman Mike Kennelly. “This is great, Joe,” says Kennelly, who is known for his sense of irony. “You get the whole weekend off.” In Kennelly's opinion, the suspension and the letter will help Joe build a case that certain elements in the department are arrayed against him. “Before it just looked like you were paranoid,” he says. “Now everyone can see they are out to get you.”

  Joe McCain isn't surprised by this latest development. In a letter he wrote to Chief George McLean sent just before Christmas, he recounted being called into Captain O'Connor's office regarding his midnight appearance at the nOg a week earlier. In his explanation to O'Connor and subsequent letter to the chief, McCain stated that the bar staff at the pub was not answering the phone that night and he had driven there to ask “fellow musician Mr. Ronin Quinn” if they'd be playing a gig together the following Sunday. The restorative powers of Guinness notwithstanding, after a brief conversation with Quinn, Sergeant McCain reported back home, where his dutiful wife tucked him into bed.

  John O'Connor happened to be the watch commander the night Jimmy Hyde reportedly beat up a handcuffed Michael Henderson inside the police station. In his whistle-blower's lawsuit, Timmy Doherty noted that O'Connor was the one person who could've prevented or stopped the beating, yet he did nothing and later ignored the harassment Doherty continues to endure. Of course, the McCains were on Doherty's side in that matter, and now O'Connor just happens to be snooping around the Tir na nOg after midnight and writes up Joe Jr. for having a glass of stout. This strange coincidence fails to make it into Joey's letter to the chief, as there is no official policy relative to “ball busting.”

  Joey notes in his letter that the department is filled with “the sick, the lame and the lazy”— officers who falsify illnesses and stay out for years at a time. Before this bout with asthma, Joe McCain had taken fewer than ten days of sick time in three years, according to departmental records. Clearly, he does not fall into the lazy category.

  Joey does have three written reprimands in his jacket, all related to a single incident. A letter dated November 16, 1998, from then–Night Commander Captain George McLean details a “snake incident” that occurred while Joe was on patrol. A citizen who reported that his pet boa constrictor was on the loose had called an officer to a downtown residence. The patrolman summoned the animal control officer, and while he was waiting made sarcastic comments about the snake and its owner over the radio.

  Back at the police station, Lieutenant Dave Damron came over the radio and ordered the patrolman to “lift the hook”— stop transmitting over the radio and call the station on the telephone. At that moment, Sergeant Joe McCain, who was also out in a patrol car, called over his radio, “189 to 184. Yeah, just let the commander know, we can go back to shoot the snake, if he would like that.”

  In a triumph of administrative hairsplitting, Joe was cited as being negligent for not admonishing the other officer, which was his duty as street supervisor that night, and for his wisecrack. In fact, his bosses found three separate rules violations in Joe's brief radio call. Over fifteen years of street-level police work, these are the only written reprimands on McCain's record— far below the average for such a proactive cop.

  On the other hand, his jacket contains eleven letters of commendation, from his superiors in the department, other city employees, and citizens— for helping to free hostages, for recovering stolen property, and for speaking to youth groups on his days off, among other things.

  An hour after receiving O'Connor's letter, Joey is ensconced in his personal command center and music studio in his basement. Two worn leather sofas face each other, connected by a wall filled with old vinyl albums and CDs, the top portion of which is adorned with black-and-white photographs of Joe Sr. in his double-breasted Met uniform. Beside those is a portrait of Joe Jr., bare-chested and holding his then-infant son Joseph, who is swaddled in an American flag. Tattooed across Joey's upper chest is the Gaelic phrase An te is laidre, “Stronger Than All.”

  Joey crumples up O'Connor's letter and tosses it on the floor. “My dad would say, ‘You're not a police officer until you've been suspended,'” he says. “If you're a do-nothing, you never get in any trouble.”

  Vocalist Norah Jones is crooning one of her ballads from the stereo when Joe's mother comes laboring down the stairs. Helen McCain is dressed in blue jeans and a nautical-looking striped sweater, her ash-blond hair done up in a careful, swirling permanent. The retired nurse, sixty-six, moves slowly, but her advice to her only child is swift and pointed: “Don't be an instigator,” she says. “You're out three days' pay.”

  Joe nods. “They hit me in the pocket,” he says.

  After stooping to pick up a guitar magazine that has fallen on the floor, Helen grasps her lower back when she straightens up. “I'll be happy when you can retire,” she says.

  “That's why I'm going back to school,” says Joe, who'll be taking two graduate courses in history at UMass Boston. “Five more years and I can retire.”

  The basement is a zigzagging warren filled with Joe's computer, two drum kits, extra cymbals, a keyboard, guitars and guitar cases, and a clutter of cables, microphones, amps, and speakers— all of it presided over by a picture of John Coltrane. The night before, Joe had jammed on his trumpet for two hours, accompanied by his eight-year-old son, Liam, on bass guitar and eleven-year-old Joseph on drums. Helen McCain lives directly above this makeshift recording studio, equipped, no doubt, with the forbearance of a saint.

  “I never say anything I don't want repeated,” she says, starting back up the stairs. “That's what I get for living with a detective all those years.”

  When his mother closes the door to her apartment, Joey sits on the sofa with his head tilted back, listening to Jones's cover of Hank Williams's “Cold, Cold Heart.” He smiles at the observation that a lot more effort has gone into drafting his suspension letter than the chief's “investigation” into the trash-pulling incident.

  “I pushed, so the dark side pushed back,” says Joe. “This is just the beginning.”

  Norah Jones is singing in a pure, sweet, mellow tone, her voice flowing along like one of the instruments in the ensemble. Joey mentions that Jones's father is the sitar master and Beatles collaborator Ravi Shankar. The story goes that the lovely, dark-haired Jones was “discovered” waitressing in New York, where she occasionally sang with the house band. McCain says that Jones changed her name so that she could make it on her own.

  But escaping a famous father is not so easy, as Joe Jr. well knows. In his initial discussion with superior officers over the Guinness-at-midnight incident, Joey says, Captain O'Connor accused him of being one of those “unaccountable and protected” members of the department that Joey disdains. O'Connor went on to accuse McCain of disappearing for hours at a time while on duty as street supervisor. When Joe pressed him on the source of this information, O'Connor said, “This is the rumor” and “It's what people in the department tell me.” O'Connor also stated that up until now McCain has gotten away with such behavior because of his “reputation”— a veiled reference to Joe Sr.

  Seen in a certain grim light, Joe'
s three-day suspension for such a minor offense could be a signal that big Joe's reach does not extend beyond the grave.

  “What would your father think of all this, if he was alive?” I ask.

  “If my father was alive, none of this would've happened,” says Joe. “They wouldn't have the balls.” He erupts in a deep, rattling cough, which he muffles with his sleeve. “They're gonna try and fire me. They build up suspensions and reprimands, and then they fire you and make you fight to get your job back.”

  THIRTEEN

  We Don't Need No Stinkin' Badges

  MARK DONAHUE AND I ARE DRIVING through the snow-crowded streets of downtown Lawrence, a gritty old mill town adjacent to the New Hampshire border, past La Vecina Meat Market and Tienda Elegante and Loan USA. It's fifteen degrees, typical for January, and plumes of exhaust are curling up from the cars inching along Common Street, while the low arc of the sun illuminates the empty dooryards and alleyways. Leaning over the street is the brick edifice of the old district courthouse, its central entrance up a steep flight of stairs flanked by street-level doors on the left and right. We're headed for the Essex County Sheriff's Office.

  When I first met Donahue we were coaching youth hockey and his stories about detective work were filled with cocksure wiseguys and their jailhouse revelations, with high-stakes defense lawyers sweating out strategy, and complicated pretexts that often transformed McCain operatives into latter-day Marlon Brandos with their Stanislavskian posing. It was exciting stuff, Donahue told me, and I'd be getting in on the ground floor, “delving into things” like Joe McCain himself. They always had a bunch of great cases.

  When mobster Johnny Peru was up on two counts of first-degree murder, his lawyer hired McCain Investigations, and Joe Sr. sent Donahue to Peru's “office” to interview his associates about any other recent troubles they might've had with the law. Mark was excited; it was his first mob case.

  Peru's office was a little pizza joint in Medford, decorated in old wood paneling with pictures of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett on the wall. Inside, Donahue sat at a table with three young criminals, including a slick-haired tough named Bobby “Wannabe Gotti” Santasky.

  As soon as they were settled, Santasky opened a menu, shot a look around the table, and asked, “Whattaya want? Whattaya gonna eat?” and immediately the other two soldiers looked at each other and at Donahue and repeated, “Whattaya gonna eat? Whattaya want?”

  All other parties took up their menus, and Santasky said, “Whattaya want, Mark? You wanna square?”

  The other two wiseguys nudged each other and asked, “You wanna square? You gonna have a square?”

  An Irish kid from Somerville, Mark was dumbfounded. “What's a ‘square'?”

  “What's a square?” asked Santasky, incredulous. He looked around the table. “What's a square, he wants to know.”

  “What's a square?” repeated the other two wiseguys.

  The answer to the riddle hung in the garlic-scented air for a moment, and Santasky said, “It's a fuckin' pizza.”

  “Yeah, I'll have a square,” Donahue said.

  “Whattaya want, a salad with that? You wanna salad? A salad. Whattaya gonna have to drink? A Coke? Gonna have a Coke?”

  Their lunch order finally resolved, Donahue asked Santasky to sketch out his background, including any past or pending legal action that might come up at Johnny Peru's trial and affect Santasky's credibility. The aspiring mobster explained that he had a job setting up events at the Fleet Center and was doing good. Pressed on that subject, he admitted, “Well, I'm kinda fired right now, I'm not working.”

  “Why?” asked Donahue.

  “I stabbed a guy,” said Santasky, his face tightening like a fist. “But he fucking deserved it.”

  “I'm thinking to myself, Oh, that's all right, then. No problem. He deserved it,” recalled Donahue.

  A few months later Johnny Peru was found guilty of murder, sentenced to life in prison without parole, and Mark Donahue ran into Bobby Santasky on the street in Medford. The young mobster was walking his pit bull and, spotting him from a distance, Mark caught Bobby's eye and they acknowledged each other. Then Bobby screwed up his face and shrugged his shoulders in that universal expression of “What happened?” and Mark did the same. A second later, Santasky twisted his mouth in the other direction and held out his hands, palms up, as if to say “Whattaya gonna do?” and Mark reciprocated in pantomime. Then both men continued on their way.

  A year later Bobby Santasky was dead, shot in the head at close range by an unknown assailant.

  My initiation into the detective business is not quite so dramatic. Stuffed between the front seats of Mark Donahue's car are thirteen active case files, including the names, addresses, occupations, and credit reports for what might be termed “voluntarily missing persons.” In each of the folders is an “interlocutory orders on injunction for return of vehicle,” stripping the delinquent car loan recipient of his ownership and assigning it to a fair-sized local bank. Today, Mark and I are working for the bank. We're repo men.

  We're out looking for twenty-nine-year-old Denny Dexteris of Rowley, who borrowed the money for a $30,000 truck, made half a dozen payments, then dropped out of sight. The address on Dexteris's loan application turned out to be false, his most recent employer and girlfriend haven't seen him in weeks, and his only known family member is an uncooperative stepfather whom Donahue has visited twice.

  On the second visit to the stepfather's auto body shop, Mark had informed him that the sheriffs were going to get involved soon and would begin haunting his business. “Hold on a minute,” said the man, reaching for his wallet. He opened it up, revealing a small tin badge issued to him as the local harbormaster. “I'm in law enforcement, just so you know. I know all about the law.”

  Donahue won that skirmish by producing his policeman's shield. “Good, I am, too. Now we're both on the same page,” he said. “Where's your stepson? If he doesn't turn up soon, he's going to have warrants on him.”

  Trying a new tack, the stepfather insisted that Dexteris was out to sea, working on a tugboat.

  “He doesn't need a truck in the ocean,” Mark says to me as we walk toward the courthouse. As a last resort, we're here to turn over the order repossessing Dexteris's welding truck to the county sheriff. “He's at the end of the line,” Mark says.

  Mark Donahue is a pretty big guy and his black fleece sweatshirt, embroidered with “Salem Police” in silver letters, has a visible effect on just about everyone we meet. Two youths in tight ski caps and bulky jackets are smoking cigarettes outside, leaning on a door that says “Probation Department.” They move aside and we go up the gritty steps, down a windowless hallway, and knock on a frosted glass door. From inside we hear a voice, and a tall, hulking, gray-haired man with a thick gray mustache emerges and invites us into his office. The chief deputy wears a shirt and tie, and his walls are covered in photographs taken with the sheriff, the governor, and former Boston Celtics great Larry Bird.

  Mark hands the deputy his business card and explains who we're working for and summarizes the predicament of Denny Dexteris. “The bank figures if we find him, we find the truck,” says Mark. “We just can't find him.” Dexteris is a welder, and the truck is an F-450 with the toolboxes on the back. “He needs it for work,” Mark says.

  Looking over the paperwork, the chief deputy recalls that there's a Bobby Dexteris from Rowley who works as a plumber for the sheriff's department. “Gotta be a relation,” he says.

  “Small world,” says Donahue. He winks at me.

  We all stand up and shake hands. “We'll hit Bobby Dexteris, see if we can turn him that way,” the chief deputy says.

  A couple minutes later, we're driving through downtown Lawrence, over the ice-clogged Merrimack River, up the long, curving ramp by the gasworks and north on Route 495. We're headed up the coast to Newburyport, with an injunction for a dark blue Dodge four-by-four. This time there's a fixed address, and an out-of-work carpenter who hangs u
p every time the bank calls him on the phone.

  Newburyport is half an hour away and to pass the time, Mark tells me about his early days at McCain Investigations. He was attending UMass Boston after getting out of the Coast Guard in 1987 and was trying to make ends meet by working as a bouncer at a Faneuil Hall nightclub and living in Lynn, Mass., with his girlfriend, Maureen, who he would marry a couple of years later. A close childhood friend of Joey McCain's and surrogate son to big Joe, Mark had always known that Joe wanted to open a P.I. firm when he retired. In the fall of 1988, just months after he'd been gunned down in Hyde Park, Joe told Mark to come work for him. “He said there was a ton of money to be made,” Mark says. “Joe was still ripped open when he started the business. He wore a girdle to hold his guts in. He couldn't even stay in the office a full day.”

  Mark started out part-time, investigating fraudulent workmen's compensation claims, “bottom of the barrel, shit work.” By January he was full-time, at the less than gaudy annual salary of $19,900. After a few months of steady improvement, he was given his first big assignment, a police brutality case being handled by the longtime McCain family retainer, Attorney Joe Doyle.

  “The first case I ever fucked up,” Mark says.

  The facts indicated that Doyle's client, a young car thief, had snapped a brand-new Z28 from the Car-A-Torium in Billerica, Mass. Spotted within a mile of the dealership, the thief led a parade of cops from Tewksbury, Lowell, Wilmington, Billerica, and the Andover State Police barracks on a high-speed midnight chase that attracted a dozen cruisers and covered over ten miles. At the conclusion of this adventure, the Z28 jumped the curb, went airborne, and landed on a stone wall. The kid pushed open the door and tried to flee, but the cops ran him down.

  The thief ended up with nine broken bones in his face, including his nose, jaw, and both cheekbones. The cops said he injured his face on the windshield during the crash. The kid said the cops beat him up. “They beat the living fuck out of him,” says Mark. “Even a car thief didn't deserve that.”