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

by Jay Atkinson

  I shake my head. “Everybody's got a lawyer these days. Everybody's suing somebody.”

  Mark holds the car at the intersection, watching the traffic roll past. “Yeah, it's all fuckin' lawyers,” he says.

  FOURTEEN

  The Gentleman from Milton

  The law is whatever is plausibly asserted and vigorously maintained.

  — MONTAIGNE

  SOMERVILLE CITY HALL IS A THREE-STORY Georgian brick building perched atop the apex of Highland Avenue. Its windows are framed in peeling white woodwork and two huge Doric columns flank the entrance. Packed into his uniform, bald head sporting a fresh shave, Joe McCain, Jr., occupies a good bit of the lobby, cracking his knuckles and occasionally reaching up to snip at a cuticle with his sharp white teeth. In a room on the second floor, McCain's longtime attorney, Joe Doyle, is about to sit down with an impartial hearing officer, police union representatives, the chief, Captain O'Connor, and the mayor for a hearing on Joey's three-day suspension.

  Doyle and McCain are asserting that the discipline far exceeds the seriousness of the offense— being seen briefly at the Tir na nOg on a night that Joe had called in sick— and are asking that his lost wages be restored and the infraction expunged from his record.

  “Disappear for a while,” McCain says to me. “We'll meet you outside in thirty minutes.”

  An hour and a half later, McCain and his lawyer emerge from city hall. Joe Doyle is a bantamweight Teddy Roosevelt of a man, with little round glasses and a head of curly brown hair tinged with gray. He's dressed in polished black wingtips and a blue oxford shirt with a striped tie and a khaki L.L. Bean jacket. The wind is coming off Boston Harbor and, finding an aperture between city hall and the high school, chilling every passerby to the bone. Immediately upon coming outside, Doyle and McCain are joined on the frozen stone of the parking lot by another man in a pinstriped suit, who turns up the collar of his overcoat. Union rep Charlie Femino is a lawyer and police officer, yet he and Joe McCain do little more than smile as Doyle summarizes what just occurred.

  “When we left the room and all four of the remaining participants stayed inside— the mayor, the chief, O'Connor, and the ‘impartial hearing officer'— the city was meeting ex parte,” says Doyle. “That's bullshit.”

  Doyle explains that a judicial proceeding is ex parte when it is held at the instance of, or for the benefit of, one party only and without notice to, or contested by, any person adversely affected.

  “It's a fucking kangaroo court,” says McCain, nodding his head.

  The union attorney is busy scribbling everything Joe Doyle says on a yellow legal pad. “This is great stuff,” he says. “Thanks, Joe.”

  Doyle's inference is that the city is concerned far less with their sick time policy than with applying it selectively to punish someone who, for whatever reason, has fallen out of favor. At one time Joe McCain, Jr., acted as personal security and driver for the mayor; today he's in the parking lot with two lawyers while illegal meetings are being held to figure out how to screw him.

  In a two-year-old management study of the Somerville Police Department conducted by MMA Consulting Group, Inc., of Boston, the first page of the executive summary includes the following sentences: “There are many statements and presentations of details which may be viewed as uncomplimentary.” Elaborating on the reasons for that, the report goes on, “The Somerville Police Department does not make the best use of available resources, resulting in the under-utilization of personnel, poor or limited supervision, lack of management controls, and decreased operational efficiency.” In light of the charge against Joe Jr., the most surprising fact in the management study is that, although abuse of the department's liberal sick time policy is widespread, “we are aware of only one member of the department who has been penalized, or even charged, with improper use of sick time in recent memory.”

  It's a short march from these facts to Attorney Doyle's assertion that the city is attempting to keelhaul Joe Jr. for the questionable offense of drinking a pint of Guinness.

  Like many of big Joe's old cronies, here in the courthouse parking lot Doyle begins our acquaintance with the spontaneous rendering of a vintage McCain story. It seems that one night Joe Sr., his longtime Met partner Jack Crowley, and Doyle were drinking at the Parker House while a live band was crashing away beside the dance floor. The downstairs lounge was packed and big Joe, wearing an old raincoat with cigar burns on the collar, was drinking Scotch and leaning over the raw bar to maintain his conversation with the bartender. Crowley and Doyle, fueled by ample drafts of liquor, began stealing clams from the bar and surreptitiously pitching them into the crowd. The shells were bouncing off tables and onto various patrons, creating quite a ruckus.

  Unconscious of all this, McCain was busy chattering away when Doyle and Crowley struck upon the notion of loading additional raw clams into the pockets of Joe's coat. They were in the process of doing so when a little redheaded fellow wearing a business suit approached, his face tight with anger.

  “Are you throwing those fuckin' clams?” the guy asked Joe. The top of his head didn't reach McCain's shoulder, and Joe had to look for him when he turned around.

  “What?” asked McCain.

  The man held up the smooth gray shell of a cherrystone. “Are you the one throwing the clams?” he asked.

  McCain put his hand on top of the guy's head and shoved him away from the bar. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “Get out of here.”

  The night raged to its drunken conclusion and Joe went home and hung up his raincoat and forgot about it. The weather grew sunny and warm and several days later, when the stench of the tidal flats had crept into her well-maintained home, Helen McCain paced from room to room saying, “Joe, what is that smell?”

  Doyle howls in the retelling, one hand on my forearm, the other on Joe Jr.'s shoulder, his head thrown back and all his teeth displayed. A graduate of Thayer Academy, Holy Cross, and the Cornell University Law School, the fifty-three-year-old Doyle and his eighty-year-old father and namesake share a private practice with eight other lawyers in Quincy, Mass. But his relationship with big Joe stretches back to 1976, when as a young assistant district attorney Joe Doyle was assigned to the Suffolk County Investigation and Prosecution Project, or SCIPP, as it was known. SCIPP was a federally funded group that combined state prosecutors, police officers, and investigators focused on rooting out organized crime and public corruption.

  “We were supposed to initiate cases,” says Doyle, who in his first weeks at SCIPP met a large, imposing man with an abundance of good street information— a fellow nicknamed “the Silver Fox” because of his thick white hair.

  Twenty-six-year-old Joe Doyle was fresh out of law school and in those days a lot of veteran investigators considered their dealings with young, inexperienced D.A.s to be an inconvenience at best and, more often, a real pain in the ass. But Joe McCain had a deep admiration for book learning and respected the young lawyers, going so far as to reveal the identities of his informants to them.

  “If Joe trusted you, he'd tell you who they were— so you wouldn't think he was just making the stuff up,” says Doyle.

  And it didn't take long for the trust between Joe McCain and the young, green D.A. to pay off in a big case. Through his longtime informant Black Jimmy, McCain learned that a nineteen-year-old secretary named Deborah Brody, who worked at New England Universal Life Insurance Company, had taken up with a lowlife named Michael Spinelli. In her position at the insurance company, Miss Brody had access to the facsimile signature machine and stole a batch of checks at the urging of her boyfriend, who had a criminal record and was married and lived in Revere with his wife and children. Spinelli's accomplice, Richard Knight, was an experienced fence who knew the ins and outs of getting the checks cashed— he sold them to other criminals for a percentage of their face value.

  Black Jimmy told Joe McCain that $40,000 found among contraband in the possession of career criminal Ernie Field had come
from a stolen New England Universal Life check. This information was so fresh that the investigators at SCIPP were on to the scam before the insurance company had discovered it, and they decided to catch the perpetrators in the act of stealing checks. Big Joe always made it a point to ingratiate himself with people he arrested— out of his natural sense of empathy and with an eye toward having them provide information. Years earlier he had done it with Black Jimmy, and upon the arrest of Deborah Brody, Joe persuaded the slender young blonde to cooperate in the investigation and testify against her Svengali of a boyfriend, Spinelli, and his accomplice. Brody agreed to make a monitored telephone call asking Spinelli to meet her at a particular place and time. When he appeared, the police arrested him. At the same time Knight was apprehended at a house in Medford, whereupon the police obtained a search warrant for the premises and discovered the remaining stolen checks.

  Knight and Spinelli were indicted, and Joe Doyle was chosen as prosecutor, with the Honorable Superior Court Justice Roger Donahue presiding. As the government's key witness, Deborah Brody was granted immunity, situated in a hotel under an assumed name, and placed under round-the-clock police guard. Meanwhile, the two crooks retained two old-time Boston defense lawyers, Al DeFelice and Ron Rosenthal. An elderly man with dyed black hair, DeFelice never entered a courtroom without his Marine Corps tie clip, making it a point to tell jurors that he'd fought at Iwo Jima. Rosenthal, also in his late sixties, wanted the jury to believe that he was a helpless old guy down to his last nickel and so would appear in court rumpled and unshaven and dressed like a hobo. His favorite accessory was a hospital bracelet, worn to garner sympathy over his “condition,” which forever remained a mystery.

  The case was tried in the old Suffolk Superior Courthouse in Boston's Pemberton Square, a boxy, high-ceilinged room accoutered with mahogany wainscoting and a tall, paneled judge's bench straight out of the previous century. From this aerie, Judge Donahue looked down upon the stenographer and a pair of court officers. Directly back of that was the prosecutor's table, staffed by Assistant District Attorney Joseph Doyle and his lead investigator, Joe McCain.

  Behind them and exactly parallel was the defense table, close enough for Al DeFelice to whisper things like “We're gonna wipe the floor with you” to the inexperienced Doyle. And at the rear of the courtroom, separated by the bar from the spectators' area, was the defendants' dock— a waist-high wooden box where Spinelli and Knight were required to sit. The jury occupied a box to Judge Donahue's right.

  Before Deborah Brody's appearance on the stand, Joe McCain noticed that the defense had moved their table closer to the jury box, and every so often DeFelice would turn and mouth “What a liar” to the jurors. Joe Doyle was busy trying to watch Rosenthal's cross-examination of the police officer who had arrested Michael Spinelli. The cop was fumbling through his testimony and Doyle became irritated with McCain, who was elbowing him and whispering something about DeFelice.

  “Look what they're doing back there,” said McCain. “Jack Gaffney would never let them get away with that. What kind of lawyer are you?”

  “Shut the fuck up, Joe,” Doyle said. “Leave me alone.”

  Finally McCain alerted the court officers to Rosenthal and DeFelice's gambit, and they picked up the defense table and moved it back again.

  Deborah Brody took the stand and shortly thereafter court was adjourned, with her direct testimony to continue the next day. Sometime during the night, Brody slipped her police guard and disappeared. Very early the next morning she telephoned McCain to confess that she'd spent the night in a Revere hotel room with Spinelli, where they'd had sex and he had tried to convince her that he'd had nothing to do with the check kiting scheme— it was all Richard Knight's idea.

  McCain was dumbfounded. Brody added that she intended to tell the truth in court that day, and that she'd informed Spinelli of that fact. She also confided the reason Spinelli had been able to sneak away to spend the night with her. Armed with that surprising bit of information, McCain hung up and drove to the office to break the news to Joe Doyle.

  Just before 10:00 A.M., the judge left his chambers to retrieve a law book and was astonished to find the two elderly defense lawyers again trying to edge their heavy wooden table closer to the jury box. Roger Donahue had a reputation as a stern, competent jurist, with little tolerance for courtroom high jinks or melodrama. Upon spotting DeFelice and Rosenthal, he called over to his team of court officers and barked, “Make sure those two guys move that table back. And if they try it again, I'm going to lock them both up.”

  At the same time Joe Doyle took Rosenthal and DeFelice aside to tell them what had occurred the night before— the skip out, the sex, everything. Although the news was disastrous to their case, the wily old litigators walked away without uttering a word.

  When testimony resumed, Brody admitted to Doyle that she had met Spinelli on the previous evening, that they'd had intercourse, and that he had attempted to persuade her to lie about his role in the case. She said she'd refused to lie, and when Doyle asked her how the defendant, who was free on bail, was able to get away from his family, the young blonde replied that Spinelli's wife was in the hospital giving birth to their child. A female juror gasped out loud, and Doyle stated that he had no more questions.

  Just the fact that Deborah Brody needed police protection indicated to the jury that Knight and Spinelli were dangerous men. Additionally, Brody's testimony proved Spinelli was a man totally devoid of character. But Rosenthal and DeFelice, with their Marine Corps tie clips and hospital bracelets and strategically placed bandages, still had a few hoary old tricks up their wrinkled shirtsleeves.

  Among the evidence against their clients was a handwritten list of the stolen checks, including the amounts tendered, who was going to fence them, and where they were going to be cashed. To prove that the handwriting on this ledger belonged to Michael Spinelli, the D.A.'s office engaged Elizabeth McCarthy, the dean of New England handwriting experts but by this time quite advanced in years and, because of a recent hip operation, hobbling around with a cane. McCarthy had concluded that the handwriting on the ledger was in fact Spinelli's, and to demonstrate this fact the prosecution had created two large easels in sight of the jury box, one displaying the “unknown” handwriting and the other containing the sample Judge Donahue had ordered Spinelli to give.

  In an attempt to try Elizabeth McCarthy's patience, Al DeFelice kept asking her to go over from the stand to the writing samples to justify how she could have mistaken some loop or slant in the unknown handwriting for Michael Spinelli's distinct cursive. The witness box was elevated by two stairs and no sooner had the elderly woman climbed up to her seat when the heartless old defense lawyer would require her to go stumping back to the easels. The tactic backfired: McCarthy's patience remained intact, but the jurors were aghast at DeFelice's cavalier treatment of the white-haired old woman.

  As the trial stretched into its third day, Joe Doyle grew apprehensive about one of the very few weak spots in his case. Somewhere in Joe McCain's affidavit that had led to the search warrant was a misstatement of fact, and Doyle knew Rosenthal and DeFelice were going to harp on that error. He spent several hours with Joe McCain preparing for his testimony, and when they reached that particular detail the young D.A. advised big Joe to admit he'd made a mistake. Cops in that era would go to great lengths to avoid such an admission, because it made them look inferior to the lawyers on both sides and because they reasoned that such foibles might undermine an otherwise solid case. And here the twenty-six-year-old Joe Doyle, with a sum total of two cases under his belt, was instructing a prestigious veteran investigator on what to say in court. McCain had an abundance of pride in his reputation and his skills, and Doyle knew it was going to be very difficult for him to admit that he'd screwed up. So when he left the D.A.'s office late that night, there was still some question in Joe Doyle's mind about what was going to happen in court the next day.

  When testimony resumed, Doyle watched as Jo
e McCain was called to the stand. In his affidavit McCain had provided the wrong date for an observation he had made that was probable cause for the search warrants in the case. McCain said that Spinelli and Knight had moved certain items from one place to another on April 11, when the events had actually occurred on April 2. In addition to the affidavit, DeFelice had Joe McCain's police report for April 11, and there was no mention of the observation noted in it; the account was recorded in McCain's April 2 report instead. The implication was that McCain had made it all up to acquire the warrant and perhaps even plant the stolen checks. In essence, DeFelice was going to argue that Joe McCain was a liar.

  Doyle could sense DeFelice building up to that crucial section of the affidavit. “Now, Mr. McCain, please turn your attention to paragraph fifteen of your affidavit,” said the defense lawyer.

  “You mean where I made a mistake?” McCain asked. “The mistake I made was that in the affidavit I said that I observed these things on April eleventh and I observed them on April second.”

  Joe McCain's answer— honest and unexpected— was in keeping with the directness of his personality and his ulterior motive as a detective. “Joe was never bigger than the case,” said Doyle. “That was the beauty of the guy.”

  Al DeFelice stumbled along with a few more questions, but the trial was over. In the end, the jury found Michael Spinelli and Richard Knight guilty of bank fraud, and Judge Donahue gave them the maximum sentence of eight to ten years in the state penitentiary.

  Joe McCain and Joe Doyle remained good friends long after the SCIPP unit was history. Their mutual respect grew out of experiences like the Brody case, and twenty-seven years later that respect continues to inform Joe Doyle's relationship with the McCain family and tints the advice he gives Joe Jr. with a paternal forbearance. There are ten thousand Irish lawyers in the Boston phone book, but whenever Joe McCain, Jr., is in a pinch, like he is now, he calls on Joe Doyle.