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

by Jay Atkinson

  A blue-and-gold tricycle sits abandoned on the sidewalk, and the roadway is devoid of parked cars or pedestrians. Halfway down Temple Street I realize it's a cul-de-sac, and then I spot the subject's house, Number 26, a two-story brown Colonial with a replica of an old New England barn for a mailbox. Early morning light reflects off the windows, and there's an aroma of cut grass and honeysuckle. The house and property are well-maintained and the brand-new Ford Explorer, shining with a fresh coat of wax, is parked in the driveway.

  At the end of the street I turn around and drive by 26 Temple again. No one is stirring. Unfortunately, there's nowhere to park that isn't conspicuous and no place to sit on the house without tipping the neighbors. But there's no other way off Temple Street for the subject, either. Convinced that Langlois is at home, I turn left onto Plummer Ave. and soon discover that it's a dead end, too. The natural surveillance point, therefore, is back on Main Street. The subject can't leave the area without using that route.

  Emerging onto Main, I spot two possible surveillance locations: the head of an unmarked gravel road opposite Plummer Ave. and, a little farther along, the parking lot of a business named Kitchen World.

  It's only then that I notice McKenna. There's a dark blue van with tinted windows parked in front of the kitchenette store, with the driver's seat all the way back and a man with a baseball cap pulled low on his forehead. I cross over Main Street in very light traffic and pull in beside the van.

  McKenna rolls down his window. “Took you long enough,” he says.

  “Did you see me go by?” I ask, climbing into the passenger seat.

  “I saw you,” he says, reaching out to shake my hand. “You figured it out, though. There's no place closer to sit on the house without being made.”

  McKenna reminds me of Dashiell Hammett's famous detective the Continental Op. He's a short, stocky fellow dressed in khaki shorts, a rumpled polo shirt, and sneakers. His calves are the size of two cantaloupes and he wears a scruffy beard and his hair is graying at the temples. His hand, gripping mine, is stubby and broad, and he squeezes me like a vise.

  “What did you notice about the guy's house?” asks McKenna.

  I run off the details I picked up, which are scant in number and colorless. In the same ten-second drive-by, McKenna has memorized the license plate of the subject's car and noted the locations of the picnic table and toolshed, backyard swimming pool and various toys. He also declares that two cops live on Temple Street and at least one of them may be friendly with the subject.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Wiffle ball bat and hockey net in the subject's yard. Soccer ball and Big Wheel in the cop's yard,” says McKenna. “They both have kids about the same age.”

  “But what makes you think he's a cop?”

  The whole time McKenna is staring at the top of Plummer Ave.; he never even looks at me. “Did you notice my front license plate?” he asks.

  Come to think of it, I did. The plate features a little starburst design and the initials M.P.A. I don't know what they mean.

  “Mass. Police Association,” McKenna says. “Just about every cop has an M.P.A. sticker on his car, and Langlois's neighbor has one. And a cop is gonna notice a strange vehicle parked on his street. And that cop is probably a friend of Langlois's. So we're gonna stay here.”

  But allowing that Langlois probably has another car inside his garage and could get by us without being recognized, McKenna takes a chance on getting “made” and drives past the house. On workmen's comp cases our job is to find out if the subject is defying his medical order, videotape the activity if possible, and write a report about it. Even on a weekend, Langlois might be pulling stumps in his backyard or building the kids a swing set, and if he is, we're supposed to document these feats on tape.

  We cruise along Plummer Ave. in McKenna's van and take a left. Temple Street is deserted, but McKenna points to a For Sale sign on the lawn of a home two doors away from the Langloises'. “There's our pretext,” he says, turning the van around. “We're looking at houses.”

  As I go rubbernecking out my window, McKenna studies the Langloises' house on the way past. Mark Donahue has told me that Kevin McKenna is the undisputed pretext champion of the world. On a domestic case last March, he was following a divorced woman who had just been awarded custody of her two children but ordered by the court not to drink alcohol. One Saturday afternoon the woman left the house all dolled up and by herself, with McKenna tailing in the van. A stunning brunette with a gorgeous body, she drove to a wedding in Plymouth, Mass., and on to the reception at the White Cliffs Country Club. Watching the front door of the club, McKenna was possessed by an idea, broke off his surveillance and raced home.

  It was St. Patrick's Day weekend and McKenna returned to the country club fresh-shaven and dressed in a well-tailored green suit, with a camcorder on a strap around his neck. At the registration table he grabbed a place card with the name of someone who hadn't shown up and proceeded into the reception, where the party was in full swing. If anyone bothered to ask— and very few people did— McKenna said that he was the bride's cousin's date and helped himself to the filet mignon and open bar.

  After dinner he made the rounds, pointing his camcorder at various tables and asking people to say a few words. Only he didn't bother to press the Record button until he reached the subject's table. The woman was pounding shots of Sambuca and when asked to address the bride, she raised her glass and said, “Don't fucking do it. Marriage sucks.”

  She thought McKenna was funny, and soon they were cutting up the dance floor— with the video camera perched on a corner of the bar, recording their moves. The woman drank like a sailor, bumping and grinding to the wedding singer's rendition of “Get Down Tonight.” It was a great time, McKenna said, and the best thing was that McCain Investigations's client, the divorced dad, got his kids back.

  “The woman was a lot of fun but a complete alcoholic,” says McKenna. “She was soused, driving around with the kids in the car seats.”

  In front of Kitchen World, McKenna and I watch Burlington come to life as people head out for their morning coffee and a string of joggers go tramping along the sidewalk in either direction. Once every hour until noon we ride past the Langloises', but the Explorer hasn't moved and all the doors and windows in the house remain closed. McKenna says that the biggest part of surveillance is the waiting; usually nothing happens. On our fourth pass, a woman who lives across from the Langloises stares as we go by and McKenna decides to break it off.

  “If he's working, we'll catch him,” says the pudgy detective. “And if he isn't, they're all billable hours.”

  Among the chewed up dog pillows, baseball gloves, and dusty jars of “food thickener” in the back of the van is an old briefcase that looks like a cardboard accordion. McKenna shuffles around in there for a moment and pulls out three case files and looks them over. “Y'like clams?” he asks. When I reply that I do, McKenna says, “Good, cuz we're going to the beach.”

  Twenty minutes later we arrive at Houghs Neck in Quincy, a spit of land that curves off the southern end of Wollaston Beach. The neck contains a single main artery, Sea Street, which is peppered with little shops and a gas station or two. Branching off to either side is a network of small, crooked lanes with panoramic views of the Boston skyline, the harbor, and several outlying islands.

  After a drive past three houses on three different streets, McKenna parks the van on a little hill behind an apartment building. From here, we can see through a hole in the fence and over an empty swimming pool to the only real intersection in Houghs Neck. McKenna says we'll be keeping tabs on three subjects at once, all employees of the same transportation company: a woman with an ankle injury who drives an airport shuttle van; a rarely seen auto mechanic with pork chop sideburns and a bad back; and the most difficult case, a truck driver named Billy Giampa with an injury to his left foot.

  Giampa has been out for six months and is suspected of illegally working another j
ob. He's “cute,” says McKenna; he's made two other private detectives who were following him, and one day last week, when McKenna was driving his other car, he lost Giampa's blue Subaru pickup on Wollaston Beach. Stuck at a light, McKenna was surprised to see the Subaru coming the other way and as they passed each other, Giampa flipped him the bird.

  McKenna laughs. “Fuck him,” he says. “I know he's working somewhere.”

  Houghs Neck is a pretty small place and I marvel at the number of people cheating on workmen's comp, all employees of the same company. “It's an epidemic,” I say.

  “They're all patients of Dr. Sommerov,” says McKenna, noting that the transportation company loses more than a dozen people a month to workplace injuries, and nearly 60 percent of them try to defraud their employer. “If they spend five grand per case on a P.I. but settle four out of ten, they're saving money,” he says.

  I ask McKenna if Dr. Sommerov is some crazy Russian they all go to, and he laughs. “Yeah, there's two doctors, actually,” he says. “Dr. Summer-off and Dr. Winter-off.”

  Perusing Giampa's file, I learn that he's thirty years old, five foot nine and 195 pounds, muscular, with a large red lion tattooed on his left arm. McKenna thinks he's working at the gas station right down the hill from us, and just as I take the binoculars for a look-see, a blue Subaru pickup arrives in front and Giampa gets out and strolls into the office.

  “His foot must be getting better,” says McKenna, zooming in with the video camera.

  The street is arrayed in sunlight, making it dark inside the gas station. Through the binoculars I can just make out Giampa lurking in the office, while McKenna explains that if we can videotape the subject driving his truck, et cetera, his employer will present the evidence to Giampa's doctor and he'll either return to work or be fired. “He's stealing from the honest people at that company,” says McKenna. “Same as any thief.”

  Giampa emerges from the gas station, climbs into his truck, and we zoom off down the hill and attempt to follow him. Cutting in and out of traffic like a rally driver, Giampa beats us through a light near the YMCA, and we loop around an athletic field, driving past a squad of lacrosse players sweating through a workout. The blue Subaru is gone.

  “Time for lunch,” says McKenna.

  Down on Wollaston Beach, we're halfway through an order of steamed clams when the client phones and tells us to drop Giampa for today and pick up surveillance on a woman in Dorchester. Her name is Lila Ogletree and she's been out of work only three days, but her background check revealed that Lila has filed six insurance claims in her last four jobs. This time it's a bad back, and McKenna says that Lila must be a regular patient of both Dr. Winterov and Dr. Sommerov.

  A short time later we're on Columbia Road in “Poor-chester.” Going through a notoriously rough neighborhood known as Uphams Corner, McKenna gropes along his pant leg and says, “This is not a good area to be without a gun.”

  He's left his at home, thinking that we were going to be in Quincy and Burlington all day. In eighteen years as a police officer, Kevin McKenna has been shot at, bitten, spit upon, and threatened by crack dealers and junkies. He's lost two partners to suicide. As a lowly housing cop, McKenna's had his best investigative work commandeered by state troopers and the Boston P.D., and as union president, he's been ostracized by his superiors, suspended on trumped-up charges, and placed on administrative leave. His doctor, a legitimate medical school graduate, has diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. But he still loves the street.

  On a hill a quarter mile from Uphams Corner we find a neat, grayish green two-story house with a steep gabled roof. Driving past, I can see four derelict Cadillacs in the yard and a row of well-kept flowering plants on the wraparound porch, which is dotted by wicker furniture and painted in dark green trim. Nobody is on the porch or in the yard, and McKenna drives around the block and parks on a stretch of roadway looking down upon the house. Then he fiddles with the radio and tunes in a country station, which he listens to for hours at a time.

  As a journalist, I'm supposed to notice things, and it's more than a little humbling when McKenna trumps every one of my observations. But just as Mark Donahue likes going out alongside Detective George Baker, the best cop on his job in Salem, I enjoy doubling up with McKenna. While we're sitting on Lila's house, a kid about nineteen or twenty years old wearing a do-rag and a Red Sox jersey walks in front of the van and crosses the street. There's a group of kids waiting on the corner, and McKenna sighs and puts the van in gear, rolling away down the hill.

  “Where we going?” I ask.

  As we're passing the kid, McKenna nods in his direction and says, “I don't want to see what happens next.”

  Attached to the kid's hip is what looks like a cell phone holster, and the black nub of something is sticking out of his right front pocket. “He's got a knife on his hip and a gun in his pocket,” says McKenna. “We want to catch a lady carrying groceries, not appear in court as witnesses to a shooting.”

  Going around the corner, McKenna spots a woman from another case unloading bags from the open hatch of an SUV. “Awesome,” he says, parking the van a little ways up the street.

  Hoisting the camcorder, he jumps over the backseat into the cargo space in the rear and tapes the subject's peregrinations to and from the house. She's a heavyset woman in a blue denim jacket and a white blouse, huffing and puffing with her groceries but more agile than a person claiming a back injury should be. Before she's finished with the groceries, McKenna is on the phone to the client. “I just got Nadia,” he says. “Uh-huh. Academy Award material. Her sciatica has been miraculously cured.”

  McKenna is happy but realizes that Lila is a bigger prize. She's a professional fraud, much too smart to get caught lifting weights on her front porch. For a while we sit on Lila's house, but the SUV that McKenna thinks is her car still isn't here and he decides to move to another location near Grove Hall. A friend of Lila's has an apartment there, and on the way, McKenna sings along with some cowpoke on the radio while the deep, reverberating beat of hip-hop emanates from the sporty little cars around us.

  “You're the only guy in Dorchester listening to the Grand Ole Opry,” I tell him.

  McKenna parks in front of a grocery store near the Roxbury-Dorchester line. At the corner a trim fellow in a straw boater and neat gray suit and bow tie is greeting passersby in front of Mohammed's Mosque No. 11. A portable sign by his elbow announces a lecture entitled “Death Stands at the Door” scheduled for Sunday afternoon at 1:30, and a banner fixed to the telephone pole bears the likenesses of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks.

  “This is Castlegate territory,” says McKenna, pointing out the gang tags scribbled over nearby buildings. “Known for more murders and drugs than any other gang in Boston.”

  Tied to a pole nearby is a collection of dead flowers and little rigid balloons on sticks and a well-worn teddy bear, the sort of makeshift shrine you'll see on the highway where a fatal accident has occurred. But this one is located on a city sidewalk, in front of a fire station and the Grove Hall housing development.

  “A kid was stabbed to death there about two months ago,” says McKenna. “Over drugs, in broad daylight.”

  Before I can ask him about it, McKenna jumps out of the van and saunters across the road, where he enters conversation with a tall, large-limbed, young black woman. She says something in an animated way and McKenna laughs, patting her on the shoulder. After a couple of minutes, he returns to the van and starts it up.

  “Who's that?” I ask.

  “I locked her up for crack a few years ago. Once in a while she gives me something. I had a shooting down here once, and she told me who it was.”

  “Does she know Lila?”

  McKenna shakes his head. “She knows Lila's friend, though. Says the woman we're looking for might have a white boyfriend, an older guy.”

  When I ask him why he was laughing, McKenna imitates the woman's high-pitched voice and laughs some more. “She said
, ‘Kevin, you got fat!'”

  TWENTY

  Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

  The point is, I'm not in business to be loved, but I am in business.

  — JAKE GITTES, CHINATOWN

  DURING HIS TENURE AT MCCAIN INVESTIGATIONS, Kevin McKenna learned a great deal about cultivating sources from the company namesake. According to McKenna and several other cops, Joe McCain was the undisputed champion when it came to informants. In the late 1960s there was a group of teenagers who hung around Revere Beach, from broken homes mostly, kids who might've worked a few hours in the concession stands or over at Bob's Discount but who spent the majority of their time drinking beer, committing petty acts of vandalism, or stealing from the carnies, who were thieves themselves. At its very root, Joe McCain's career was based on his knack for engendering trust in the sorts of people who, as a rule, didn't trust anybody. And even after he made detective and was busy tracking the migration of the gangsters shuttling from the Ebb Tide to Hurley's Palm Gardens to the Driftwood and back to Sammy's Patio Lounge and the Tiger's Tail, big Joe had a soft spot for these troubled kids. He'd go walking through the aromatic summer crowds looking for them, meting out a few words of advice, a couple of bucks here and there, or a kick in the ass if need be.

  Among this group of nascent criminals and con men, one lad in particular caught McCain's attention. His name, for the purposes of this story, was Tommy Flynn; he was the half brother of a state policeman and one of the toughest kids who roosted along Revere Beach Parkway. Joe used to laugh and call him Jack La Lanne, because Flynn, even at sixteen, was constantly working out: running up and down the beach, doing push-ups and chin-ups, riding his bike, and shadowboxing in the alleyways off Ocean Avenue.