by Jay Atkinson
Later, at their arraignment on criminal charges, Henderson showed Spear what had occurred away from the others, when he was assaulted by James Hyde:
Q. He was lifting up his shirt and he had bite marks.
A. He had a bite mark?
Q. Yes.
A. Where?
Q. On his chest.
In a bizarre moment during the trial, the lawyers approached the bench for a conference and one of them told Judge Saris that Detective Hyde's partner, Mike McGrath, who was sitting in the gallery, had been “talking on the phone and laughing” during Spear's testimony. This behavior was in plain view of the jury, and the clear implication was that members of the Somerville P.D. were belittling the witness and his credibility. Reading on, I expect Judge Saris to lower the boom on McGrath. But after the lawyer's complaint, Saris replies, “I will ask [McGrath] to try to keep it down.”
The most telling bit of evidence against Hyde and his friends will appear during Spear's cross-examination by the attorney Peter Brown, who represented two of the defendants, Lieutenant Bossi and Sergeant Aufiero. After going over a list of the witness's previous run-ins with the law, Brown attempts to impugn Spear by noting that he has contradicted some of the statements he made before trial in his depositions, which were also under oath.
Q. Well, you took an oath to tell the truth and are you saying that you didn't tell the truth?
A. On some things, yeah.
Q. On some things you didn't tell the truth?
A. I was scared, yeah. What would you do if you were in a room with people that tried to kill you?
Spear also says that he was never in fear of what Timmy Doherty might do to him, and that Officer Doherty treated him with respect and professionalism when placing him under arrest and escorting him into the paddy wagon. In the second of two depositions, however, Spear refers to the presence of Hyde and Bossi while he's answering questions and asks, “How is it intimidating? I'm sitting in the room with two cops who beat me half to death practically, it's kind of uncomfortable. You would probably feel the same way.”
Other cases are beckoning, and after making arrangements with Antonia Larson for the transcript, I bolt down the stairs and into the street. My impressions of “the 1994 Holiday Inn Massacre,” as Timmy Doherty calls it, are that judges are so worried about getting cases through the chute they are more like bus schedulers than Solomon, and that Hyde and the other pugilistic cops should've been arrested immediately. The fact that they weren't, but that Alfonso and Mittell won the civil trial, forms a huge indictment of the Somerville P.D. and the integrity of its leadership during that era.
Going to work is still like going to hell for Timmy Doherty; he has no use for many of his colleagues nor they for him. Two cops named in his lawsuit, Captain John O'Connor and Lieutenant Michael Cabral, serve in the department's internal affairs unit and are expected to watch out for such unfair treatment. In a further indignity, Jimmy Hyde, after being recalled from the DEA, has been named the Somerville P.D.'s gang investigator, a job Doherty says he created. Recently Chief George McLean has begun to rein in Jimmy Hyde and those of his ilk, making them more accountable to the command structure, but a travesty of this magnitude still casts a very long shadow over the department.
In the aftermath of the Henderson beating, Timmy Doherty, troubled by what he had seen, approached Joe McCain, Jr., about setting up an appointment with Joe Sr. The elder McCain had been through this sort of thing before, and although he and big Joe hardly knew each other, the twenty-six-year-old Doherty wanted to hear what the old Met cop had to say before he crossed the blue line and testified.
For his part, Joe McCain had survived a couple of bullet wounds and gone back into detective work, like some kind of Winter Hill Lazarus. But some cops believed that working for defense lawyers as an investigator was only a notch or two above rolling winos on the Common. If that wasn't bad enough, others were convinced that McCain was prodding the Alfonso-Mittell civil suit along just to embarrass his son's enemies in the department.
Big Joe's meeting with Officer Doherty took place in the McCain kitchen; the agenda was brief and the old cop's message was succinct. “No matter what, you can't lie,” said McCain, training his gaze on the frazzled young cop. “That's what the public hired you for.”
Outside the federal courthouse, Boston Harbor is dotted with pleasure boats and ferries shining in the sun. As I'm walking along, I'm thinking of that old British snoop John Keats, and what he said about the truth: “That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Engraved on the giant lower stones of the courthouse are the opinions of various Supreme Court jurists and other prominent thinkers. A quotation from Frederick Douglass strikes me as appropriate to the Mittell-Alfonso case in general and Timmy Doherty's situation in particular:
Where Justice is denied, and any one class made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
Amidst the tattooed bike messengers, law clerks, and a lady with a pet dog, I go pinging over the corrugated steel of the old Northern Avenue Bridge. It's ironic and disturbing that the people most oppressed and degraded are those beautiful souls, like Joe McCain and Timmy Doherty, who endeavor to tell the truth.
* * *
AS SOON AS I REACH the surveillance point above Lila Ogletree's house, Kevin McKenna slides open the rear door to the van. “Get in,” he says. “There she is.” A large woman in black tights and a lime green windbreaker comes down the stairs and heaves herself into a small gray hatchback that has pulled up in front, driven by a middle-aged white guy.
“There she goes,” says McKenna, scrambling into the front seat as I jump into the van with my backpack and McKenna hands me the video camera.
The little gray car races down the hill, makes a quick left, and runs in traffic along Columbia Road. “Is that her?” I ask.
“She fits the description: fifty years old, heavyset, black,” says McKenna. “But there's no picture in the file. I'm guessing.”
At the light, we pull up alongside and McKenna says, “Shoot some video of her. She doesn't see us.”
Before I can focus the camera, the light changes and the hatchback speeds away. We follow the car to Jerome Street, where it stops in front of a lavender Victorian with a steep staircase in front and the woman gets out. I hand the camcorder up, and McKenna tapes the woman hustling along the side of the car and up the stairs.
“Hey— she's running,” I say, as the neon green of the woman's jacket sloshes and billows. “Her back looks fine to me.”
McKenna continues taping the woman as she climbs the staircase and goes into the house. “It might not be her,” he says, shutting off the camera.
We park on the hill and McKenna calls in the license plate of the hatchback and finds out we're on the cleaning lady, not the subject. “Fuck,” he says. We race back to Ogletree's house, and the SUV is parked in the driveway. “Good, she's still here,” McKenna says. “I think.”
While we're sitting at the bottom of the street, watching the driveway and side entrance, McKenna shows me the little silver-plated .25 he's carrying for protection. He takes out the magazine, clears the chamber, and hands me the gun: it's small and heavy in my palm, no bigger than a toy, and the clip is the size of a Pez dispenser.
“Hollow points,” says McKenna, holding up one of the bullets.
“You'd have to be pretty close with this thing,” I say, marveling at how light the gun is. I pull the bolt back and straighten my arm, and there in the backseat of McKenna's van, I sight over the bone of my thumb and down the silver line of the barrel. For some people, shooting a man is just that easy.
McKenna takes the .25 back, clears the chamber once more, and reinserts the magazine. “Most shootings occur within ten feet of the target,” he says, returning the gun to its position under the seat.
The first shooting McKenna ever witnessed occurred in the Orchard Park housing p
roject in Roxbury, where he and his partner, who was black, did an undercover drug buy. Although they'd been trained to avoid hallways, where it was usually impossible for the backup officer to maintain surveillance, the dealers insisted on meeting there and McKenna's partner went down with the money while McKenna waited in the stairwell.
The two dealers tried the double cross, putting a knife to his partner's breastbone. “Gimme the drugs and the rest of the money, or I'll cut your fucking throat,” the dealer said. The black cop took out his gun and shot the dealer in the groin; the other kid rushed him, and the cop fired a second round, getting him in the stomach.
Both drug dealers were down on the floor, screaming and rolling around in their own blood. McKenna burst from the stairwell just as his partner ran out the back and doors opened on both sides and the residents crept into the hallway. There he was, a white guy holding a gun, with two black kids on the floor and the smell of gunpowder in the air. But a woman from one of the apartments handed McKenna a pair of disposable diapers, and he gave them to the drug dealers to staunch their wounds. “Use these,” he said.
The man who had been shot in the groin uncrossed his legs, revealing a bloody mess. A young girl standing nearby saw the wound and pointed at McKenna, screaming, “They shot his shit off. They shot his shit off.”
After another hour of surveillance, McKenna acquires Ogletree's telephone number from directory assistance and calls the house, pretending to be a real estate broker. An old woman answers the phone and says that Lila doesn't live there, and that she doesn't know her address or phone number.
“If I had it, I couldn't give it to you,” the woman says and hangs up.
McKenna explains that people who make a career out of false injury claims often list a relative's address as their own to keep investigators from knowing where they live.
We're still trying to figure out if we've got the target when a beat-up old Honda arrives in front of the Ogletrees'. A woman in a yellow sweatshirt is driving, and she climbs out and goes inside the house. A skinny old white guy with mottled skin and greasy hair stays in the car, reading a newspaper. Then the woman comes back out with what looks like a stack of mail. She gets in the car and drives off.
McKenna follows them, staying back at least 150 feet whenever possible. He theorizes that the woman at the wheel is Lila Ogletree, the dude with the newspaper is her boyfriend, and the voice on the telephone was Lila's elderly mother.
“She looks younger than fifty,” says McKenna, studying her through the binoculars whenever the traffic on Columbia Road slows down. “But you can't tell sometimes.”
At a stop sign on Dudley Street, McKenna calls my attention to a little four-door pulled up at the corner with a group of white kids inside. A black teenager on a bicycle is pedaling away. “Did you see it?” asks McKenna.
“See what?”
“The drug deal. The one on the bike gave something to the passenger, and the passenger handed him the cash. Kids on bicycles are hard to track. They use 'em a lot around here.”
When I ask why he doesn't use his phone to tip Boston P.D., McKenna laughs. “They won't get here until tomorrow, even if we called yesterday,” he says.
Trying to keep at least one car between the grimy red Honda and us, McKenna follows the target to a strip mall that contains an Office Mart. I'm reminded of the surveillance tips I received from Mark Donahue. Mark's advice was to keep a good distance from the subject and to blend in with the scenery. When following a car, stay on the right side of the target's bumper, where you'll fall into the blind spot in his rearview mirror. Mark usually carries four or five hats and a couple of spare jackets in the backseat, changing outfits here and there during the surveillance. The number-one rule: don't let the target see you.
In the Office Mart parking lot, McKenna hops out and tails the woman into the store while I jump into the front seat with the camcorder. Through the zoom lens I keep an eye on the man in the passenger seat of the Honda. He's wearing glasses and doing a crossword puzzle. Two minutes later McKenna thrusts open the door to the van, startling me. “She's at the cash register,” he says.
He picks up the video camera and tapes the subject returning to the car with an Office Mart bag in each hand as I watch through the binoculars. The woman is in plain sight, just seven or eight car lengths away.
“She could be fifty years old,” I say to McKenna, who's still taping her.
He puts the camera aside and watches the Honda pull out, then allows a pickup truck to get between us and the subject, and follows the woman into traffic. “I got a feeling it's her,” McKenna says.
At the Walgreens on Dudley Street the target makes another stop. She goes inside and the white guy stays in the car with his puzzle. While we're sitting there a six-foot black woman with blonde hair gets out of a Cadillac Escalade driven by a man in a baseball cap. The woman is wearing a miniskirt and has the long, sinewy legs of a dancer.
The tall chick sashays around the nose of the SUV and climbs into a paving truck driven by a hefty, Italian looking fellow. “Hooker,” says McKenna.
The subject emerges from Walgreens toting more purchases and the white dude has his nose buried in the crossword puzzle and doesn't even open the door for her. “If it's Lila Ogletree, she's got the laziest boyfriend of all time,” I tell McKenna.
He laughs. “I'll make a notation in the file,” McKenna says, pulling out behind them.
We tail the Honda to Maynard Street, where both occupants get out of the car and enter a dilapidated tenement building. McKenna uses his phone to call the office, trying to find out who lives at 78–80 Maynard Street. One of the names he comes up with is Beaudet.
“Wait here,” says McKenna, handing me the binoculars. He gets out of the van and walks over to the house, turns at the gate, and goes up the front stairs to the mailbox.
A few seconds later, the chunky detective returns to the van. “Apartment Three has a tag for Beaudet,” he says. “Underneath in pencil it says, ‘Ogletree.'”
With the tall blue rectangle of the Prudential Building shining in the distance, McKenna phones the client and says we've got something on the Lila Ogletree case. They want to view the tape as soon as possible and will send a driver to Houghs Neck to pick it up. We're heading back there to sit on Billy Giampa.
The blue Subaru pickup is not in Giampa's driveway, and after the courier grabs the Ogletree tape, we drive to the Quincy assessor's office to find out who owns the gas station that Giampa frequents. McKenna believes that it's a family member or close friend, and that Giampa is working under the table for them. He thinks the manager of the gas station has tipped Giampa to other detectives and doesn't trust him.
The gas station is listed under an R-T-S corporation in upstate New York, and we have to shuttle back and forth between town offices to unearth the names of the two men who are running the business. They are Middle Eastern, and by checking their names against other lists we discover that they also own a salvage company and a small construction outfit.
“Giampa's in there somewhere,” says McKenna. “I feel it in my falafel.”
We return to our spot above the gas station a little bit wiser. After just a couple of minutes McKenna and I blurt out “There he is” at the same time and watch as Billy Giampa takes a circuitous route back to his house. He turns right on Sea Street when he should've turned left, and we can hear his engine as he passes on the street behind us.
“This guy's paranoid,” says McKenna. “He thinks he's being followed.”
McKenna glides down from the hill and tucks the van beneath a giant shade tree near the bottom. A moment later the blue pickup rattles past. “Yeah, he's cleaning himself,” says McKenna. “Making sure he doesn't have a tail.”
When Giampa turns at the stop sign, McKenna takes a left and then another left, trying to beat the pickup across Sea Street. But the crazy bastard is driving the little side roads at forty-five miles an hour and shoots through a hole in the traffic. “Fuck,” says
McKenna, as we pick our way across the intersection. “He's gotta show up now.”
We hide in a little grass alley and wait for Giampa to pass by. My heart is beating fast, and it occurs to me that this whole thing is a goof; like when we were kids and Bobby Corey and I would ditch our Stingrays behind the wall at Howard Park and wait for Mary Lou Endyke to ride by. Then we'd pull our caps down low and follow her to Lawlor's Drug Store.
At the last second I remember that there's no tape in the camcorder and we miss our shot as Giampa runs around the block and scoots into his driveway.
“Ehh, we'll sit on him another half hour and call it a day,” says McKenna, tossing me the binoculars. “We get paid, no matter what happens.”
TWENTY-TWO
Hats on the Bed
Old times only buy you one ticket, and you just cashed that in.
— JIM ROCKFORD, THE ROCKFORD FILES
IT'S A RAW, WET AFTERNOON IN MID-MARCH, the light failing, with a large, amorphous cloud of mist and vapors hanging over Union Square, shrouding the passersby. Joey McCain has summoned me to the Tir na nOg without explanation, and after parking some distance away, I turn up the collar of my old hiking jacket and stomp toward the pub, wondering what the mystery is. I asked Joey over the phone, but all he'd say was to meet him at four o'clock.
For the past month, I've been working a string of fraud cases with Kevin McKenna in Dorchester and Roxbury and out on Houghs Neck in Quincy. Several of the cases have turned out well, so more have come in and we've been busy. The woman in the battered Honda that we videotaped in the Office Mart parking lot did turn out to be Lila Ogletree, who had filed workmen's compensation claims six times over her last four jobs. She was supposed to be immobilized by a back injury, and the video of her carrying shopping bags and jumping in and out of the little Honda proved otherwise. Her employers looked at it and discontinued her benefits; Ogletree hired a lawyer and took them to court. The judge saw the evidence and ordered her straight back to work.
