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

by Jay Atkinson

  While the surveillance team was staying on the Davises, the relationship between Joe McCain and Tanya Roberts continued to sour. Assigned to “handle” Tank Gaffney's live-in girlfriend, a woman named Maggie, who was also an informant on the case, Roberts told Maggie that she could do better than the fat, bald Gaffney. Of course, this upset Gaffney, causing him to lose his interest in the case. To wrestle things back on track, McCain stayed up half the night, convincing Gaffney that he was handsome in an unconventional way.

  McCain was raised to have the utmost respect for women; he was a chivalrous man, in the old-fashioned sense. But he had no tolerance for dirty or incompetent police officers, regardless of gender or race. In the midst of the Davis brothers case, he turned to FBI agent Matt Cronin, and said, “This douche bag with her tight fucking blue jeans is gonna ruin this case.”

  Cronin smoothed things over at the bureau, but then things went from bad to worse. In her brief stay in Massachusetts, Roberts managed to insert herself among FBI power brokers, led by John Connolly, a well-groomed, fastidious man who shared Roberts's inclination to work out on bureau time. One very hot day, McCain was following Mickey Davis and lost him up on Beacon Hill. When he tried to hand the surveillance to Roberts, the sexy young red-head never answered his radio calls.

  McCain drove straight to the Boston Athletic Club on Summer Street. With the sun beating down, he spent an hour searching the parking lot until he found Roberts's little blue Mustang. Taking out one of his business cards, he scribbed “Hope you had a nice workout” on the back and stuck the card on Roberts's windshield. Then he climbed back in his rattling old shitbox and returned to work.

  Later that day Roberts stormed into the Norfolk D.A.'s office, where McCain was meeting with Matt Cronin and a few other detectives. “What the fuck is this?” she asked, throwing McCain's card onto the table.

  Joe swept the card aside. “We're out there busting our asses in the hot sun and you're nowhere to be found,” he said. “Who do you think you are? Miss America with an FBI badge, who can do whatever she wants?”

  Work on the Davis brothers case went on, but the tension was palpable. Listening over the wire one day, McLean learned that Stevie Flemmi had taken Debby Davis on a vacation to Mexico. Upon their return, the telephone chatter indicated that Debby had met the rich, handsome son of a Mexican chicken and oil millionaire, and the two had taken a liking to each other. Within a few weeks Flemmi was spending more time with fourteen-year-old Michelle Davis, and shortly thereafter Debby was among the missing, rumored to have returned to Mexico and the company of the young millionaire.

  Stevie Flemmi liked to take little weekend trips to Montreal with his paramours. Determined to hook the Rifleman any way he could, for a while McCain became fixated on catching Stevie crossing the border with the underage Davis girl. “If we can't get him for anything else, we'll arrest the bastard for statutory rape,” Joe told Biff McLean.

  But the whole case unraveled before Flemmi embarked on his next junket. Suspected alongside the Davises and Whitey and Stevie was a friend of Mickey Davis's called Paul Petros, a florist and their partner in the cocaine business. On June 2, 1983, five detectives including Chris Brighton and Biff McLean followed Petros and Mickey Davis from the Mystic Valley Parkway to State Street in downtown Boston. Driving a brand-new silver Audi, Petros was believed to have two kilos of cocaine hidden in his trunk and was on his way to meet the buyer.

  High above the city, Matt Cronin was quarterbacking the surveillance from the FBI plane. Having rerouted air traffic to allow the pilot to fly low, Cronin had a clear view of Petros's car and the movements of its passengers once they stepped out. A well-dressed, meticulous fellow, the forty-one-year-old Cronin was a law school graduate and native of Connecticut. He admired Joe McCain for his integrity and love of police work; in a profession where it's easy to become cynical, this plainspoken guy from Winter Hill treated law enforcement as a vocation, coming to work every day brimming with passion for the job.

  “Joe could walk into any place in the city in full uniform, and even the wiseguys would talk to him,” recalled Cronin, who considered McCain his mentor even though he had fourteen years of experience himself.

  The team of detectives settled near Petros when he parked the Audi on the corner of Washington and Avery Streets. Carrying a folded newspaper under his arm, Chris Brighton got out of his car and walked along the sidewalk with Petros coming toward him. The drug dealer crossed Washington Street to a fruit stand, where he bought a couple of peaches. Meanwhile, an unknown black male approached Davis with a shoe box in his hand, and Petros crossed back to his car. Davis took the shoe box in his left hand, and Petros got behind the wheel of the Audi.

  McCain and Cronin's plan dictated that their guys would witness the exchange of drugs and money, then let Davis and Petros go, and arrest the buyer. Pressuring him to cooperate, law enforcement would have the buyer declare his satisfaction with the Davises' product and ask them to triple his order. Such a large buy would force the Davises to go back to Bulger and Flemmi for help. That was the transaction that McCain and Cronin wanted to jump on; if they could catch Bulger and Flemmi in the open with that much cocaine, no amount of federal protection would save them. And having the buyer as their key witness would move the original source, Tank Gaffney, “one back” from the arrest, shielding him from reprisals and allowing him to continue as an informant. It was win-win.

  So far, things were progressing as McCain's team had hoped. But before Cronin could radio down from the airplane to follow Petros and arrest the buyer, a voice broke in from Metropolitan Police headquarters ordering that all three parties to the transaction be arrested on the spot.

  “No, stay back,” said Cronin. He was furious; this was the worst possible time for interagency rivalry to get in the way of a great pinch.

  “I'm telling you to move in,” said Met headquarters. “Take 'em all down.”

  It was a major screwup. The detectives on the ground had not actually witnessed a transaction, and the shoe box turned out to contain a pair of shoes. The arrests forced the team to expose their probable cause, which was the wiretap, and once that news got out, the chance of hooking Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi became remote.

  Things were about to get worse. The team of detectives assigned to the case was operating out of the Harbor Unit on Beverly Street in Boston, over behind North Station. Although this arrangement was kept quiet, when Paul Petros got back on the street, he managed to steal a file on the case from the front seat of one of the detectives' cars, which was parked outside the Harbor Unit. Obviously there was a leak, and it had to be someone on the inside. Nothing was ever proven, but Joe McCain had a short list of suspects, including an FBI agent who wore tight blue jeans.

  As soon as they found out about the theft, McCain and McLean drove up to New Hampshire, where Tank Gaffney was working, to tell the informant that he might be in danger. Then McCain met with the judge, in camera, to inform him how the operation had been compromised, and the judge ordered the contents of the wiretap to be sealed, where it remains to this day. Contrary to popular belief, then, Bulger and Flemmi's cozy relationship with the Boston FBI office did not allow them to spike the Davis brothers case. But someone did, and that person's identity remains a mystery.

  The FBI's misguided protection of Whitey Bulger and Stephen Flemmi is already part of Boston lore, up there with Harry Frazee selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees to underwrite his production of No, No, Nanette. But with all his street experience, Joe McCain rarely saw things in black and white, and if there was ever a case that included a lot of gray area, it's the case against Whitey Bulger. Which law enforcement officials were aware of Bulger's murderous dealings while the gangster was a protected government informant may never be known. Whitey Bulger has been a fugitive since 1995, and his sightings, both real and imagined, push every other topic out of the local news. Stevie Flemmi is in custody, trying to sell his backlog of criminal information to avoid the death pen
alty. According to Colonel Thomas J. Foley, the superintendent of the Mass. State Police and a key witness against Flemmi, the government “has got him solid on a group of murders.”

  Not long after Joe McCain died, Bulger's FBI contact John Connolly was convicted of obstruction of justice for abetting the criminal activities of Bulger and Flemmi, and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. Connolly's supervisor, John Morris, admitted taking bribes from the Winter Hill gang and was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony against Connolly. (“Morris took seven grand in an envelope from Whitey and he's retired,” said Mass. state trooper Al DiSalvo. “Is that fair?”) Connolly bashing has been a popular Boston sport for years, with politicians, judges, district attorneys, law enforcement personnel, and media types all guilty of piling on. But Joe McCain never did, in spite of the fact that he expended a great deal of time and energy and put his own life and those of his colleagues and family in jeopardy trying to break up the Winter Hill gang and put Whitey and the Rifleman in jail.

  One aspect of the case that aggravated McCain was the fact that the mob rats “Cadillac Frank” Salemme and John “the Basin Street Butcher” Martorano, each a suspect in twenty murders, were offered limited immunity in exchange for their testimony against Connolly, who has not been accused of killing anyone. Martorano was offered a deal amounting to roughly four months of jail time per murder to provide information about a man he'd never met. From Joe Barboza and William Geraway on down, this sort of questionable bargaining drove McCain nuts. “You've got the shooters,” he said. “What can they possibly give you that's better than they are?”

  On October 19, 2000, a Bulger strong arm named Kevin Weeks led Massachusetts authorities to a makeshift grave beside the Neponset River where they found the remains of Debra Davis. Weeks told police that on a September evening in 1981, Flemmi and Davis were taking a ride through South Boston when Davis attempted to break off their relationship. Flemmi proceeded to his mother's house on East Third Street and forced Davis inside, where he and Whitey Bulger strangled her.

  Later that night, Flemmi and Bulger drove to an isolated spot beneath the MBTA tracks in Quincy and buried Davis's body. After Weeks helped the Mass State Police unearth several more bodies, there was increased speculation that the twenty-seven missing persons known to the authorities represent a small percentage of the actual number of killings Bulger and Flemmi committed.

  Since Weeks came forward, Debby's mother Olga Davis has appeared on Boston television several times, crying over her lost child and accusing the government of complicity in her death. By protecting Whitey and Stevie, and ignoring her pleas for assistance when Debby first disappeared, the FBI and the state of Massachusetts share in the responsibility for Debby Davis's murder, if Olga Davis is to be believed. She has filed lawsuits against the FBI and the state of Massachusetts.

  What Olga Davis omits during her tearful media appearances is the fact that Metropolitan Police Officers Joe McCain and Biff McLean and FBI Agent Matt Cronin did offer to help her. When Debby first went missing, Stevie Flemmi told her family that she had returned to Mexico and her wealthy young boyfriend. Olga knew enough about Flemmi and Bulger and their way of doing business to be skeptical, even frightened. Debby Davis had intimate knowledge of Flemmi's criminal activities; when she fell in love with the Mexican kid and Stevie began his affair with her fourteen-year-old sister, Debby became a loose end that had to be removed.

  Olga Davis didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how Flemmi and Bulger solved these kinds of problems, or how they made the bodies disappear. In fact, the two gangsters would often commit a murder and then go into a coffee shop the next day and break bread with the victim's family. At first Mrs. Davis may have believed that Debby had taken off for Mexico. But after not hearing from her daughter for several weeks, which was out of character, Olga became worried and approached McCain through Tank Gaffney's girlfriend, Maggie, and the three of them sat down for a meeting. Olga had been told that McCain was the only cop in Boston who could be trusted and by this time, she was desperate.

  Although she had no physical evidence that her daughter had been murdered, Olga insisted that Flemmi was a violent man and had learned of Debby's fledgling love affair in Mexico. McCain listened to her story without Olga knowing that he had the whole operation under surveillance. When she was through, McCain said he would think about it and get back to her.

  Technically, Olga Davis was talking about a Randolph missing persons case, over which McCain had no jurisdiction. Joe brought her tale to Matt Cronin, and the FBI agent suggested that Olga Davis wear a wire and accuse Stephen Flemmi of having something to do with the girl's disappearance. Matt Cronin and his colleague Jimmy Crawford had their own suspicions about a leak in the FBI “front office,” so nearly all of what they were learning about Flemmi and Bulger and the Davises they left out of their reports— which were being read by Connolly and Morris. So although there's no written record of what actually occurred, it's a source of both amusement and irritation whenever these retired cops and agents see Olga Davis on television, claiming that she approached the FBI but they wouldn't help her. (Nor does she ever mention that she accepted money from Stevie Flemmi, or that he conducted a significant drug-selling operation under her roof.) The truth is, when Joe McCain brought Matt Cronin and Olga Davis together, the FBI agent asked her to wear a wire and she refused.

  It is also a fact that McCain put Biff McLean on the Davis brothers case because Biff, as a Mattapan guy, knew a lot of the younger players: kids who were buying the coke, some of the mules and couriers and lesser dealers, and an informant who ran in those circles and often produced new, fresh angles on what they were hearing over the wire. (One day in June, McLean heard the Davises planning a big Fourth of July barbecue. They were making scads of money in their cocaine business but were discussing in gleeful voices how they had shoplifted all the hamburgers and sausages for the party, while McLean and the other detectives laughed about it on their end of the line.)

  Danny Jacie, the small-time drug dealer and former boyfriend of Debby's, was one of the minor players in the Davis saga. Long before Debby Davis went missing, McLean heard from his own informant that Jacie was supposed to meet Stevie Flemmi at five o'clock one night in a remote location in the Blue Hills, a sprawling rural area just south and west of Boston. The two men knew each other because of Debby Davis.

  That night uniformed Mets were patrolling a gravel road called the Pipeline on the Milton-Quincy border. At dusk, a car passed them at high speed going in the other direction. The police car made a quick U-turn and chased after the car, losing it in Quincy, whereupon they turned back and drove up to the Blue Hills as ordered. There, in a tiny lot off the Pipeline, they found the body of twenty-one-year-old Daniel Thomas Jacie. He had been shot several times.

  It wasn't until several years later, while manning the Davis wiretap, that McLean learned Jacie had been dating Debby Davis at the same time Flemmi was seeing her. Known as a ruthless, jealous bastard, the Rifleman lured his rival to the Blue Hills and then killed him.

  The fourteen autopsy photographs are contained in an old brown envelope. In them a good-looking, young man with brown hair and brown eyes and a wispy beard is lying on a table. He is wearing a pair of tan pants, a white shirt, and a short, brown leather jacket, and his eyes are open. At the beginning of the sequence, Jacie is depicted from the waist up, his shirt unbuttoned and jacket peeled back to reveal a bullet wound on the left side of his rib cage, just below the heart. Dried blood encircles the hole, which is approximately an inch in diameter, and there are large pink stains on the inner flap of the shirt.

  In the other photographs the corpse is naked. In one of the most gruesome images, Jacie is facedown on the examining table. The white-gowned figure of an attendant is depicted over Jacie's left shoulder, wearing latex gloves and holding a scalpel in his right hand. Gobbets of blood are everywhere. The hair on the lower part of the victim's skull has been sho
rn away, leaving the sort of ugly, gaping wound made by a large-caliber handgun at close range. The path of the bullet widens as it enters the skull, exposing the gory mass of the victim's brain.

  Although Biff McLean would love to press Stephen Flemmi on what occurred in the Blue Hills that evening, Danny Jacie's murder remains unsolved.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  One-fifty Gen-o

  There are no second acts in American lives.

  — F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  COMING UP FROM THE T STATION at Government Center is like rising from the depths of a Stygian underworld. As I climb toward the daylight at the apex of the stairs, heavy pipes rattle against the wall and another train arrives below, disgorges its passengers, and shudders off into the darkness. Topside is the bright gray chill of mid-March, City Hall to my right, the JFK Building straight ahead, and off to the left, the curving stone edifice of Center Plaza. It's March 20, the first day of the war against Iraq, and City Hall Plaza is occupied by satellite trucks from the major networks and cable television stations, in anticipation of the protesters who are expected to flood the area.

  There are a lot of cops around, and I ask a Boston police officer the way to One Center Plaza and he points along the sidewalk to Kinsale's Tavern and the entrance to the adjacent building. Six floors above Cambridge Street, inside FBI headquarters where I'm going to meet Gene Kee, no one will be protesting the war— they'll be too busy fighting it.

  Off the elevator FBI is printed on the wall in giant blue letters and I proceed down the corridor, through a metal detector, and into the reception area. The FBI lobby is part Brahmin living room— floral sofa, easy chairs, and shiny end tables— and part observation room at San Quentin— a large sheet of bulletproof glass divides the room and off to the right is a steel-reinforced door. Behind the glass a pretty blonde receptionist asks me to empty my pockets onto the counter, return through the metal detector, and hoist up my backpack and shuffle around the notebooks and pencils so she can look inside. Then the young woman trades a red visitor's badge for my driver's license and asks me to take a seat while she calls upstairs to former Joe McCain protégé Eugene Albert Kee, Jr.