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

by Jay Atkinson

  Today, fifty-year-old Gene Kee is a Massachusetts State Police lieutenant assigned as a detective to the FBI Bank Robbery Task Force. (And with fifty-five bank robberies in metro Boston in January alone, he's a busy man.) Kee has agreed to take me out to Wood Avenue in Hyde Park, where big Joe was shot, with the understanding that he might have to answer calls and meet with informants over the course of the day. But all this was arranged before the war started, and with new threats of terrorism and heavy security throughout the building, there's some question whether any extraneous visitors will be allowed inside.

  After a few minutes Kee comes through a side door into the lobby. He slaps me on the back and shakes my hand, calling me Doctor and Commander. I'm neither, but am smiling and shaking my head in spite of myself. Dressed in gray slacks, white oxford shirt, and a beige-and-blue paisley tie, Kee has the wide shoulders and thickly muscled back of the habitual weight lifter. His short, brown hair, ruddy complexion, and square jaw are a road map to his previous occupations: U.S. Army regular, beer drinker, and college hockey player.

  Gene Kee and Joe McCain go back to the early eighties and the first incarnation of the Special Investigations Unit under Mark Cronin; Kee is an unabashed Joe McCain fan and goes out of his way to keep an eye on Joe Jr. while he schools a generation of other young cops in the McCain legacy.

  “This is your lucky fuckin' day,” says Kee as we're buzzed through the door into the plush hallway of the FBI offices.

  It turns out that the special agent in charge of Boston's FBI operation hails from my town, and his seven-year-old and my son play hockey and soccer on the same teams. So in a happy coincidence that would've made Joe McCain proud, the FBI has approved my visit, and the boss man wants to have a word with Gene and me before we go out on the street.

  Gene Kee sticks his head into an office with a sweeping view of City Hall Plaza just as Special Agent in Charge William Chase comes strolling along the hallway. Chase is a trim, compact man with a reddish brush cut and is wearing dress pants and shiny shoes with a dark blue FBI jersey and his badge, dangling on a chain around his neck. He shakes hands with Gene and me, explaining that he's busy in the command post down the hall and will get “suited up” in shirt and tie only if he's called to do any media interviews today.

  As the Chief, which is what Kee calls him, Bill Chase is a recognizable figure, appearing often on television and radio and in the Boston newspapers to explain high-profile cases and provide a connection for the public. But with rumors of terrorism increasing by the hour, he must be facing some tough decisions, the only hints of which are a few more crow's-feet around his eyes as he smiles.

  “Be careful out there, Jay,” he says, before turning to Kee. “Don't do any jump-outs, Gene.”

  “Oh, wow, Chief. You know I won't.”

  “Should I give Jay my Kevlar?” asks Chase.

  “Go 'head,” says Kee, grinning at us.

  Chase slaps him on the back and laughs. “Get out of here,” he says.

  Kee says, “Let's go, Commander,” and leads us down the curving hallway past the FBI Wall of Martyrs— black-and-white photographs of agents slain in the line of duty— around the bend and alongside another gallery of photos; this time it's the FBI's Most Wanted list, and Kee raps on one of the mug shots with his knuckles as he goes by and I stop and look: it's James J. “Whitey” Bulger, from Winter Hill in Somerville, ruthless gangster and murderer. The longtime Joe McCain nemesis “is being sought for his role in numerous murders committed from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s in connection with his leadership of an organized crime group that allegedly controlled extortion, drug deals, and other illegal activities in the Boston, Massachusetts, area. He has a violent temper and is known to carry a knife at all times. Considered armed and extremely dangerous.”

  It's no small irony that Whitey Bulger's mug shot has such a prominent place in the FBI office, since under a different regime he was a prized “informant,” free to plunder and kill under agency protection. But all that was long before guys like Bill Chase and Gene Kee reported to work here.

  Kee is an old workout rat and stops to show me the FBI gymnasium, which offers a stunning panoramie view of the plaza and where, by contract, he's allowed to exercise for an hour each day. (Biff McLean took me into the gym at the Danvers State Police Barracks and it's interesting to note that the troopers' facility is heavy on free weights and things like squat racks and Smith machines, while the FBI room is filled with cardiovascular equipment: treadmills, stair machines, et cetera. In a way, the exercise slant reflects the mission of each agency: security and deterrence for the State Police, tracking and pursuit for the FBI.)

  Punching numbers into a panel on each level, Kee leads us up one flight to the offices of the Bank Robbery Task Force. Security is pretty tight everywhere, but there's no significant uniformed presence and other employees in the corridor and outside the photo and fingerprint labs smile at us and say a polite word or two.

  “You might not have picked the best day to be in this building,” says Kee, laughing at the notion. “We're a big target.”

  Typically the FBI Bank Robbery Task Force pairs an agent with a State Police detective, but because of the war the FBI is concentrated elsewhere and Gene Kee is working alone today. The seventh floor is a maze of forest green carrels and cabinets with slate gray indoor-outdoor carpeting, and while Kee settles at a desk adorned with photographs of his teenage son and daughter, I can hear the detective in the next carrel talking on his phone: “He's got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. . . . Three heart attacks. . . . Yeah, the skinny one.”

  Gene Kee usually spends half his morning dealing with informants, whom he goes out of his way to treat like human beings. “I learned that from Joe— the respect,” he says. “In this business, a lot of guys get the info they want and then kick the informant to the curb. Joe never operated like that. A lot of his informants stayed with him for years.”

  Illustrating that same loyalty, Kee dedicates an inordinate amount of time to making a phone call on behalf of a woman in danger of getting “locked up” and losing her Section 8 housing certificate. He talks to someone at the district courthouse and makes a second call to another cop about the woman, noting that she's entered a substance abuse program. “Could I ask you for some consideration?” asks Kee. “Uh-huh. Well, please keep it in mind.” He hangs up, muttering, “Ugh. That doesn't sound good.”

  Even though we're in a secure FBI office, Kee pulls his chair right up to mine and talks in a voice so low that I have to lean forward to hear him. His old buddies have told me that everything with Gene is “under the dome,” a reference to the 1960s TV show Get Smart and the Plexiglas “cone of silence” that Agent 86, Maxwell Smart, would insist on during his conversations with the Chief. One day after Joe McCain got shot and Sergeant Kee was in charge of Special Investigations, Dennis Febles and Mark Lemieux rigged a garbage bag to the ceiling in the shape of a dome, and when Gene answered his phone they used a hidden wire to lower it over his desk and then ran like hell.

  Kee explains that before we drive out to Hyde Park we have to meet a guy outside, near the door to Kinsale's. The woman he's trying to help is the original witness and informant in the Winter Hill mob case, a drug user who one day got fed up with the murderous double-dealing of Bulger's gang and broke the public silence on what they were doing. Kee says that the woman has left the witness protection program in San Diego, moved back to Boston, and is using heroin again. The man we're going to meet is her son.

  Beneath One Center Plaza is an open arcade, where the wind sweeps down from Beacon Hill, stirring up cigarette butts and scraps of paper, and the men and women who work in the surrounding offices hurry along with their collars turned up. Wearing his camel-hair sport coat and clutching a manila envelope, Gene Kee stands on the edge of Cambridge Street, looking up and down. Then a husky young man in a dark blue jacket and New England Patriots cap approaches on the sidewalk and shakes Kee's ha
nd.

  “How's your mother?” Kee asks.

  The young man takes the envelope. “She's doing all right,” he says. “She's trying.”

  Kee reaches over, unclasps the envelope, and pulls what looks like an application partway out. “Sit and walk her through it,” he says to the kid. “Get it back to me and we'll see if we can get her the housing.”

  “Okay.”

  Shaking hands again, Kee says, “Your mother's a hero. I'll do everything I can for her.”

  The kid looks out from under the brim of his cap. “Thanks. I'll tell her.”

  Kee's “company car” is a brand-new Dodge Intrepid with leather interior and hidden police lights. Driving down the Southeast Expressway, Gene and I look like a couple of appliance salesmen listening to the war on 'BZ. In fact, Kee is something of an entrepreneur despite his twenty-three-year career in law enforcement. Not long ago, after a Boston cop was shot and killed while swinging a sledgehammer at a locked door during a raid, Kee invented and eventually patented and later sold the rights to the “one-man battering ram.” (The first time he used his invention, A1 DiSalvo, Chris Brighton, Mark Cronin, and Biff McLean were all cut by flying glass— something they never let their old buddy live down. “We've been through a few doors,” Kee says. “Into some real shitholes.”) Allowing the officer employing it to remain in side profile and thus a smaller target while bashing through a door, the innovation made Gene Kee and his family a few bucks but, more important, saved lives among his fellow police officers.

  Joe McCain's life is very much on Kee's mind as we cruise down Gallivan Boulevard in Dorchester, hunting for the street that will take us into the appropriate section of Hyde Park. Though his office is only a few miles away, Kee has been here just once in the fifteen years since Joe was shot and then only because he was working nearby and a colleague wanted to see the house. As we turn onto River Street, moving alongside the scarred brick of an old paper mill, Kee's characteristic good cheer evaporates and his weathered face takes on a dark, ruminative aspect.

  He's been sober for many years and has told me that, not long after the shooting, he and Chris Brighton visited Joe McCain in Brigham and Women's Hospital, finding their mentor pale and weak, hooked up to all sorts of monitoring devices and oxygen machines and IV lines. Leaning up for a moment but unable to speak, Joe made a cup-to-the-lips gesture, in effect asking, “You're not drinking, are you?”

  They shook their heads, and “Joe gave us this look, you know, ‘all right.' He was always worried about us, even then,” says Kee. He takes a left onto Wood Avenue. “Joe transcended ego and politics to work with people from all walks of life, at every level. What a gift he had.”

  Seen through the windshield of Kee's Intrepid, Wood Ave. is a dingy neighborhood of ranch houses and grimy little Colonials. Parked cars are crowded along both sides, but the street is empty of pedestrians beneath a low, overcast sky. Just before we reach Ellard Road, Gene finds space along the curb and pulls over.

  “That's it,” he says.

  Melvin Lee's former residence is a small, two-story house covered in grayish green siding trimmed with burgundy. Surrounded by a chain-link fence with the gate open, the front yard has been paved over and contains a single denuded oak tree in a concrete well. No fewer than six unregistered cars occupy the driveway, and the side yard is filled with headless dolls, broken wading pools, cinder blocks, three-legged chairs, rusted lawn mowers, and heaps of other charred and nameless refuse.

  A single, inscrutable piece of graffiti is scribbled on the siding in white paint: “Romans.” Gene Kee and I get out of the car and, for a moment, gaze at the house. “What a fuckin' dive, though, huh?” he asks, shaking his head. “Forty-eight seconds, and it was all over.”

  It occurs to me that I should purchase a throwaway camera and take some pictures, so Kee and I climb back in the Intrepid and he drives down to the corner of Ellard Road and turns left, showing me where the “takedown team” was located during the initial surveillance. But Melvin Lee kept coming back to his porch to stare at them, and when the Special Investigations Unit returned that evening, everybody was moved back a couple of blocks; the van was nosed into a blind street alongside Ross Park, with Al DiSalvo three hundred yards away, on the far side of the baseball fields.

  “Knowing Joe and his impatience, when Mark [Cronin] said, ‘Everybody move in, Chris is in trouble,' Joe and Paul [Hutchinson] were driving by the front of the house,” Kee says, with a note of regret in his voice. “And we were over here.”

  A few minutes later, we arrive back at the house with a camera and approach the gate. There's a brief walkway leading to three stairs up to the front porch. “It was a ‘rip' from the get-go,” says Kee. “[Vladimir] Lafontant was just a guy who showed up and said, ‘Fuck him, let's rip the white dude off and we'll split the money.' A crime of opportunity.”

  When I ask why Joe McCain wasn't wearing a bulletproof vest, Kee reminds me that issuing vests wasn't the rule back then like it is now, and that big Joe wasn't a member of the takedown team and arrived first on the scene only through a fluke. “Besides, picture that vest on a three-hundred-pound guy,” he says. “It would look like a bib.”

  This time Kee has parked in the street, right where he jumped out of the van that night. Standing between a telephone pole and a fire hydrant, he points at a spot in the chain-link fence. Lafontant ran outside with a gun in each hand, exchanged volleys with McCain and Hutchinson, leaped the fence and then “dropped like a sack of shit right here,” says Kee, gesturing at the pavement. “He was already dead, that was obvious. Shot through the heart. He did it all on adrenaline.”

  The Special Investigations Unit was as tight as any of the military units Gene Kee served in, as close-knit as any of his old hockey teams. When Mark Cronin gave that order, foremost in everyone's mind was, “Kegs” Brighton was in trouble.

  The unit's wisecracking and beloved undercover man, Brighton often got himself in and out of dangerous situations. On another case Brighton posed as a bad guy for a wannabe Mafioso named Anthony Pucci from Everett, Mass. The bad guy was a drug dealer and punk who thought he was King Shit because Brighton drove him around in a little cream-colored Mercedes.

  “You're big,” Pucci told Brighton. “You're my muscle.”

  Trying to impress some girls in a nightclub, Pucci slapped Brighton across the face. “You're my protection,” he said. “I want you right here on my shoulder.”

  In private, Brighton said, “I'm gonna kill this fucking guy before it's over.” But he remained in character while the little gangster walked around like he was Al Capone. The tough-talking drug dealer cried when they finally took him down. “Guess what?” asked Brighton, slapping Pucci in the face. “We're cops.” Later Pucci skipped bail and ran away to join the Italian Navy, and Brighton and the other guys laughed about it.

  But that night on Wood Avenue was different. Before the operation, while they were sitting around the office, a palpable tension filled the air and there was some talk of canceling the buy— like a group premonition. At the scene there were gunshots and shouts and chaos, Gene Kee moving toward the house in what seemed like slow motion as Biff McLean came racing through the side yard firing his weapon.

  “I think one of Biff's rounds ended up in the house across the street,” says Kee, poking fun at his old buddy's marksmanship.

  Lafontant's path into the street placed members of the unit in a potential crossfire. Less than fifty feet away, Al DiSalvo was “drawing down on us,” says Kee. “Thank God he never fired.”

  Joe McCain staggered down the front walk and sat on the pavement, leaning hard against the fence. McLean knelt beside him and opened up Joe's shirt, and there was a little red hole in the center of his abdomen. Into McLean's ear, Joe said, “Tell Helen that I love her.”

  Gene Kee stands on that spot while I lean on the fence with my camera, snapping pictures of the trash strewn over the yard. “You wanna get out back?” asks Kee, but it's not really a q
uestion. He's already striding toward the front porch, up the stairs, a purposeful look on his face.

  He pulls out his State Police badge and rings the bell. A large, ebony-skinned man in a bath towel answers the door, and Kee identifies himself and asks the man, who's in his late forties and has a gold tooth, if we can go into the backyard and take a few photos.

  The man speaks very little English and at first does not understand the request. “A crime occurred here . . . a long time ago . . . nothing now,” says Kee, his voice growing louder. “We just want to see.”

  After a flurry of gestures and head bobs and single-word descriptions, the man agrees, indicating that if we'll wait a few moments he'll join us. In just seconds he reappears, dressed in old khaki pants, a quilted jacket, and one black loafer and a green flip-flop sandal. He stammers in a musical voice that he's Haitian and has owned the house for seven years and means to improve it.

  In the backyard I take a handful of photos, and Gene choreographs Mark Cronin's and Biff McLean's and Chris Brighton's movements while the owner of the house follows us without saying a word. Old tires and broken metal cabinets and smashed televisions and microwave ovens are strewn over the weedy lawn.

  The back door is locked tight, and Kee asks if we can go inside to see the kitchen. The man says he'll unfasten the door and passes around to the front of the house while Gene and I stand there looking at each other.