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

by Jay Atkinson

  “He probably didn't understand a word and is back in bed,” says Kee.

  But we hear the creaking floorboards, and several bolts are shot back and the man opens the half-rotted door and beckons us inside. A thick, musky odor pervades the kitchen, where every flat surface is crowded with dirty dishes, empty food containers, and scorched pots and pans. Kee indicates where Chris Brighton was sitting, and then we duck our heads into the tiny, adjacent bathroom, where Lafontant attempted to cock the sawed-off shotgun. It's strange, but the layout of the house seems familiar to me, though I've never before set foot in Hyde Park.

  The three of us head into a dim corridor along the staircase toward the front of the house. Near the exit I mention the front room that was unfurnished on January 29, 1988, where Detective Hutchinson got his first glimpse of the shooter. Kee gestures and the owner of the house unlocks a padlock on the door and allows us a glimpse inside: clean, white-upholstered furniture covered in sheets of plastic, an array of expensive stereo equipment, and a thick blue carpet figured with gold designs. There's a cabinet lined with gold-trimmed urns and other ceremonial-looking crockery, not a smudge or speck of dust anywhere.

  “That's the shrine,” says Kee.

  We thank the man for his kindness and go onto the porch and down the front walk. “He probably thought we were from the city inspector's,” says Kee. “He's on a green card and afraid to say no.”

  Shuffling along, my camera in my pocket now, I say that the city should erect a plaque to Joe McCain on the sidewalk. But Kee's thoughts are elsewhere and he pauses on the street for a moment, looking back at the house. “That bullet would've killed any one of us,” he says. “Joe was getting close to retirement anyway, and they wouldn't've been able to take him off the job in a tow truck. Joe McCain's true pride was being a Metropolitan police officer.”

  At Simco's hot dog stand on Blue Hill Avenue, Kee treats me to a grilled hot dog, vanilla frappe with honey, and a free call to my cardiologist. As we're headed back toward downtown, his pager goes off and Kee says, “Got one,” explaining that a bank has just been robbed. He's holding the pager, and I look at the text message as the description of the bank robber scrolls across: “tall, 6920, thin build, dark hair, sunglasses.”

  Soon we are speeding through the Callahan Tunnel toward the bank, which is on the VFW Parkway in Revere. “You don't run the siren on something like this?” I ask.

  Kee laughs. “Nah. He's already home in bed.”

  Out near Logan Airport we navigate a maze of broken up temporary streets as jets crisscross overhead. Two minutes later we arrive at the bank, which is little more than a kiosk on a paved, triangular lot, surrounded by police cars. A slender black woman in a maroon suit and braided yellow hair greets us at the front door, which is locked.

  “Gene Kee, Bank Robbery Task Force,” says my partner, holding up his badge.

  Inside the entrance is a polished marble counter flanked by a couple of offices behind smoked glass panels. Four burly Revere cops are off to my left, watching the surveillance video. “We got a good shot of him,” says a sturdy-looking detective in plainclothes. “But he took back the note.”

  “He did?” asks Kee.

  The detective nods. “He said, ‘Gimme back my note.'”

  The Revere cops, the bank manager, half a dozen wide-eyed tellers, and Gene Kee and I are standing in the semicircular lobby with a stock ticker running across the wall that everyone is ignoring. A young Russian woman with bobbed hair is the teller who was robbed of $2,200, and immediately upon being introduced Kee takes her into the manager's office and half-closes the door. The videotape can wait; Kee wants to speak to his best witness while the experience is still fresh in her mind.

  “Who is he?” asks the Revere detective, gesturing toward Kee. He's a short, broad-shouldered fellow named Goodwin, dressed in beige corduroys and a long-sleeved blue jersey. “Is he with the FBI?”

  “He's a State Police lieutenant,” I say, as the detective writes it down. “Gene Kee. K-e-e.”

  Inside the office I can hear Kee asking the Russian girl a series of questions in a patient, friendly voice. Where was the robber standing? Did he look at you? Where did he put his hands? What do you mean, tall? Kee gets up from his chair. I'm five ten. Taller than I am? By how much?

  A moment later, the Russian girl comes out of the office with Kee, points to the second teller window, says, “Right there,” and then the two of them turn around and go back inside.

  Someone from the bank's security department enters the building, hands his card to the Revere detective, and points at me. “Who's he?”

  “He's FBI,” says Detective Goodwin.

  “Actually, I'm a journalist,” I tell them.

  The security chief is a stout man wearing glasses and an expensive, olive-colored linen suit. He huddles for a moment with the bank's employees, and they all skitter away from me. “You're a journalist,” he says. “Are you with a local paper?”

  “No.” I point toward Kee, in the office behind us. “I'm with him.”

  The security chief looks me in the eye and then walks away, his fancy loafers ringing on the tiles of the lobby. Suddenly the area surrounding me is deserted, like I'm contagious. After a few minutes the young woman in the maroon suit plops down in the chair beside me, and I ask her if she's nervous and she replies that all the girls are a little upset. I ask when the robbery occurred, and the security chief races over and steps between us and says, “Let's talk for a minute,” to the young woman and I'm by myself again.

  Mr. Bank Security is a real pain in the ass, and I feel like reminding him that the bank has already been robbed. Just then Kee comes out of the office and beckons to me and when I try to follow him into the back room, the security chief walks over and attempts to have a private word with him.

  “He's with me,” Kee says, waving me into the room. “It's all right.”

  Inside, the Revere detective is running the appropriate section of the video back and forth on a monitor. “Watch. The robber is gonna come out from behind the big bald guy,” says Goodwin.

  A husky, bald-headed man is looking straight at the camera. “Too bad it's not that guy,” says Kee.

  “No shit,” says the detective. Forty-one-year-old Detective Sergeant John Goodwin has a relaxed, easygoing manner and looks like a stockier version of Al Pacino in Serpico. He takes out his cell phone, dials a number. “Hey, Johnny, you know that guy in line behind you with the sunglasses? He robbed the bank about ten seconds after you left. . . . I wish it was you. I would've solved the crime by now.”

  Sergeant Goodwin's phone call reminds me of what Al Seghezzi, an old friend of Joe McCain's and a retired deputy superintendent of the Mets, has told me: just like politics, all crime is local. By being on the street and getting to know a lot of people, a cop will meet a few criminals and can later identify them.

  On the videotape, the bank robber emerges from behind the huge bald guy and Goodwin cuts his phone conversation short. “You're no good to me, then,” he says, snapping his phone shut.

  The bank robber is a lean-faced man with short hair dressed in a zipped black jacket and wraparound sunglasses. Standing between Kee and Goodwin, I'm wearing a black hiking jacket and a pair of gray-tinted Oakleys. “Shit, he looks like you,” says Goodwin.

  “Good thing I've got Gene as my alibi,” I say. Kee pretends not to hear and walks away. “Right, Gene?”

  Goodwin laughs, stopping to print a series of still photographs of the robber from a machine built into the TV. “These are good. Like his graduation picture,” says the cop. A self-described “grinder,” John Goodwin is one of three brothers and a cousin on the Revere Police Department.

  On screen and in the photo, the bank robber looks twenty-three or twenty-four years old, but the Russian girl has placed his age closer to forty. Back in the lobby, Goodwin spreads out the pictures on a table by the door. “I think I know him. He's a little older, but we grew up together,” says the Revere dete
ctive. “His friends, that's what they do. They hit banks.”

  Kee asks Goodwin how he got a handle on the guy's identity. “I saw something,” the Revere cop says. “That smirk. It looked familiar.”

  This is just the sort of little detail that Joe McCain taught a much younger Gene Kee to take seriously. Goodwin goes on to say that the “kid” he's thinking of has just been released from the Middleton jail and is living in Revere with his mother.

  “Only a junkie would hit the bank down the street from his house,” says Kee.

  Goodwin holds one of the photos between his fingers. “It shows he ain't thinkin' straight,” he says.

  While the uniformed cops file out, Kee comes over beside me and opens up a fingerprint kit and dons a pair of blue latex gloves.

  “He's a sharp kid,” I say, nodding toward Goodwin.

  “I used to be like that, once,” says Kee.

  “You still got the juice, Gen-o,” I tell him.

  Kee grins. “You're being kind,” he says.

  Using a soft brush, Kee spreads a fine gray powder over a glass shelf where the robber stood before joining the line. “How do you isolate the prints?” I ask him.

  “You don't,” says Kee.

  From his kit he removes a small white box marked “Crime Scene Products” and “BVDA Instant Lifter,” and decorated with a stylized blue fingerprint. “There's a beauty right there,” says Kee, indicating a pristine thumb print in the middle of the shelf. “Could be anybody's, but if it helps convict the guy . . .”

  Kee's self-proclaimed technical expertise has long been an object of derision among his old Met buddies. On one occasion, his assignment was to take surveillance photos of some wiseguys on a street corner, and afterward Kee was telling everyone he had gotten some great pictures. When they were developed, “all he had was a roll of feet,” said Biff McLean, recalling that the photos only showed the mobsters from the knees down. “Look at this, Gen-o, a pair of size ten-and-a-half loafers,” Joe McCain told him, while Kee replied, “You guys put me behind that fuckin' pole. Whaddaya expect?”

  After Kee completes the fingerprinting, he and Detective Goodwin make plans to get the bank robber's photo into the Boston Herald and Revere Journal. Then Kee packs up the videotape and his fingerprint kit, shakes hands with the manager, and waits for a moment while she unlocks the door.

  Passing through the glass cubicle that houses the automated teller machine, Kee notices a young kid with buzzed hair and a Police Academy jacket with a Burlington Police patch on his shoulder. The young police cadet has his face shoved up against the ATM and, like just about everyone under forty, has a cell phone attached to his ear.

  Kee whispers to Sergeant Goodwin: “C'mon. I gotta bust 'em on this guy.”

  As soon as we get outside Kee reopens the door to the ATM, hangs his badge around his neck, and motions for Goodwin to take his badge out. “Excuse me,” Kee says, but the kid ignores him. “Hey, Burlington,” says Kee, in his command voice.

  The cadet lowers his cell phone and turns around. “Huh— ?”

  Kee and Goodwin are leaning through the open door, thrusting out their badges. “The bank just got robbed, and the guy ran right past you,” says Kee.

  “I— I just got here,” the kid says.

  “You missed him,” Kee says. “What the hell are they teaching you guys?”

  “I just, just got here,” says the cadet, turning red from his collar to his hairline.

  The two older cops begin smiling and then laughing. “We're just pulling your leg,” Kee says. “But the bank was robbed.”

  Embedded into the wall, the ATM is speaking in a mechanized voice, but the kid is paralyzed with embarrassment.

  “What week you in?” asks Kee.

  “Eleventh.”

  “Good luck, kid,” says the old Met.

  Detective Goodwin smiles at us and shakes his head, and we jump in Gene's car and take off down the VFW Parkway.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Pride of the Mets

  Cops get very large and emphatic when an outsider tries to hide anything, but they do the same thing themselves every other day, to oblige their friends or anybody with a little pull.

  — RAYMOND CHANDLER

  ON MAY 26, 1980, AS THE PIPE BANDS and Civil War reenactors and high school glee clubs in the Memorial Day parade marched past, five men drilled and blasted through the wall of a neighboring storefront and robbed the Depositor's Trust Savings Bank in Medford, Mass. Among the crooks were Metropolitan Police officers Gerald W. Clemente and Joseph Bangs, as well as Lieutenant Tommy Doherty of the Medford Police. (In a saga of irony and interconnectedness that no fiction writer could make up, Tommy Doherty, who is not a blood relation to the Somerville cop Timmy Doherty, later became the beleaguered patrolman's father-in-law.) Bangs and Clemente had been friends for more than ten years when they dreamed up the bank robbery. By that time, they had collaborated on other larcenous schemes, including insurance fraud, drug trafficking, and the theft and sale of civil service promotional examinations, a far-reaching, lucrative caper that would eventually tie the dirty cops to the Depositor's Trust robbery. Nicknamed Exam Scam, the illegal distribution and sale of the stolen tests netted Clemente and Bangs three thousand dollars per exam and resulted in unfair promotions for certain Mets, as well as other cops and firemen from departments across the state.

  Soon after the bank robbery, one of Clemente's pals in the Exam Scam, MDC Sergeant Frank “Indian” Thorpe, tried to sell a copy of the sergeants' test to a former Met turned Wilmington patrolman named David McCue. A large, broad-shouldered man, Thorpe claimed to be a descendant of the Olympic and professional athlete Jim Thorpe and was known more for smashing up cop cars than for the breadth of his intellect. McCue told his boss about the overture, and together they went to the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office. The A.G. had McCue wear a recording device and meet with Thorpe in the parking lot of a Dunkin' Donuts in Lawrence, Mass., where the parties hashed over the terms of the deal. The contents of the wire led to Thorpe's indictment on a misdemeanor charge of trying to corrupt a public official, and the extent of the Exam Scam began to emerge.

  Meanwhile, a mob associate named Vernon “Gus” Gusmini approached Tommy Doherty to say that a large amount of money stolen from one of the safe deposit boxes at the Depositor's Trust belonged to the Winter Hill gang, and Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi wanted it back. In fact, Gusmini went on to tell Gerry Clemente that the mob wanted a piece of all his action. Later, sources reported that Gusmini was upset because he had conceived the original plan to break into the bank, and Clemente had welshed by going ahead without him.

  Hearing that Gus Gusmini was busy applying the screws to Clemente on behalf of the Winter Hill gang, the superintendent of the Mets, a former Marine and straight shooter named Laurence Carpenter, summoned Joe McCain from the Suffolk County D.A.'s Office and briefed him on Clemente, the Depositor's Trust burglary, and Gusmini's extortion plot. After big Joe recovered from the shock that Gerry Clemente was dirty, he suggested that, for the time being anyway, they treat Clemente like a legitimate police captain being harassed by a hoodlum, and Carpenter agreed. They'd get more out of him that way.

  McCain conducted interviews with Clemente and members of his family, then returned to Superintendent Carpenter with the recommendation that Clemente be taken to East Cambridge District Court to swear out a complaint against Vernon Gusmini for extortion. That way, McCain reasoned, they'd be able to hook Clemente and Gusmini, since the warrant would contain a tacit admission that Clemente had taken part in the burglary. In the meantime, Gusmini fled the state. But within just a few days he was arrested on an unrelated drug charge in Florida.

  Joe McCain, Jr., was in his second year at the University of Miami, living on the eleventh floor of a high-rise dormitory, when he heard a voice coming from the elevator that sounded a lot like his dad. “Gee, I must really be homesick, because I'd swear that's my father out there,” he said to himself. Toss
ing aside his book, Joey ran into the hallway, and there was the old man, big as life, smiling and laughing as he hugged young Joe, explaining that he was in Miami to bring back a prisoner.

  When Gusmini was busted on the cocaine charge, the Mets issued a warrant for him and sent big Joe to execute it. At the same time McCain heard a rumor that the Mass. State Police sensed an opportunity to undermine their old rivals, the Mets, and had dispatched their own man.

  Young Joe took a ride with his father over to the Dade County Sheriff's Office, where they were holding Gusmini. In the sun-baked parking lot, the McCains encountered Tommy Spartachino, a former Met who was by this time a Mass. state trooper. Earlier in his career, Spartachino had served as the “third man” with Joe Sr. and Leo Papile when they all worked together on Revere Beach.

  Joe Sr. sent his nineteen-year-old son back to the car and hailed Spartachino. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I got a warrant for Gusmini,” said Spartachino. “He's going back with me.”

  “Fuck you he is,” said McCain, showing Spartachino a Metropolitan Police warrant. “This is a Met case, not a State Police case.”

  Joe McCain and Superintendent Carpenter wanted to go after the dirty Mets themselves, to prove that only Clemente and Bangs and their henchmen were corrupt, not the entire system they worked under. Big Joe also wanted to avoid the embarrassment of having the Mass. State Police meddling in what he considered his business— the reputation of the Mets. In the end, McCain won the argument and processed Gusmini out of the Dade County jail into his custody.

  After McCain returned home with Gusmini, he was summoned to appear in front of a special grand jury on obstruction of justice charges. The implication was that McCain, and by extension the Mets, had wrested Gusmini away from the State Police to protect a widespread conspiracy. No one really believed that Joe McCain had a shred of information about Clemente's gang or the heist, but certain elements in the Attorney General's Office and the State Police, including Spartachino, wanted to give him “a little tickle.” By painting all the Mets with the same brush, these individuals hoped to consolidate their own power and, by weight of negative publicity, force Governor Michael Dukakis to dissolve the Metropolitan Police.