I’d been in many high-speed pursuits, but none of them in a park. I heard the unmistakable whirring of helicopter blades through the open car windows.
“We’ve got him now,” Bancroft said.
His breathing was rapid, as was mine, and his hands gripped the wheel so hard his knuckles were white. The Escalade was fast, but no match for the Taurus’s Police Interceptor engine. We came up on its rear bumper just as the police chopper came overhead and lit up the scene with a blinding spotlight. An amplified voice from the chopper said, “Police, halt! Police, halt!”
Which reminded me of a cop TV show I liked, Blue Bloods. However, something about that show always annoyed me. Whenever Danny or Jamie was approaching a suspect, he shouted out, from a distance: “Police! Stop! Police!” Of course, the suspect bolted. What you really did was sneak up on the bad guy until you were right on him and he couldn’t escape. Another annoyance about Blue Bloods was that Danny, a detective played by Donnie Wahlberg, was always able to run the suspect to ground. Donnie was no spring chicken, but he could catch guys much younger as they sprinted through traffic, down alleys, and climbed over fences. Will Estes, who played Jamie, a uniformed officer, was a spring chicken, but he wore a heavy utility belt and black leather dress shoes, while the miscreant was usually wearing a track suit and Nikes, or some such outfit. Still, Jamie caught up with the guy. The show should hire me as a consultant. Then I’d have two incomes from the world of crime fiction.
Shouting out an order to halt was much more effective when it came from a helicopter hovering overhead.
Bancroft accelerated up close to the Escalade and, using a technique cops learn in driving school, turned the Taurus’s right bumper hard into the left rear of the Escalade, causing it to fishtail and hit a massive oak tree head-on at high speed.
Bancroft skidded to a stop beside the Escalade and we hopped out, guns up. Right then, Millie’s armored SUV arrived. It was safe, but too heavy to be fast. She got out with her pistol drawn. Bancroft extended his hand, palm out, toward her, telling her to stay back. He and I approached the Escalade, Bancroft on the driver’s side and me on the passenger’s side. Through the window, I could see that Amendola wasn’t moving, with the air bag inflated against his chest and face.
“Like clockwork,” Millie told us as she approached the Escalade. “He did exactly what you said he would. I think one of his bullets ricocheted off my window and caught him somewhere in his upper body. Never saw anyone look so friggin’ surprised.”
She was grinning.
The thrill of the hunt.
29.
Adrenaline Rush
The next time I saw Bobby Amendola, he was unconscious in a bed in a private room at Massachusetts General Hospital, his left wrist handcuffed to the bed frame and two uniformed Boston PD officers standing guard in the hallway.
It was nine the morning after the Charlestown Navy Yard adventure. A doctor, a young Asian woman, met us at the reception desk on the floor and told us that Amendola had suffered a concussion, broken ribs, a broken nose, and a deflated left lung. The name tag on her white coat said she was Dr. Linn.
“He has a chest wound from a gunshot, but most of the damage was done by the air bag,” she told us. “He’ll live.”
“How long before we can haul his sorry ass to the Suffolk county jail?” Bancroft asked her.
“In two or three days,” Dr. Linn said. “Now you’ll have to excuse me while I attend to patients who aren’t under arrest.”
There was nothing more to do until we could sweat Amendola. Bancroft had other police business, so I hung around my hotel, working out in the exercise room, watching movies on TV, strolling around the city a few more times, and editing the Jack Stoney book.
On the second morning, having formed a bond with the Google Maps lady, I decided to go back to the Charlestown Navy Yard to take a tour of Old Ironsides and the destroyer USS Cassin Young. Jack Starkey, the irrepressible tourist. My visit was considerably more enjoyable than my last time there. The two proud ships of the line, whose glory days were a century-and-a-half apart, were fascinating to see up close. They’d seen a lot more action than I ever would.
Tour guides described their histories. The Constitution was named by George Washington himself and her nickname, Old Ironsides, was given after a battle in 1812, with a British frigate off the Massachusetts coast. The two ships fired broadsides into each other, but the British cannonballs bounced off the Constitution’s rugged oak sides, just like Amendola’s bullets bounced off Millie’s SUV.
On the third day, Bancroft and I visited Amendola again. He was in the hospital wing of the Suffolk County House of Correction. The day before, Bancroft had obtained and executed a search warrant for Amendola’s Escalade, house, and electronic devices. Bancroft found no communications between Amendola and Leverton and Lucy Gates hadn’t found anything incriminating by hacking into Stewart Leverton’s devices. I didn’t expect that she would. They’d do business face-to-face. Also nothing helpful to our case in his home. But we did recover his .22-caliber Ruger semiautomatic pistol from the smashed-up Escalade after the chase in the park.
The slugs he fired into Millie’s SUV were too badly damaged to make a match with his Ruger, but we didn’t need one to charge him with the attempted murder of a police officer. We had a very nice video of the whole thing from the camera in Millie’s vehicle. And the Boston PD crime lab did match the Ruger to the bullet I brought with me from Henry Wilberforce’s house.
Long story short, Amendola’s ass was in a sling.
We found Amendola sitting in a wheelchair in the hospital wing’s visitors’ room. A guard had unlocked the door for us. The windows had wire mesh screens on them.
Seated in a folding chair beside Amendola was a young man wearing a suit. Amendola had deep yellow and purple bruises on his face and a metal splint on his nose. The young man stood up as we approached and said, “Detectives, I’m Rob Little, Mr. Amendola’s attorney. I work for the Public Defender Division.”
Just as I suspected, Stewart Leverton had not hired a lawyer for his enforcer. That would have established a connection between them. Without evidence of Amendola’s employment, we had to get him to give up his boss.
Rob Little looked to be in his mid-twenties, a recent law school grad no doubt, with wire-rimmed glasses that gave him a studious look. It was clear from the cut of his suit that public defenders made minimum wage.
Bancroft and I found two folding chairs at a nearby table, pulled them over, and sat near Amendola and Little. I said, “We have a few questions for your client, counselor.”
“That’s fine,” Little said. “And you do understand that he doesn’t have to answer them.”
“When he hears what we have to say, I think he’ll want to,” Bancroft said.
“We’ll see,” Little said.
“How are you feeling, Bobby?” I asked him.
“How the fuck do you think I’m feeling?” he said. “Just look at me.”
“You shouldn’t speed in the park,” Bancroft told him. “It’s dangerous, and against the law.”
I looked at Little and said, “Your client has been charged with the attempted murder of a police officer. We’ve got it on videotape. We’re also prepared to charge him with the murder of Henry Wilberforce in Naples, Florida.”
“Never heard of him,” Amendola said.
Little put his hand on Amendola’s arm, indicating that he shouldn’t talk about that. I didn’t know if Amendola had told Little about Henry’s murder. Probably not.
“Maybe you haven’t heard of him, but your Ruger has,” I said.
“I’ll need to see the ballistic evidence of that,” Little told me.
“Of course,” I said. “But before we get into that we have a proposition.”
“Which is?” Little asked.
“If Amendola will cooperate with us, we’ll ask the Naples district attorney to consider taking the death penalty off the table and the Boston DA to consi
der a lesser charge for the attempted murder of a police officer.”
“Define cooperation,” Little said.
Little might be a recent law school grad working as a public defender, but he clearly knew his stuff. Clothes don’t make the man.
“We know that Amendola was ordered to commit both of those crimes by his employer, Stewart Leverton,” I said. “If he will testify to that, he has a chance of getting out of prison while he’s still breathing.”
Little looked at Amendola, then said to me, “I need to confer with Mr. Amendola privately.”
“Sure,” I said, and Bancroft and I found another guard to unlock the door to the hallway, and we left the room.
“Do you think Amendola will take the deal?” Bancroft asked
me.
“Mentioning the death penalty usually does the trick,” I said.
“Will your DA approve it?”
“Tom Sullivan, the Naples police chief, has already talked about it to her. She said that, once she reviews all the facts, she’ll consider it. How about your DA?”
“That’s Randall Wilcox. He’s a hard ass. He’ll want to nail Stewart Leverton if the evidence supports it.”
A few minutes later, Little had the guard open the door and nodded at us to come back in. He said, “We’ll need that proffer in writing, Detectives.”
Bancroft and I left the prison and drove back to police headquarters. On our way to the coffee room in the Homicide Unit, Rob Little called me on my cell phone and said, “Mr. Amendola is willing to testify in the way you described. Once we have the signed proffers from the two district attorneys, they can take his deposition and we can go from there.”
“I’ll get back to you as soon as we have them,” I told him.
“In the meantime,” Little said, “I want Mr. Amendola returned to Mass General, where he can get the proper treatment and rehab.”
“I’ll think about that,” I said. After a moment, I said, “I thought about it and the answer is no.” I was generally not in favor of mollycoddling skells like Bobby Amendola.
I ended the call and said to Bancroft, “Amendola’s taking the deal. I’ll have Tom Sullivan get the proffer document from our DA and you can do the same with yours.”
Bancroft, the bass fisherman, said, “Fish on. Now let’s reel him in, mount him, and hang him on the wall.”
That night, Bancroft, Millie, and I met at Paddy O’Doul’s Pub. The place was crowded with people celebrating whatever, maybe just the fact that it was Wednesday. During my drinking days, I celebrated Wednesday, too, as well as Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I’d told Bancroft that maybe we should wait to declare victory until we had Stewart Leverton behind bars, but he said, just in case that didn’t happen, we wouldn’t want to miss a good time at Paddy’s. I couldn’t argue with that logic.
“Halloran said he won’t forget what you did,” Bancroft told Millie after we ordered our drinks from the young waitress, who was wearing a white blouse, tartan skirt, and matching bonnet. Faith and begorra!
“I enjoyed the rush,” she said.
“That means you’re hooked on the job,” I told her. “It doesn’t happen all the time, there’s a lot of frustration too. But there’s enough to keep you going.”
“In my case, for nineteen years and counting,” Bancroft said.
30.
The Opera Singer
Two days later, Bobby Amendola had recovered enough to be taken in a police van to the offices of the Suffolk County district attorney for his deposition about the attempted murder of Corporal Millie Ryan. According to Massachusetts law, it didn’t matter that Amendola thought Millie was a civilian when he fired three shots at her as she sat in her armored SUV which, of course, was also a crime. But shooting at a police officer was worse.
Bancroft and I weren’t allowed to attend the deposition proceeding, which was conducted by an assistant district attorney. Amendola’s lawyer, Rob Little, was present.
When the deposition was finished, the ADA, an experienced prosecutor named Ellie Gorman, called Lieutenant Halloran to report the results and Halloran passed the transcript on to Bancroft and me. Amendola had sung like Pavarotti at La Scala, in return for a recommended sentence of fifteen-to-twenty years, with the possibility of parole, in a Massachusetts state prison.
It was part of the agreement with Rob Little that, when Ellie Gorman finished her questioning, an assistant DA from Collier County, Florida, named Peter Boylan, who’d flown in for the occasion, got his turn with Amendola. Amendola’s concert continued for Boylan.
The Suffolk County DA had enough incriminating evidence against Stewart Leverton, based on Amendola’s testimony, to charge him with conspiracy to commit murder in Massachusetts, and the Collier County DA had enough to charge him with conspiracy to commit the murder of Henry Wilberforce in Naples. It was part of Amendola’s plea bargain that he’d serve his time in Massachusetts, and then, if he survived, he’d stand trial in Collier County for murder, with a maximum sentence of life without parole.
Halloran reported that both ADAs said that Little provided Amendola with competent representation. That was important, not only to his client, but also to the prosecutors, because inadequate representation was grounds for appeal.
The day after the depositions, Randall Wilcox, the Suffolk County DA, placed a call to Stewart Leverton’s attorney, Gilbert Norquist, to tell him that his client was being charged with conspiracy to murder a police officer and also about the pending Naples charge. Norquist was able to persuade Wilcox to allow Leverton to surrender to Detective Bancroft at police headquarters rather than having Bancroft arrest him at his home or office and perp-walk him to the detective’s Taurus. Leverton was a pillar of the community, Norquist had argued, had never been in trouble before, and was not a flight risk.
Bancroft and I were told that the DA responded to those assertions by saying, “You mean we’ve never caught your client breaking the law before, counselor. If he hops a flight to Tahiti, I’ll hold you responsible.”
That night, Bancroft and I celebrated again at Paddy O’Doul’s. Millie had a date with a fireman her Uncle Danny didn’t approve of because he was a fireman and not a cop. Stewart Leverton was scheduled to surrender the next morning.
“Want to be there?” Bancroft asked me.
“My work here is done,” I said. “Time to head for home until I have to come back for Leverton’s trial.”
No trial for Bobby Amendola, with his plea bargain in place. I’d have to appear at Leverton’s trial as a witness to the attempted murder of Millie by Amendola. Bancroft, Millie, and the crew of the police helicopter were also on the witness list. Amendola would be the star witness.
Bancroft called the next day, while I was at my bar, and said, “Stewart Leverton didn’t fly to Tahiti after all. He walked into police headquarters with his lawyer at seven this morning. I arrested him and he was arraigned for attempted murder before a district court judge, released on two million dollars bail, ordered to wear a monitoring ankle bracelet, and placed under house arrest until he appears in two weeks before the same judge to set a trial date.”
“Keep me informed,” I said.
Bancroft called me again two days later and reported that, during questioning at police headquarters, Stewart Leverton categorically denied that his wife, Libby, had any knowledge of the alleged crimes. Libby said the same thing when Bancroft questioned her.
“I tend to believe her, Jack,” he said. “Even if I didn’t, we have no evidence that she did know anything about the crimes, and she wouldn’t be called to testify against Stewart because of the rule of spousal privilege.”
“One out of two for the Levertons isn’t a bad batting average,” I said. “That’s better than Ted Williams.”
“What’s next for you, Jack?” he asked.
“I’ll be taking care of business. Non-police business.”
He chuckled and said, “Come back to Boston any time you want to get s
crod.”
31.
Witnesses for the Prosecution
Two months later, I was back in Boston for Stewart Leverton’s trial in Suffolk County District Court before Judge Anthony Merino and a jury of twelve men and women who, unless they were felonious, multimillionaire real estate developers, were definitely not the defendant’s peers.
The three-day trial was big news in Boston. The courtroom gallery was packed with journalists and interested citizens, including Rae Carpenter, president of Carpenters Local Union 327, and other people Leverton had screwed and intimidated over the years. Libby Leverton was not there.
Gilbert Norquist, Stewart Leverton’s personal lawyer, was not a criminal defense attorney, so Leverton hired Samuel Stein from New York, who was known as one of the best in the country.
And he was. His strategy was to go relatively easy on me, Steve Bancroft, Millie Ryan, and the two-man crew of the Boston PD helicopter. We all were law enforcement officers whom the jury was likely to find credible. Suffolk County ADA Jennifer Parsons questioned us. We gave practiced, straightforward answers about our investigation. Stein objected now and then, but he basically let us tell our stories.
After all, as Stein pointed out in his opening statement to the jury, our evidence was largely circumstantial. Nothing we would say would tie his client directly to the attempted murder of Corporal Millie Ryan by Bobby Amendola, Stein told the jury, and he was right. The only direct evidence that Leverton was guilty of conspiracy to commit murder would be the testimony of Bobby Amendola, Stein said, a career criminal who’d pleaded guilty to the underlying crime as part of a plea bargain in return for a reduced prison sentence.
As all good defense attorneys do, Stein offered an alternate theory of the case. He said that Bobby Amendola attempted to kill Millie “for reasons of his own, which he has refused to divulge in order to obtain a plea bargain from the district attorney by implicating my client.”
Amendola had been brought to the Suffolk County Superior Courthouse at Three Pemberton Square from the Suffolk County House of Correction the morning of the first day of the trial. Both days he’d changed in a holding cell adjacent to the courtroom from his orange prison jumpsuit into a grey suit, white shirt, and blue tie provided by the DA’s office. The DA forgot about shoes, so Amendola wore prison sneakers without laces. The US Supreme Court had ruled that prisoners appearing in court before a jury can wear civilian clothes, the theory being that if a defendant walked into the courtroom wearing black-and-white-striped PJs and dragging a ball and chain, he would be, in the eyes of the jury, already guilty.
The Now-And-Then Detective Page 18
