Mayor for a New America

by Thomas M. Menino

  From the Boston Globe Magazine’s December 4, 1994, cover story: “Boston’s Urban Mechanic: Can Mayor Menino’s Nuts-and-Bolts Approach Revive the City?”Bill Greene/The Boston Globe

  I gave out honors to students for academic achievement and for school spirit—putting the spotlight on kids who had never won anything before—for twenty-nine years.Courtesy of the City of Boston

  Vote No on Question 2. With my friend Bob “Skinner” Donahue on the night we won the referendum for an appointed school committee, November 1996.Michael Robinson-Chavez / The Boston Globe / Getty Images

  At the Curtis Guild School in East Boston with Bill Cosby, the co-chair of the Massachusetts Service Summit for Net Day 3, on October 25, 1997. The Boston public schools were the first in the country to be wired for the Internet.© Don West Photography

  My granddaughter Giulia Fenton playing under my desk at City Hall. When I first took office I didn’t have any grandchildren. When I left I had six.Courtesy of the City of Boston

  The Geneva Avenue walk in Dorchester was a Christmas tradition.Courtesy of the City of Boston

  With Karen Marinella of WLVI-TV at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Bringing the convention to Boston, a Democratic city in a blue state, was a big deal.Courtesy of the City of Boston

  Marching in the Gay Pride parade. On my left is Harry Collings, a longtime friend and an advisor on LGBT issues.Courtesy of the City of Boston

  Visiting Camp Harbor View, a haven for inner-city kids.Courtesy of the City of Boston

  The 2008 Christmas toy drive for the Bowdoin-Geneva neighborhood. By my last year in office we were delivering toys to four thousand families.Courtesy of the City of Boston

  Speaking at Faneuil Hall shortly after taking the oath of office for a historic fifth term, surpassing Kevin White’s record.Courtesy of the City of Boston

  The support and love of my family, and knowing I would have more time for my grandkids, made my decision not to run again a little easier.Barry Chin / The Boston Globe / Getty Images

  The part of being mayor that I miss the most is being with the city’s kids.Courtesy of the City of Boston

  Boston Strong. Six months after the Marathon bombing, Red Sox slugger David Oritz’s son D’Angelo celebrates the World Series win at Fenway Park.Courtesy of the City of Boston

  With my wife, Angela, at the Hyde Park YMCA, which was named in my honor. I came here often as a kid and still live nearby.Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe /Getty Images

  A private moment in the Oval Office with President Obama and Vice Pesident Biden.Courtesy of the White House Photo Office

  Chapter 3

  Police and Fire

  He cared about the community, about the family, and about me. . . . A piece of me died Saturday night. He was a good cop, a good father, a good man, and he was my best friend in the whole world.

  —Officer Robert Luongo, speaking at the funeral of his partner, Berisford Wayne Anderson

  THE TWO WORST things about being mayor? Dead kids and dead cops.

  In early February 1994, six weeks after the shooting of honor roll student and anti-gang activist Louis Brown, a few blocks from the church where Louis’s funeral was held a policeman was killed. It had been all of two weeks since my swearing-in, yet what I said in my first comment on the tragedy would stay true through every day of my time in office: “The thing that really bothers me about the job is the violence.” You don’t get used to it. You can’t and remain human.

  The shooting of Officer Berisford Wayne Anderson contains an infuriating element seen in Boston crimes from the crack craze of the 1980s to the Marathon bombing. His killer was not only known to one branch of law enforcement that failed to communicate with another. It was worse than that. He was actually in jail, awaiting trial for a gun crime, when a prosecutor released him.

  The shooting happened around 5:30 on a Saturday afternoon. Anderson had just ended his shift as a plainclothes officer working out of the Area B-3 station, which covers Mattapan and part of Dorchester, where he lived with his fiancée and five children. He went home, took off his bulletproof vest, and left to run a family errand. He had pulled out of his driveway into narrow one-way Spencer Street when he was stopped by a car coming the wrong way.

  The driver got out and exchanged words with Anderson, who was stepping from his own car when the driver fired two shots at him. Anderson emptied his .38-caliber revolver firing at his assailant, who, using his car door as a shield, fired back. One of his bullets hit Anderson on the left side. He crumpled on the snow-covered sidewalk a few yards from his front door.

  His fiancée ran to him and cradled him in her arms. “He was trying to breathe, trying to talk,” she said later. “I told him to hold on, ‘don’t leave me.’” A neighbor heard her ask, “Who did this?”

  Dalton Simpson, eighteen, did it. The whine of his Volkswagen could be heard backing down the length of the street.

  Officer Jonathan Stratton was driving nearby when his radio alerted him to watch for a black Volkswagen fleeing the scene of a shooting. Stratton was returning from a cop’s funeral. It was for the police chief of a small Massachusetts town. The chief had answered a call for help from police in an adjoining town who were pursuing three burglary suspects. The suspects had fled into the woods. The chief went after them. They shot him as he tried to arrest them.

  “I saw the car. I pursued it,” Officer Stratton told a reporter. He did not know that the victim was a police officer, much less his former partner.

  Stratton’s cruiser chased the Volkswagen for about a mile till it sideswiped a parked car on Crowell Street and wound up in a driveway. Simpson got out and ran. Stratton, who had him covered with his gun, ran after him, scrambling over snowbanks and fences. Simpson dropped his gun, a .380-caliber Lorcin (one of 936 guns sold by a Philadelphia gun dealer who didn’t keep legally required records). Stratton retrieved it while two other officers tackled Simpson. At a local hospital, where he was treated for injuries sustained during the chase, Simpson, who’d been committing violent crimes for years and getting away with it, said, “I wish I had a bullet for the other cop.”

  “This is the 90s,” Officer Stratton said in an interview. “Things have changed. There’s no respect for police anymore, especially with young kids. Their whole culture is to hate cops. It’s in their music and their videos.” “Cop Killer” and “Fuck the Police” were high on the hit parade. The music industry was making millions off targeting policemen.

  Three months before his fatal run-in with Anderson, Simpson was arrested in Framingham, twenty miles west of Boston, for trading shots with a drug dealer. He was jailed for a month. Then an assistant district attorney got a bright idea: to waive his $10,000 bail if Simpson testified against the dealer. Simpson agreed, but failed to keep his end of the bargain—to appear in Framingham District Court in early December.

  There is a haunting might-have-been to Officer Anderson’s murder. Anderson volunteered to help kids in his neighborhood stay straight. Among other good works, he led a troop of Police Explorers, an offshoot of the Boy Scouts. Nearly all of his life Simpson lived one street over from Anderson. Simpson was born in Jamaica. Anderson was the son of a Jamaican immigrant. That was a bridge between the kid and the cop. Could Anderson have crossed it if he had found Simpson in time? No kid is destined to be a killer.

  What to do about kids who kill? I called for “early childhood education programs that work on a kid’s self-esteem—to get down to the basics of how we deal with the problem,” and for more investment in neighborhood programs and summer jobs. Does that sound like a “bleeding-heart liberal”? Then listen to the cops. When he first met with the BPD’s anti-gang unit, my new police commissioner expected to hear “more cops,” “tougher judges,” “more jails.” But what they said was “We need more jobs and alternatives for these kids.”

  Jobs and alternatives for kids: Through two decades that was key to my strategy on crime prevention. Our summer jobs program steered t
eenagers away from the streets. But we needed to reach their younger brothers and sisters, too, to keep them from gangs, drugs, and violence. I jump ahead here to fill in that piece of the story.

  I had a crazy idea. Suburban kids go to summer camp. Why not city kids?

  Suburban families pay the $3,000-per-month cost of camp. City families need help. It is justified. Preventing crime is a public good. Nothing was stopping me from sending Boston’s kids to camp. Nothing except for the money to rent the camp, transport and feed the kids, and pay the salaries of instructors, lifeguards, nurses, and kitchen workers.

  In 2007 I was uncertain whether to run for a fifth term in 2009, and if I ran, whether I’d win. Before it was too late, I had to see my crazy idea into the world.

  Camp Harbor View partly owes its existence to something a Roxbury youngster told me: He had just learned in school that Boston bordered on the ocean. He had never seen “the water” himself.

  That got me thinking about some land the city owned on the water—Long Island, a narrow peninsula sticking into Boston Harbor. Up until the 50s, the city ran a hospital there for patients suffering from chronic illnesses. In recent times the hospital was used as a homeless shelter and drug treatment facility. Beyond the building stretched twelve acres of bare land surrounded by water. It was just about the choicest site in Boston, with views across the harbor to the downtown skyline.

  But the harbor—if you fell into it, you’d come out with a disease. By 1988 it was so polluted that the GOP presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush, exploited it as an issue against his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Through the 90s, the Commonwealth spent billions cleaning the harbor. By 2007 it was safe to put a summer camp on Long Island.

  Somebody should write a book about what cities owe to rich people. The Boston chapter would feature benefactors going back to the eighteenth century. My friend Jack Connors belongs in that company. Jack grew up in Boston. He made a fortune in advertising in Boston. When he retired, he decided to give back.

  Jack’s Rolodex is a who’s who of the generous rich. I showed him the Long Island land and asked him to raise the money to put a summer camp there. I had him with the anecdote about the kid who’d never seen the ocean.

  The media was forever poking into my so-called pet contractors, looking for dirt. There was no dirt. But there was loyalty from companies like Suffolk Construction that had done all right building in Boston. I told Suffolk I needed a camp in a hurry; and with workers sleeping in tents on the site, in 109 days it was done. On July 2, 2007, Camp Harbor View welcomed its first three hundred campers.

  Run by the Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston, the camp teaches kids eleven to fourteen swimming (in an Olympic-sized pool), sailing, and kayaking. Arts, crafts, softball, soccer, and fitness round out the picture. Older kids training to be counselors take classes in math and English. A staff of seventy-five counselors, a social worker, and a nurse look after about eight hundred kids—half in July, half in August. School buses pick the kids up before eight A.M. and drop them off at home at six, with a boxed supper so their mothers don’t have to rush home from work to cook.

  The official cost is $5 a month. But I didn’t want kids who paid ragging those who couldn’t, so nobody collects it. Even kids have dignity.

  “Crossing the bridge onto this island and looking at the city from afar is symbolic,” a counselor who’d started as a camper told a reporter. “You realize there’s so much more to learn and experience beyond the confines of your neighborhood.” I hope that kid who didn’t know about the ocean got a chance to take in that view, to see those wider horizons.

  The dining hall is named after one Mayor Thomas M. Menino. Fifty years from now kids won’t know who that was. Maybe someone will explain, “He was a guy from Hyde Park who wanted you to have fun, learn stuff, and return from camp at the end of the day too tired to get into trouble.”

  Politicians can’t resist demagoguing crime. Governor Bill Weld, for example. His response to Wayne Anderson’s killing was to call for Massachusetts to restore the death penalty. His Democratic opponent in that year’s governor’s race also came out for death. In Washington the Democratic Senate was debating President Bill Clinton’s tough crime bill. It included welcome money to hire more cops in Boston, but set aside only $100 million for neighborhood programs.

  That represented less than 1 percent of the bill’s $23 billion cost. Suppose 25 percent of the $23 billion had gone into early childhood education and basketball leagues and mentors and summer jobs instead of prisons and high-tech equipment for the police. I think crime would have fallen sharply. But until you prove them wrong, politicians will cling to the cynical wisdom that there are no votes in preventing crime, only in punishing it.*

  With or without federal aid, Boston would lead the country in preventing crime. And we would do it without searching “suspicious” young African American men—the controversial policy known as “stop and frisk.” I would not tolerate racial profiling. You can’t police a multiracial city like an occupying army.

  Just before he left on his Roman holiday, Ray Flynn appointed a new police commissioner. Hired in the summer of 1993, Bill Bratton was gone by winter, lured to New York by Rudy Giuliani. Naming Bratton’s replacement was my call, the most important appointment of my mayoralty. Officer Anderson’s death delayed my decision for a week.

  The search committee forwarded the names of four finalists. Two would have made history. Boston police superintendent Joseph C. Carter would have been Boston’s first African American police commissioner. Massachusetts State Police lieutenant colonel Kathleen O’Toole would have been—and eventually was—the first woman to hold the job. The other candidates were former Chicago police commander Dennis Nowicki and Boston’s acting police commissioner, Paul Evans, Bratton’s former deputy.

  During the ’93 campaign any member of my team who referred to me publicly as “acting mayor” didn’t do it a second time. I wanted voters to forget about the “acting” part. Still, why kid myself? I wouldn’t have been elected mayor without my five-month tryout.

  As a chief executive, I liked acting positions. People want to prove they can do the job. They’re not “acting”—they’re working hard to win a permanent appointment.

  Paul Evans had been acting police commissioner for barely a month when Officer Anderson’s death threw us together.

  We sat together in the front pew of the Charles Street AME Church for Anderson’s funeral. Together we joined in the applause for Anderson’s eight commendations for bravery. Together we nodded as we heard Reverend Mickari D. Thomas Jr., a Boston police chaplain, declare, “In a time when we desperately need role models for our young people, Officer Anderson was just that.” We were moved when Anderson’s partner, Officer Robert Luongo, after reading his handwritten remarks, plunged off the pulpit, gently patted Anderson’s coffin, and hurried back to his pew, where he broke into sobs that echoed through the church. In the snow of Forest Hills Cemetery we struggled to control our emotions as Officer Michael Fish played “Taps.” Together we went to the grave to comfort Anderson’s mother, Edainey Matthews Blissett, sobbing in her son Ronald’s arms, and the rest of the family. An immigrant family of the New America who gave their son to protect the city.

  Paul Evans was born and raised in a blue-collar family in South Boston, where he went to school, played sports, met his wife, Karen (at a “sock hop”), and always lived. In 1968 he and five buddies from his corner enlisted in the Marine Corps; all served in Vietnam; only four came back. Paul joined the Boston Police in 1970. He soon found himself pitted against many of his neighbors, enforcing Judge Garrity’s order to integrate South Boston High School. While rising through the ranks, he earned a law degree.

  Paul and I were basically the same type of public person, low-key, and just wanted to get the job done. Calling for “collaboration,” “partnerships,” and “taking responsibility,” he sang from my hymnal. No Bratton, he was somewhat shy, anothe
r trait we shared.

  Even if I’d known none of this, I might have offered Paul Evans the job anyway, from observing him in the days after the murder of one of his men. He was at all times, but especially at the funeral, calm, caring, tactful, and dignified. You’re impressed when someone displays qualities you try to display yourself.

  “Although Menino appears to have made up his mind days ago, he reportedly has confided in no one, not even his wife,” Chris Black wrote in the Boston Sunday Globe, three days after the Anderson funeral. I know how seriously I took the decision. But did I keep it from Angela, and how would Chris know? That evening I called Evans and ordered him to be at my house in Readville in a half hour. He made it in less time. When I said he could drop the “acting,” he beamed.

  “I think we will be a good team,” I told reporters. We were.

  Under Paul Evans the BPD implemented a new crime prevention strategy that had the law enforcement community and the White House hailing the “Boston miracle” as a national model. That helped to restore the sunken reputation of the nation’s oldest police department. Evans, I promised the city, would initiate “a lot of changes in the way policemen do their work.” Critics worried that his longevity in the department made him an unlikely candidate to change it, but I saw it the other way: As a committed BPD lifer, he’d have greater credibility to press for reform than an outsider. “Paul Evans will not be status quo,” I said.