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

by Jay Atkinson

  But the true measure of Joe McCain's character lies not in the arrests he made or the lives he saved, but in the quiet moments he reveled in. How he loved his wife and son and friends and was more at home walking his dogs on Packard Avenue than at the testimonial dinners that marked his career. How for twenty-four years he dressed in a red suit and snowy beard— augmented by his own white hair— and as Santa Claus spent the entirety of Christmas Eve visiting his friends' and colleagues' and their neighbors' children, and homeless kids and kids with AIDS, sometimes arriving via State Police helicopter to meet all his appointments in one night; ending at home with his three beloved grandchildren, who lived upstairs and worshiped him. How he counseled the wildest lads from the old neighborhood and beyond, like Leo Martini, whose brother was a Met cop turned bad that ended up in jail and who became a cop himself and leaned on big Joe when the other side beckoned. And Timmy Doherty, who crossed the blue line and testified against a dirty cop, and guys like Brian O'Donovan, hailed as the “toughest guy in Somerville.”

  Not to mention the men and women big Joe put in jail and later befriended, and the victims of crimes he continued to advise and comfort and counsel long after he'd sent their tormentors to prison, and crooks turned informants he treated with genuine respect and meted out rewards and admonishments to with the forbearance of a kindly Dutch uncle. Joe McCain did all that, and still found time to assemble a pretty good golf game for a man over three hundred pounds with a couple of bullet holes in his stomach.

  Although he was larger than life, in no single photograph does Joe McCain stand more than five inches tall. And I know him only via photographs, audiotapes, fleeting bits of old television interviews, and yellowed newspaper clippings; and through the tales and anecdotes of his former colleagues, neighbors, and friends. Certainly it would be easy to look at McCain's accomplishments and chalk them up to his Depression-era roots or membership in the “Greatest Generation.” But it's a peculiarity of heroism, especially in the classical sense, that the hero strikes out alone— that he has the inner strength and absolute conviction in his own ideals and abilities to go against the grain of his fellow stalwarts. In an era when “reality” has become something we watch on television, the great pageant of Joe McCain's life is well worth examining. A genuine hero doesn't endure a single moment and then traffic in it. He or she doesn't take as the main goal parlaying the heroic experience into something else. As Winston Churchill demonstrated in World War II, being a hero is much less glamorous and more difficult than that. Simply put, a hero lives the truth.

  It's difficult to tell a story about being a detective that isn't episodic and profane because that's the nature of the work; if you want politeness, continuity, and closure, go sell real estate. And certainly among cops in Boston and everywhere else, there's a fair amount of small-mindedness and bullying, and more than a few guys whose uniforms cover up their dearth of personality, but you only have to spend a night in a place like Somerville or Fall River or Lawrence to imagine what it would be like without them. So when a detective like Joe McCain, Sr., comes along, with his hard-knocks childhood and wartime naval service, with the street contacts and smarts, who can drink like a sailor and punch like a kangaroo and has the balls of an elephant, a guy who really enjoys the game and plays hard, you wind up with a collection of feats that, had they occurred in another age, would've been the sort of life the bards wrote songs about back in the old country, in Cork.

  In Legends of Winter Hill, I'll serve the twin roles of “newsie” and gumshoe, creeping down alleys, interviewing witnesses, poring over files, and in the end, creating a portrait of a career and a calling that has intrigued us since the days of the original Pinkerton men.

  ONE

  Joey and the Angels

  This is my son, mine own Telemachus

  To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle.

  — ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  THE SOMERVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT is a low concrete structure that looks like a small town library from the 1960s, with a fenced-in yard containing a fleet of half-serviceable patrol cars and a steep concrete ramp out front that leads to a walled parking lot. Right at noon, thirty-nine-year-old Joe McCain, Jr., pulls up and I climb in the passenger side of the sump-smelling cruiser and buckle myself in. Since we're working together and so much of the “cop job” spills over to the P.I. firm, McCain has suggested I ride along with him on his shift as a police sergeant and hear about a few past cases while getting familiar with the territory. He shakes my hand with a grip like a wrestler and pushes off beneath gloomy skies, past the convenience stores, pawnbrokers, and blocks of crowded tenements.

  Two of the many truths contained in the hard-boiled detective oeuvre are that there's no money in it and a whole lot of sitting around. In Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe says, “I went back to the office and sat in my swivel chair and tried to catch up on my foot-dangling.” As a working cop, Joe McCain has a distinct advantage over the classic gumshoe: instead of dangling his feet inside the Fulton Street office of McCain Investigations, four out of every six days he puts on a bulletproof vest, straps on his gun, and hits the pavement equipped with an up-to-the-minute criminal database and supported by 130 well-armed, well-trained partners. There's no down time on the streets of Somerville.

  Just looking at him, Joey McCain is the kind of guy somebody would tire of knocking down long before he'd stop getting back up. He's a former U.S. Marine, a graduate of the University of Massachusetts–Boston, and possesses a master's degree in criminal justice. A compact, powerful man with a shaven head and neatly trimmed mustache, McCain is covered in tattoos, from his neck to his ankles. As he rides through Porter Square, he keeps up a running commentary on past investigations while peering into alleyways and sizing up the other drivers and their passengers.

  Standing outside her Brazilian eatery, a tall, attractive female shopkeeper with a circle of bright lipstick whistles at McCain and waves. “What's up?” he asks through his open window. The woman smiles and blows him a kiss.

  Not an especially large man, McCain is a presence nevertheless; he has the swagger of a city cop leavened with sympathy for those who are growing up on the same streets he did. He says he owes it all to his late father, who was his hero, mentor, and best friend. “He knew how to relate to people from all walks of life: doctors to dockworkers,” says McCain. “That was his secret.”

  Very often, great dads are easier to lionize in death than they are to emulate in life. Being “Junior” is a hump some guys never get over, and they go running to another part of the country, a different sort of career, a new life. But Joe McCain, Jr., is not awed or intimidated by the legend of his father. Under the rough talk and the lurid swirl of tattoos, including a vengeful ex–undercover cop from Marvel Comics named “the Punisher” that fills his entire back, Joey's a character in his own right. He's also a guy who put on the uniform, staked out a piece of turf, and assumed the mantle of his old man out of respect, not as a way of keeping up. If you know Joey McCain, you can't imagine him doing anything but this: investigating crimes and putting away bad guys right where his father started, more than forty years ago.

  Incorporated in 1842, Somerville is a city of four square miles and roughly 80,000 people, located along the northern edge of Boston. Once a stronghold of Irish and Italian immigrants, Somerville today is a mélange of over fifty nationalities, a diverse mix of students, shopkeepers, blue-collar and bohemian types, and a couple of posh, leafy neighborhoods bordering the campus of Tufts University. Guys like Joey McCain and his fellow P.I. Mark Donahue grew up playing baseball at Trum Field; went to Somerville High; swam at the Dilboy pool and learned to skate at the MDC rinks; drank beer in the McCain basement; and shot thousands of pucks off a sheet of plywood in the McCain driveway. Donahue eventually moved his family out, to suburban Methuen. But Joey McCain has always called Somerville home.

  “I love the Somerville of today,” says McCain. “The arts, the entertainment, the r
estaurants. You just gotta keep your eyes open.”

  In Teele Square, where several nondescript storefronts lie opposite a city firehouse, McCain tells me about the day in April 1999 that he was riding his bicycle on a community policing detail and came upon a joint called the Station Café. Piqued by something, he rode up to the entrance, dismounted his bike, and peered into the front window. The barroom was filled with Hells Angels and Outlaws, rival motorcycle gangs that were locked in a mortal struggle for the New England drug trade and that never, ever socialized together.

  McCain has a long, bad history with the Hells Angels, who have at various times threatened him, his friends, and his wife and three children. Although he has dabbled in things such as scuba diving, marathon running, and playing drums in a jazz band, the one true passion of Joey McCain's adult life is motorcycling. He's been riding since he was nine years old, when his father bought him a used Yamaha 80. Today he own a KDX 200 Kawasaki dirt bike, a '92 K75S BMW street bike, and a '99 Electra Glide Standard Harley-Davidson. All three of his sons— Joseph, age eleven; Liam, nine; and Lucas, six— have their own motorcycles. And McCain is a card-carrying member of the Renegade Pigs, a national organization of police and firefighters that ride American-made motorcycles. The Renegade Pigs are composed of twenty-five chapters, including two in Massachusetts, and over five hundred members.

  “Some people, even other police officers, categorize us as rogue cops, because we're heavily tattooed and wear leather vests,” says McCain, cruising down Powderhouse Boulevard, alongside the flat, green planes of the Tufts athletic fields.

  But the Renegade Pigs are nothing more than a group of law enforcement types who blow off steam by riding their Harleys, camping out, and drinking beer, McCain says. The enmity between Joe McCain, Jr., the Renegade Pigs, and the Hells Angels began in the mid-nineties, when McCain gave an interview to a New Hampshire newspaper that disparaged the Angels.

  “I said that they were punks and drug dealers, and the funniest thing about it was, they didn't object to being called drug dealers, just punks,” McCain tells me.

  After the story was published, an accompanying photograph was passed around Angels' haunts, and word came down that Joe McCain should start watching his back. Friends said that his photo was hanging up in an Angels' clubhouse with a red line through it, that there was a bounty on him, and that Angels were competing to see who would strip the Renegade Pigs' insignia from Joey's leather jacket.

  Estimates of the Hell Angels' involvement in the illegal methamphetamine trade nationwide are as high as 75 percent, McCain says, and they also traffic in cocaine, marijuana, prostitution, and the “chopping” and reselling of stolen motorcycles. Recent efforts to legitimize their existence by retailing club paraphernalia and portraying themselves as the last free Americans are nothing but a smoke screen for their true identity, according to McCain.

  “They are the dregs of society,” he says. “Stop me when I'm lying, is what I always say to them. They're nothing more than a fascist regime.”

  By the late 1990s, the Hells Angels were upset with the Renegade Pigs for a number of reasons, including the law enforcement group's habit of wearing their chapter name in semicircle formation on the back of their vests, an Angel practice that other clubs are “forbidden” to emulate. Then one night, just a few hours after someone in New York had affixed a Renegade Pigs sticker to a Hells Angels' motorcycle, a small group of the Pigs left the Red Rock bar in Manhattan's Meatpacking District. A dark blue SUV cruised up alongside them, the tinted windows came down, and someone inside the van opened fire.

  “They shot a Washington, D.C. cop, in the ass, Dave Moseley, a buddy of mine,” says McCain. No one was ever arrested for the shooting, but “it was definitely the Angels,” he says.

  It was against this backdrop that Joe McCain, Jr., rode up that night in April to the entrance of the Station Café. Seated at two tables pushed together in the rear of the saloon were approximately ten members of the Hells Angels and a dozen Outlaws, gangs that had been killing each other since the 1970s. Immediately, McCain radioed his division commander for backup units and asked that they keep out of sight.

  Although the two gangs have always hated each other, their operations had been sufficiently undermined by law enforcement that they had convened to discuss a truce. As luck would have it, their sworn enemy, Joe McCain, Jr., working alone, had discovered the proceedings.

  His heart hammering in his throat, McCain pushed open the door and went inside. “I felt like those guys in Animal House, when they walk into the bar and they're the only white guys,” says McCain.

  He passed through a small alcove, which was clad in dark 1970s paneling and badly lit; to his right was the long wooden bar and to the left a narrow room outfitted with benches and booths lined up along the wall. Every biker in the place turned and watched him come in, dressed in shorts and boots and wearing his badge and gun.

  “Anyone with a brain in his head was finishing his drink and trying to leave as unnoticed as possible,” says McCain.

  As he neared the table, an Outlaw rose from his seat. A well-muscled, stocky man with thick shoulders and a military haircut, the gang member was a former corrections officer and Army Ranger whom McCain had been introduced to while hobnobbing at a local Harley shop.

  “Hello, Joe,” said the Outlaw, shaking McCain's hand. “There won't be any trouble here, and we'll be gone in half an hour.”

  McCain reinforced the notion that he didn't want any trouble, and that he wanted the gang members out of the neighborhood. Then he turned around and walked out.

  This was unbelievable; the Angels and the Outlaws were having a summit in a public bar while offering peace terms to law enforcement. “I live near there, and I left my bike, went around the corner to my house and got my video camera, and went over to the firehouse across the street,” says McCain. “I asked the guys there if I could get to the upper floor and hauled ass up the stairs. A little while later, the Angels and Outlaws started piling out of the bar, laughing like they're all great buddies now. You gotta see it.”

  We're approaching the end of McCain's shift, so we return to the station, park the cruiser in the lower lot, and enter through a reinforced door next to the mechanic's bay. As we pass through the dispatcher's area, where detailed maps of Somerville are pinned to the wall and a steady stream of radio traffic is heard, a tall, burly E-911 operator named Scott Lennon hails McCain. “You guys ready to eat?” he asks. “I'm starving. My stomach thinks my throat is cut.”

  McCain laughs. “Yeah. Let's get some chow.”

  In the division commander's office, Joey rigs up his video camera on the desk and rummages through a cardboard box for the Hells Angels tape. On top of a nearby file cabinet is a set of women's clothing in a stapled plastic bag, the evidence from a rape the night before. One of the dispatchers comes in and mentions that the rest of the rape kit is in the freezer down the hall. McCain continues searching until he finds the right tape, and then Lennon enters with the food: wire-handled containers of rice, mushy vegetables in sweet sauce, and candied pork and chicken from the Thai place across the street.

  McCain finishes cueing up the tape, and we sit there with steaming plates of rice and chicken balanced on our knees. The Station Café is a long, yellow brick building with two picture windows fronting on Holland Street. The camera zooms in, panning across six husky figures in leather vests clustered around the bar. The “rockers” sewed onto their vests indicate that four of the men are Hells Angels and two are Outlaws. McCain's voice is heard on the tape, as well as that of a fireman who is standing beside him.

  You don't usually see them together, the fireman says.

  Never, McCain says. Something's up, for sure.

  The camera settles on the Victorian-looking door, which contains a sheet of etched glass that doesn't allow a clear view into the bar. On tape, McCain says, C'mon, you guys. I want everybody to come out, so's I can . . .

  In a moment the door opens and a
huge, bald-headed Outlaw with a thick gold chain exits the bar, laughing with two Angels and an Angel prospect, identified as such because he lacks an upper rocker on his vest. As the gang members pass into the evening, McCain frames a nice, tight shot on each of their faces.

  Outlaws and Angels smiling and joking, says McCain on tape. I love it.

  Because of his own rightful distinction between motorcycling enthusiasts and what he calls “criminals disguised as bikers,” McCain takes genuine pleasure in deflating the Angels. One after another they cross the threshold of the barroom like they're being introduced on a TV show, and Joey says, “Thank you, thank you, and thank you,” as each man scowls into the camera.

  Just then two Angels with long shaggy hair come outside. They are dressed in black jeans, black, long-sleeved T-shirts, and their vests, and are smoking cigarettes. One of them spots Joe's bicycle, which is still leaned up near the entrance, and he nudges the other gang member, exhales a plume of smoke, and says something. In a juvenile show of defiance, the Angel pantomimes getting on Joey's bicycle, and he and his crony roar with laughter.

  “Tough guys. Except they're so fucking stupid they can't tell they're getting their pictures taken,” McCain says to me.

  While we're watching the tape, Joe McCain's phone rings; he picks it up, growls his name, and immediately drops into a more pleasant register. It's his mother calling. Helen McCain, sixty-six, a retired nurse and widowed for a year, is having a rough day. Today would have been Joe Sr. and Helen's forty-second wedding anniversary, and next week is the first anniversary of his death.

  Joey speaks with his mother for a few minutes and promises to look in on her when his shift is over. Other than breaks for college and the Marine Corps, Joe McCain has lived in the house where he was born his entire life. The McCain residence is right off Powderhouse Boulevard in West Somerville, in a neighborhood bordering on the Tufts University campus and composed of half-million-dollar homes dating back to the Grover Cleveland administration.