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

by Jay Atkinson

  “You are so nice,” she says, blushing.

  A pudgy young school committeeman with his eye on an alderman's seat arrives a few minutes later. He's wearing a tired gray trench coat and has an armload of campaign brochures and before Leo can introduce us, he hands me one.

  “Where're you going?” asks Martini.

  The school committeeman jabs his chin toward the housing project.

  “Nobody votes in there,” Martini says. He's a public servant himself, serving as a volunteer commissioner on the Somerville Recreation Commission.

  The young politician stifles a yawn. One at a time, he removes his shoes despite the cold and massages his tired dogs. “It's a free meal,” he says. “You should come over.”

  “What're they having?” Martini asks.

  “Chinese.”

  Leo makes a face. “I don't eat that stuff,” he says.

  After shaking our hands once more, the school committeeman walks away, heading for his egg roll and wonton soup. Horns are honking in the street and a guy leans out from a passing SUV and says “Mar-ti-ni” and the big bald cop waves to him.

  “See that kid? He went to school with Jimmy Hyde. They were best friends,” Leo says. “In seventh grade, Hyde came up to him and said that he'd decided to become a cop and the two of them couldn't be friends anymore. That he was ‘going in a different direction.' Who says that to his best friend? What a piece of shit.”

  Behind the three towers of the housing project, the sky is darkening and there's a pronounced chill in the air. For the first time, Leo Martini removes his sunglasses. His small blue eyes are lined with crow's-feet, more kind and humane than I'd expected. When I ask why he and Joey and Timmy Doherty have persevered over Jimmy Hyde and his crew, Martini laughs.

  “Because we're telling the truth,” he says. “Listen, kid. It's easy to tell the truth cuz you don't have to remember nothing. If you're gonna lie, you gotta have everyone lie with you.”

  SIXTEEN

  Cyrano de McCainiac

  LEO MARTINI AND TIMMY DOHERTY weren't the only cops that Joe McCain helped out. Big Joe always taught his guys that it's never about who gets the glory, what matters most is playing hard and fair and enjoying the rough-and-tumble of the game. One time Joe had a line on a wiseguy who was flying out of Logan Airport, headed for Switzerland with a load of stolen jewelry and bearer bonds. It was Friday evening, and McCain was alone in the D.A.'s office at 73 Tremont Street in Boston, without the authority to stop the plane and looking for help.

  After making a few phone calls, McCain was getting irritated because no one would listen to him. Finally he reached a guy he knew in the Boston FBI office named Eddie Quinn and said, “Look, Eddie, I got a flight going out about eleven o'clock tonight with some stolen goods on it.”

  “What's this all about, Joe?” the FBI agent asked.

  “Bonds— bearer bonds going to Bern, Switzerland. I got the flight number and everything else.”

  “How'd you get it?” asked Quinn.

  McCain was growing a little impatient. “I'm in the office right now,” he said.

  “Ehh, let's wait till Monday,” Quinn said.

  “Monday? For crissakes, this guy's gonna be long gone by then.”

  “Joe, we have an office over in Europe, but we couldn't get anybody now. With the time changes, it's the middle of the night over there.”

  McCain was furious but reined in his anger, speaking in a clipped tone that piqued his friend's interest. “Hey, Eddie, I'll take care of it,” he said.

  “Joe, how you gonna do it?” Quinn asked.

  “Why should I tell you?” asked McCain, and then he hung up.

  Sitting in the deserted office, Joe McCain was far from certain about what he was going to do next. After a few minutes spent pulling on his earlobe, Joe picked up the phone and dialed the overseas operator. “Bern, Switzerland,” he said. “The police department.”

  A short while later the call broke through to a secondary line and there was a distant ringing noise that lasted quite a while and a series of clicking sounds and finally, after several minutes, a policeman on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean reached up and lifted the hook.

  “Do you speak English?” asked McCain.

  For all he knew, the guy on the other end of the line was Hans Christian Andersen, but McCain figured it had to be somebody like him, a regular cop, interested only in doing his job.

  “Listen, take a pencil out. This is Detective Joe McCain, uh, District Attorney's Office, Suffolk County, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.”

  McCain went on to describe the case and who was headed to Switzerland and what he was carrying, and pretty soon the officer in Bern had a supervisor listening in and the two Swiss cops were bombarding McCain with questions. “The flight is just about to leave Boston and will be there in five or six hours,” Joe said. “All I want you to do is meet this plane and get this guy, because he's coming over with all these stolen goods.”

  “Okay, we'll see what we can do,” said the Swiss cop.

  Joe McCain hung up and put on his coat and left the office. It was close to midnight, and riding the elevator down to the Fatted Calf for a drink he laughed at his own earnestness. He made a bet with himself that nothing was going to happen and that he'd never hear another word about the case. Then he had his Scotch and drove home and went to bed.

  The telephone in the McCain bedroom rang at four o'clock in the morning. “What is it?” asked Joe, his voice thick with sleep.

  “You fucking McCain,” said a man's voice. “You got us to do it by them calling Washington. Washington— ”

  “Who is this?” Joe asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “It's me, Eddie. Eddie Quinn. You know how it works, Joe? You call Bern and they call Washington and then Washington calls the Boston office and gets the fucking agent in charge out of bed. And that's me, for fuck's sake. That's me.”

  Tangled in his bedclothes, McCain started laughing. “You're kidding.”

  “Do I sound like I'm kidding? You know what they said? Who is this fucking cop in Boston, this detective, Joe McCain, that's calling Bern, Switzerland?”

  “Did you get him, Eddie?”

  Quinn was calm now, almost laughing along with McCain. “Did we get who?”

  “My guy at Logan.”

  “Yeah, we pinched him.”

  “Good night, Eddie,” said McCain, rolling over to go back to sleep.

  In a pattern that he would follow his entire career, Joe ducked credit for solving the case while taking some heat from the D.A.'s bookkeeper for his overseas phone call. In a profession where who gets the credit, deservedly or not, and who gets the newspaper coverage often plays a huge role in whose career takes off and who ends up in a cruiser patrolling the Blue Hills, Joe McCain's indifference toward his own reputation was an anomaly. When he and his partner Jack Crowley and assistant D.A.s like Joe Doyle, Roger Emanuelson and Tom Peisch were working together in the Suffolk County Investigation and Prosecution Project, the old SCIPP unit, the man in charge was eighty-year-old district attorney Garrett Byrne. And if photographers from the Boston Herald and Boston Globe and news crews from Channels 4, 5, and 7 were coming to Tremont Street to take pictures of a table loaded with counterfeit money or a valuable painting or statue they had recovered, Joe McCain would tell Crowley to go fetch Gary Byrne. After all, he was the boss.

  “For Christ's sake, why do I always have to wake Gary up?” asked Crowley, tongue in cheek.

  A few minutes later, Crowley would return and Doyle or Emanuelson would ask if the boss was on his way. Crowley was a great practical joker and impressionist, and he'd drop right into his Igor routine, hunched over, squinting, one arm thrust out, and dragging his right leg behind him.

  In a perfect Bela Lugosi imitation, Crowley would say, “Yes, master, I went down to the morgue and I put thirteen pints in him and he's ready to run for another term.”

  Everybody would laugh and Byrne would show up for the p
hoto session in his tinted glasses and they'd all go downstairs to the Fatted Calf for a couple of drinks. But Joe McCain's good-natured largesse reached its apotheosis with a Somerville cop named Billy White. Both Local 25 teamsters and native sons from Winter Hill, McCain and White became friends as teenagers and were together the day McCain spotted Bobo Petricone's Oldsmobile and got involved in the Bernie McLaughlin murder investigation. A former Marine, Billy White was honest, hardworking, and a devout Catholic; he and his wife and three daughters attended Mass at St. Clement's every week without fail. (He also had a brother “Red” White, with a bad hand, whom everyone called Lobster.)

  Billy White was always grinding out a buck. Long before discount warehouses were in vogue, White used to buy tuna fish and Campbell's soup by the case in an effort to save money, and he and his family were just getting by. In the mid-1960s he and Joe McCain and another Met cop named Frank Donovan, a former World War II POW and inveterate gambler, got in the orange juice business. For an original investment of five hundred dollars apiece, White and his new partners bought an orange juice recipe and a vat for crushing the fruit, and rented a little storefront down near Union Square in Somerville. White made the juice, McCain loaded the gallons and quarts into the back of his pink Cadillac convertible and delivered to the bars in Lynn, Revere, and Peabody, and Donovan handled local deliveries and went around collecting the money.

  There weren't any huge profits in this seat-of-the-pants operation, but things went reasonably well until White and McCain figured out that, as quickly as Donovan was collecting the money, he was taking it to Suffolk Downs and losing it on the horses. During this period Billy White was studying for the sergeant's exam, and before their fortunes took a downturn, he'd promised to donate five hundred dollars to St. Clement's Church if he was successful in acquiring the rank. White topped the list and made sergeant; the same day, he picked up Joe McCain, drove over to the bank and took out a loan for five hundred dollars, and delivered it to the priest at St. Clement's.

  Billy White worked just as hard on the cop job as he did moonlighting and ran off a long string of gambling arrests, locking up several prominent Somerville bookies. In those days bookmaking and Somerville politics went hand in hand, and as a dubious reward for all the pinches he was making, White got transferred to a walking beat, midnight to 8:00 A.M., down around the Swift meatpacking plant beyond Union Square, a stinking, desolate end of town where he couldn't even buy a cup of coffee. Sergeant White was in exile.

  The long-standing enmity between certain factions of the Somerville P.D. and the McCain family, which has reemerged over Joe Jr.'s suspension and the trash-pulling incident, goes all the way back to the mid-sixties and big Joe's early career as a detective. The sort of treatment White was getting aggravated Joe McCain and he swore that he was going to help Billy out. On his job, McCain acquired a list of six “wanted” men who had jumped their parole and were hiding in Billy White's jurisdiction. (A cop who was injured on the job recognized one of the parolees in his neighborhood and called Joe.) McCain gave the list to Billy White and he and Leo Papile accompanied Sergeant White and a handful of Somerville cops, all armed with shotguns, as they surrounded a house on Flint Street early one morning.

  “You and me are gonna go through the front door,” said White to Joe McCain. “Just like the old days.”

  McCain shook his head. “No Mets,” he said. “It's your pinch. Leo and I'll just wait out here and help you I.D. them.”

  The Somerville cops raided the house, and as McCain and Papile squatted half a block away, laughing to themselves, they were startled by the noise of a shotgun blast. They ran up Flint Street as Billy and his men reemerged, leading six grimy and unshaven parolees out the door in handcuffs.

  “What the hell happened?” asked McCain.

  Billy White jerked his head toward one of the patrolmen, who was standing there with a sheepish look on his face. “Accidental discharge,” he said. “Right through the ceiling, upstairs, and through the roof. Lucky we didn't kill somebody.”

  It was a great pinch, diminished by the fact that one of the shotguns had been fired. Dogged cop that he was, Billy White responded by training every man under his command in the shotgun; on their off hours, they were required to practice down by the Mystic River, since the range couldn't accommodate all that firepower. And Joe McCain, with his unparalleled street sources, determined to restore the luster to his friend's career, kept hunting for another good case.

  A short while later McCain heard about a shipment of pistols, shotguns, and machine guns stolen from a local dealer and began keeping an eye on a bar near the junction of Highland Avenue and the McGrath Highway. Across from the bar was a firehouse, and McCain and White decided to use the top of the tower to look down into the joint and take pictures of the gang that had stolen the guns. Eventually they hit a house on Walnut Street and arrested the thieves and recovered all the guns. Although they worked the case together, McCain threw all the credit to White, who drove the Somerville police crazy. Chief Thomas O'Brien was in tight with the bookies, and White kept getting his picture in the newspaper for busting up the neighborhood. O'Brien couldn't decide if he was more upset over his friends getting arrested or Billy White becoming famous.

  Because of his disdain for law enforcement politics and the silly jurisdictional battle that was undermining Billy White's reputation, Joe McCain worked overtime developing a case large and dramatic enough to resurrect his old pal once and for all. From a biker named Dougherty he knew from Revere Beach, McCain learned of a cache of imported food and wine worth over $300,000 that had been hijacked from the docks. At the corner of Summer and Center Streets was an auto body shop with a false wall made of cinder blocks, and neatly stacked in the cavity behind it were the odd-shaped bottles of olive oil, wheels of cheese, and gallon after gallon of expensive Italian and French wines.

  Joe called Billy White and asked, “Do you want it?”

  “You're kidding me,” said White. “Who stole it?”

  “Well, shit, if you don't want it . . .”

  White cut him off. “I want it, Joe,” he said. “But I gotta really know it's there.”

  “Whaddaya need?” McCain asked. “A block of cheese or something?”

  “Jesus, Joe, I'm in deep shit with the chief for this stuff,” said White. “I just gotta know.”

  So one night around 2:00 A.M. McCain parked his car halfway down the block and tiptoed up to the auto body shop, climbed through a window, discovered a ladder in the corner, and leaned it against a freshly mortared wall at the far end of the garage. The cinder blocks stopped a couple of feet from the ceiling, and McCain climbed up and thrust his head over the top of the wall and shined his flashlight. There in the crawl space was the entire shipment: the netted bottles of Merlot and Cabernet, the great chunks of Brie, everything. Chuckling to himself, McCain replaced the ladder and went back out through the window.

  Going straight to a pay phone, Joe called Billy White and woke him up. “Billy, get dressed. Get a warrant. And go get it,” he said. “It's all there.”

  By 6:00 A.M. Billy White arrived at the auto body shop with a phalanx of police officers, a search warrant, and every city truck that he could scare up. All the uniformed cops were excited to be part of something this big, and as the sun rose over Somerville, they gathered in front of the auto body shop with their pickaxes and shotguns, the trucks lined up along the sidewalk like floats in a parade. Once again, Joe McCain and Leo Papile were hiding up the street, and as Billy White, resplendent in his dress blue uniform, was about to give the order, Chief O'Brien rode past on his way to work and almost had an infarction.

  The cops broke the wall down and began unloading the stolen goods, and as the work went on, television crews showed up and filmed the operation for the evening news. Billy White's picture appeared on the front page of the Somerville Journal, and within a few months he had passed the detective lieutenant's exam and moved over to the State Police. Finally, he was s
afe from his enemies in the Somerville P.D.

  But a day after the big bust, he and Joe McCain were having a drink over in Cambridge, and big Joe raised his glass and said, “You're really making a name for yourself, Billy. You're gonna work your way right out of there.”

  White laughed. “I'm working myself into goddamn heart failure, you son of a bitch. Don't give me any more of these.”

  McCain was always quick to lend a hand. But it was his old pal on the Mets, Billy Parsons, who arranged Joe's most eventful moonlighting experience. The former Marine's cousin John Thistle owned a rigging company and in the mid-eighties Thistle hired Parsons and McCain to haul the contents of a downtown bank to a new location in Worcester, Mass. The two behemoths were part of the crew that moved the thirty-ton vault doors by means of cold-rolled steel bars, along with safe deposit boxes that had been sealed by a notary public and were transported to Worcester in a convoy of trucks guarded by policemen with machine guns.

  It was backbreaking, technical work. The safe deposit boxes, which were filled with valuables, could be jacked up to only a certain height and then carried out in blocks of twenty through a hole that had been blasted in the sidewalk. The process took a couple of weeks and while they were at it, the steelworkers and riggers stayed at a beautiful new hotel in downtown Worcester. Every night up on the twenty-second floor, they were treated to a fantastic spread of lobster, shrimp cocktail, and porterhouse steaks, augmented by the finest wines and whiskeys and a keg of ice cold beer.

  On their last evening, at the height of the conviviality, Chief Rigger John Thistle, who like his brothers was missing part of a finger here and a toe there, climbed out the window of the hospitality room onto the narrow granite ledge. With the ease of a man walking along a sidewalk, Thistle sauntered around the corner of the building while Joe McCain leaned out the window, gaping at him. “You crazy bastard,” said McCain.

  A few moments later, Thistle returned. “C'mere, Joe,” he said.

  Big Joe mustered himself and crawled onto the ledge. It was a cold winter night, the stars glittering above the hotel and a steady wind from the north. More than two hundred feet below, the empty swimming pool was the size of a dinner plate and tiny cars moved up and down the streets. Slowly McCain stood up and followed Thistle around the corner of the hotel on the twelve-inch ledge.