by Jay Atkinson
Joe lost track of Flynn when he enlisted in the Army and went away to Ranger School. In the mid-seventies, when he was discharged, Tommy Flynn bumped into Joe McCain on Revere Beach, and the two old friends had a cup of coffee together. The Army had done Flynn a lot of good: he was tall, well-muscled, and after years of boxing and karate, lethal with hand and foot.
“Joe, you know, I'm gay,” Flynn said.
“Good for you,” said McCain, with a shrug. “What do I care? You're a grown man.”
But Flynn, who had always kept McCain informed of what was happening on Revere Beach, explained that, as a twelve-year-old kid loose on the boulevard, he'd been exploited and abused by a group of prominent men who ran a house of prostitution stocked with little boys— a pedophile's dream— less than two miles from the coffee shop where they were sitting, at 242 Mountain Avenue in Revere.
The third-floor apartment was being rented by the thirty-seven-year-old novelties salesman Richard Peluso, who had outfitted the main rooms with pool and Ping-Pong tables, dart boards, pinball machines, and magazines from an organization called NAMBLA that depicted sex between men and boys, while stocking the kitchen with ample supplies of popcorn, peanuts, candy, and beer. Boys between the ages of eight and thirteen, most of them latchkey kids with no fathers and very little structure in their lives, were being lured to the house with promises of fun and games, only to be anally and orally raped by Peluso and a continuous line of doctors, businessmen, and other professionals who paid a fee to Peluso for their depraved adventures.
This had been going on for years and was still going on, said Tommy Flynn; in fact, he had first been taken to Mountain Ave. by a “respectable” businessman named Eddie Mede, part of the family that owned Mede's Log Cabin in East Boston, a nightclub that featured transvestites— some of whom Joe McCain had locked up when he was a rookie cop. Not known as a pedophile or a homosexual, Mede taught self-defense tactics to the Revere Police Department and had given Tommy Flynn karate lessons at his studio in Beachmont.
This was the most outrageous and disturbing thing Joe McCain had ever heard. And, it got worse; Peluso's house of horrors was frequented by one of Boston's best-known child psychiatrists, a wealthy investment broker from Wellesley and a licensed social worker from Cambridge, among many others from all over the country. All of them were successful, well-educated men, often with children of their own, and too frequently in professional positions where they were entrusted with the education and safety of young people. Veiled in respectability, these predators had ruined the lives of dozens of prepubescent boys from Revere, Malden, Chelsea, and their environs, by sodomizing them, sucking their penises, and performing other bizarre and unnatural acts. This abuse was so brazen and systematic that Peluso and his cronies were using a school bus and driver to transport unsupervised young boys the eight or nine miles from the North End of Boston to Mountain Ave.
As he sat in the coffee shop, big Joe's lower lip began to quiver, and his right leg trembled beneath the table. In his eighteen-plus years on the job, he had witnessed a great number of terrible things: as a police diver he had hauled corpses out of the Mystic River with their eyes, lips, ears, noses, and genitals eaten away by scavengers; he had been the first to respond to automobile accidents involving multiple fatalities; he had seen gangsters with their faces torn off by shotgun blasts; and he had attended dozens of autopsies with an unlit cigar in his mouth and Vicks VapoRub stuck up each nostril to kill the stench. But what Flynn was describing made Joe McCain sick to his stomach.
McCain knew Flynn and trusted his information, but what proof did he have? Flynn told Joe that if he went into a certain room on the third floor of 242 Mountain Avenue he would find a huge stack of Polaroids depicting naked boys in the midst of various sex acts. The photographs, which Flynn described as perverse trophies hoarded by Richard Peluso, had been stashed in a heating vent.
“Are you sure, Tommy?” asked McCain.
The ex-Ranger stared Joe McCain in the face. “They're in there,” he said.
McCain was working in the SCIPP unit at the time, with the mandate to be aggressive and make cases. His partner was Jack Crowley, who had a knack for getting in beneath McCain's volcanic temper and dictatorial manner, prompting him to laugh in the midst of his rages by impersonating Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi.
Oftentimes McCain would show up at the office in a shirt and tie pockmarked with tiny burn holes from his cigar, and Crowley once asked him if he knew a good tailor.
“Sure, why?” asked McCain.
“Because you should ask him to make you a suit out of fuckin' asbestos,” Crowley said.
A hardworking guy who moonlighted several nights a week in a liquor store and had seven kids of his own, Crowley said he would work the case with McCain even though there was a regime change in the SCIPP unit and he was on the way out. The reigning district attorney, Garrett Byrne, who was eighty years old and had served the county since 1952, had been defeated by Newman Flanagan, and the incoming D.A. wanted to put his own people in there. Assistant D.A.s Joe Doyle and Roger Emanuelson were resigning, Crowley was going back to his old unit in District A-1, and a host of other good cops were transferring out. Detective McCain was sitting on what looked like a huge, messy case, and as he did over his entire career, Joe resisted office politics and his own selfish interests to go after Peluso and his sex ring.
Personally he wanted to keep a low profile in the early stages of the investigation, remaining unknown to the perps and perverts who frequented 242 Mountain Ave., so armed with Flynn's tip and his own reputation, McCain convinced the D.A. to get a search warrant and asked Jack Crowley to go over to Peluso's house and look for the incriminating photographs.
“Okay, Joe,” said Crowley, who called his partner No Show for his propensity to skip golf outings and other social commitments. “Just remember that I work with you, not for you.”
McCain warned Crowley that he would find some terrible things on Mountain Ave., that there might even be some kids in the house, but still Crowley was shocked when on a cold, rainy afternoon he and another detective rang the bell to serve the warrant and a twelve-year-old boy, naked to the waist, ran past them into the street.
The evidence was right where Tommy Flynn said it would be. Crowley returned to the SCIPP office with a large collection of Polaroids, featuring a diverse group of naked boys in an array of vulgar poses. Some of the photos depicted boys as young as nine years old engaging in sex acts with older men in the bedrooms of 242 Mountain Ave., or sitting on the laps of these men, smiling and drinking beer. Eventually, Richard Peluso was indicted for the rape of three boys under the age of sixteen.
Although people who came of age in the 1970s might look back on those days as the height of the so-called Sexual Revolution, as far as Boston's straitlaced middle class was concerned, the phenomena of child molestation and perversion didn't really exist. Certainly they didn't occur in a place like Revere, among men of respectable professions, and if they did, those subjects and those men were not suitable for polite conversation or public display. And as Joe McCain girded himself for the unrewarding and difficult labor of tracking down the boys in the Polaroid photographs— and their parents— he realized that his most formidable opponent was denial: the good people of Massachusetts were going to have a hard time believing that such things could, and did, occur in the city named for one of America's greatest patriots.
For several hours a day over a period of months, McCain drove alone through the streets of Revere and Chelsea and Boston's North End, searching for the abused boys. He had duplicates of the photos made that featured just the heads of the victims, and he would stop his car beside playgrounds and street corners and ice cream stands, beckon a few kids over, and ask them if they knew the boys in the pictures. His reputation preceded him, and the most reticent of neighborhood kids would give him a name or describe something they'd seen.
In some ways, Joe McCain and the other detectives in the SCIPP unit felt t
hat child molestation was the most heinous crime of all. The taking of a life is an atrocity against all human beings; but when it's over, the victim's suffering ends. For the young victims of perversion and molestation, the suffering is open-ended; they often spend their lives plagued by memories of their own weakness, by guilt, by sexual deviancy, and by related substance abuse. And as McCain worked on, eventually identifying sixty-three juveniles who had been abused at Peluso's apartment, including the sons of local policemen and firemen and longshoremen and even the son of a Met cop he was friendly with, he began to realize that there would be a number of trials and that enduring the trials would be hell on these kids.
As the investigation bore fruit, thirty-year-old assistant district attorney Tom Peisch was assigned to prosecute. A native of Burlington, Vermont, and graduate of Dartmouth College and Boston College Law School, Peisch had earned a reputation as a thoughtful, meticulous litigator over his three years in the Suffolk County D.A.'s Office. An undersized but determined fellow who spent his weekends playing for the Mystic River Rugby Club, Peisch was about to get married and would soon join the exodus of lawyers and cops from 73 Tremont Street. Private practice beckoned, and at a much higher rate than the $833 per month he had started with under Garrett Byrne.
But Peisch loved Joe McCain and relished the thought of working with him on such a difficult case. Together they decided to choose someone with a high profile from among the pool of suspects, acquire a conviction, and force a good number of the remaining defendants to avoid jury trials and plead out. That way, they'd be able to cut down the number of victims who would have to appear as witnesses, minimizing the psychic damage of their testimonies.
They had Richard Peluso; they had Frank Damiano, the forty-nine-year-old school bus driver; and McCain was turning up a slew of other names as the investigation continued. But it had already begun to wear on him. As he met with the young victims and their parents in Peisch's office, McCain conducted his interviews in as gentle a manner as possible; he would show the parents the obscene photographs with tiny strips of electrical tape covering the children's genitals while explaining the rigors of a trial and what defense lawyers might counter with.
Occasionally one of the mothers would become adamant about seeing the entire photograph. She would argue that she'd brought this little boy into the world and felt it was her obligation to know exactly what her child had been subjected to. “Why do you want to do that?” McCain would ask. But she would insist and Joe would peel off the strips of tape, and the mother would see her child's exposed genitalia, break down, and weep.
Joe McCain didn't think he had the background or wherewithal to counsel the victims or their families. In his regular conversations with Peisch, Joe made light of the “triple-decker education” he had received growing up on Marshall Street, and often prefaced his opinions with “I'm just a dumb cop, but this is what I think . . .” But the victims, many of them young men by this time, responded to big Joe's honesty and the natural warmth of his personality. In the end, thirteen victims and their families agreed to cooperate in prosecuting or making plea deals with the accused.
McCain's doggedness and tortuous spadework paid off when an eighteen-year-old who had been abused several years earlier produced two names that shocked McCain and Peisch. Arthur P. (“Preston”) Clarridge was vice headmaster at the Fessenden School in West Newton, an exclusive all-male primary school that had graduated luminaries such as the billionaire Howard Hughes and U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy. A mathematics teacher, Clarridge, age forty-nine, was a meek-tempered little man who was known in certain circles to possess a small black valise stocked with marijuana, alcohol, and various “sex aids.”
The other offender named was a fifty-year-old child psychiatrist, Dr. Donald M. Allen, former chief resident at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston. The eighteen-year-old victim described an episode with Dr. Allen that culminated in the much older man “jerking off” onto the boy's chest.
“If I ever get near him, I'll kill him,” the youth said.
Peisch and McCain had their guinea pig in Donald Allen, who would be indicted on four counts of rape of a child under sixteen. But they still needed a key insider to make sure Allen went down, an adult who would help make their case. In a piece of investigative maneuvering that McCain later called “a work of art,” he “flipped” Preston Clarridge, making him into a witness for the prosecution. Many nights were spent in Peisch's office, where McCain and this Harvard-educated child molester would hold long philosophical conversations on human sexuality. Clarridge's viewpoint was that the social norms governing heterosexual behavior were merely what parents taught their children at an early age, not irrevocable truths inherent in nature. By lending a sympathetic ear to these arguments, however much it pained him to do so, McCain earned Clarridge's trust and gradually convinced him to turn against his fellow pervert and friend.
By testifying against Allen, Clarridge would save the greater embarrassment of his own trial, an event that McCain presented in such a way that the very prospect filled the balding schoolmaster with terror. And Preston Clarridge was a smart fellow: he sized up his chances early, deciding it was best to cast his lot with the government.
But making a case against Dr. Allen wouldn't be easy. He had retained an attorney named Larry O'Donnell, an ex-cop and formidable litigator known for his bold gambits in the courtroom. Just selecting the jury was an ordeal: the presiding judge, Joseph Ford, a balding, nondescript fellow with a dry manner, was saddled with a lengthy pretrial hearing merely to decide what would be included in the voir dire, the questioning used to identify or rule out prospective jurors. A lot of discussion was focused on the terminology that would be used at trial, with O'Donnell taking issue with the word “homosexual.”
“Even Kinsey couldn't define it, Your Honor,” he said, during a long, frustrating day filled with procedural questions. “If it's sucking a cock, let's call it sucking a cock.”
Eventually Judge Ford settled on seventy-eight questions, with the defense using their allotment to try to get rid of individuals who were opposed to gay sex and sex between adults and children, and the prosecution trying to keep those people in. There were so many questions and the process was so exacting that Judge Ford took the unusual step of tape-recording all seventy-eight queries so he wouldn't have to repeat them, then bringing the prospective jurors up to the witness box one at a time to answer them all.
A lot of the jury pool came from Revere and Chelsea and Malden, working men and women who were horrified by many of the details in the case. At one point a rugged-looking teamster was asked how he felt about hearing assertions that grown men— and Dr. Allen in particular, who was sitting in the courtroom— may have inserted their penises into the rectums of nine- and ten-year-old boys.
The teamster screwed his head around and looked at Judge Ford. “Are you crazy?” he asked. “Who did that? Him? Why don't you just take him out and kill him?”
“You're excused, sir,” said Judge Ford.
The teamster continued grumbling as he stepped down from the box. “I'll take him out back and strangle him right now,” he said. “Save you the trouble.”
The trial, which ran for two weeks leading up to Christmas 1978, became both a prurient spectacle and an ideological battlefield, as the Irish cops and the Ivy League lawyers clashed inside and outside the courtroom with each other and the lunatic fringe of the gay revolution. Although television cameras were banned from the actual trial in those days, the Superior Courthouse in Boston's Pemberton Square was besieged with TV crews from all three local stations and the network news programs, as well as print reporters from across the country, including from The Village Voice and a number of gay publications. Picketers from the North American Man-Boy Love Association, the infamous NAMBLA, lined the entrance to the courthouse each morning, and other protesters, some of them attired in outrageous garb, lay down in the corridors outside the courtroom. It was even rumored that the openly gay
author Gore Vidal would make an appearance at the trial, in support of the defendants.
Tom Peisch, with Joe McCain by his side, presented the government's case with his usual clarity and precision. Through his parade of witnesses, Peisch outlined the nefarious methodology associated with Donald Allen's conquest of little boys. It wasn't a matter of “overborne will” but rather a slow and gradual culturing of these nine- and ten- and eleven-year-olds; an ingratiating into their confidences, and then a systematic and ruthless deflowering.
There was certainly no question of consent involved, since in Massachusetts children under the age of sixteen were legally incapable of giving their consent regarding these activities. And there was no doubt that the victims of Donald Allen's crimes had suffered great consequence; the fourteen women and two men of the jury needed only to look into the faces of these young men, aged and troubled beyond their years, to understand what this middle-aged pederast had done to them and their hopes for the future.
The wild card in the trial was the question of Donald Allen's defense. Since Larry O'Donnell was required during pretrial hearings to reveal only if his client would plead insanity or claim an alibi, the District Attorney's Office could only guess about the defense's strategy. So Tom Peisch laughed to himself when O'Donnell stood up to claim that Dr. Allen had been conducting a grant-funded study for Tufts University on sexual behaviors and had not participated in any illegal activity. Peisch knew that Clarence Darrow himself couldn't sell that load of horseshit to the jury.
This declaration raised the inference that Donald Allen considered himself a lot smarter than Joe McCain, and that the self-professed “dumb cop” from Winter Hill would never be able to prove Dr. Allen wasn't acting in a medical capacity while frolicking at 242 Mountain Ave.
“He made a very big fucking mistake,” McCain would say, as the trial was recessed and he and Jack Crowley descended upon the Tufts campus with an armload of subpoenas. In very short order, the two street cops were able to establish that there was no grant, no protocol, no research notes, and no study; that, in fact, O'Donnell's assertion was nothing more than a “recently contrived defense.” After this bit of police work, it was clear to Peisch and all the other courtroom participants that Joe McCain had graduated summa cum laude from Marshall Street.