by Jay Atkinson
Meanwhile, a separate team of detectives battered down the front door of Ernie Field's house in Medford, arrested him, and searched the premises for several hours. They discovered ten pounds of cocaine, worth an estimated $1 million on the street, as well as three DEA badges that Field would attach to leather cases when he was moving the coke. Police also found a book entitled 100 Ways to Disappear and Live Free. Ernest K. Field, Joseph P. Civita, Bruce Ziskind, and Edward M. Maiani were charged with conspiracy to distribute drugs and held in lieu of $700,000 bail.
Eddie Miami was sentenced to five to eight years in prison on three counts of conspiring to violate narcotics laws. A couple of years after they busted him, Stew Henry and Joe McCain were in the Suffolk County Courthouse in Pemberton Square when they spotted the little mobster, talking on a pay phone.
“Hey, uh, Vito,” said Eddie, trying to stretch the metal cord in order to hail the two cops. “C'mere, you guys.”
McCain and Henry went over and shook Eddie's hand. “You two guys were the best goddamned— hey, no hard feelings,” said Eddie. “You got me good.”
Shortly after Eddie got out of jail, Stew Henry saw him driving through the parking lot at the North Shore Mall. He followed, and when Eddie parked his car, Henry got out and once again the two men shook hands and made small talk. It was like two guys from rival high schools meeting up years after the big game: “How you doing? Everything's all right?”
A few years later, Joe McCain called Henry to tell him that Eddie had been sick for a while and died. He was just a wiseguy, but with his passing, and Stew Henry's retirement after twenty-six years in the outfit, and something as unthinkable as Joe McCain getting shot on the job, there was a definite sense that an era had ended.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Three-Hundred-Dollar Clowns
BY GETTING TO KNOW ALL THE METS from the old Special Investigations Unit, I'm beginning to figure out why Joe McCain would draw the ire of cops like Joseph Civita and Jimmy Hyde. When William “Battlin' Biff” McLean greets me at the Mass. State Police barracks in Danvers, his ready manner is a welcome change from the brusqueness of the other troopers in and around the lobby. Widowed ten years and the father of two young sons, Biff McLean is a tall, friendly man with the build of a middle-distance runner: some power, a little speed, and a wealth of endurance. He's coming off a nice effort in a local road race and while we're standing there, a young trooper with a military haircut stops by.
“The lieutenant is pissed at you,” he says to McLean.
The lieutenant he's talking about, Biff's supervisor, is a dozen years younger than he is. “What's he mad at me for?” asks McLean.
“You beat him by about six minutes yesterday,” the trooper says. “Don't you know you're supposed to let the lieutenant win?”
Biff laughs, and the young trooper goes out. McLean's wavy, brown hair is flecked with gray, and he's wearing a pressed denim shirt and dark slacks, with a nine-shot Beretta strapped to his hip and the small gold State Police badge right-center on his belt. The former Boston English High hockey player and Army infantryman and gravedigger has been a cop for twenty-five years and is assigned to plainclothes narcotics. McLean waves at a trooper behind the Plexiglas and we get buzzed inside and head upstairs to his office.
Like the other Met cops who were there the night Joe McCain got shot, Biff McLean has moved on to a new phase in his life. And although they don't work together anymore, McLean keeps tabs on his former partners. Known by his old radio call sign, “One-fifty Gen-o,” Gene Kee is now a lieutenant, assigned to the FBI Bank Robbery Task Force in Boston. The unit's surveillance expert, “Fat Al” DiSalvo, is back in uniform, manning the State Police detail at Logan Airport, while Dennis Febles, recently graduated from the New England School of Law, is in Troop H. Chris Brighton, who has thus far proved an elusive interview, is also in uniform, working out of the Lower Basin. And the unit's thoughtful, cerebral commander, Major Mark Cronin, has retired with his wife, Debbie, to a comfortable oceanfront home in Hampton, New Hampshire.
Biff McLean was just shy of his thirtieth birthday when he started with the Mets in 1978. One afternoon shortly after he came on the job, McLean was in his cruiser and heard over the police radio that a drug suspect had stolen a car and was speeding through downtown Boston. The car was a brown 1978 Ford Gran Torino, and as McLean was sitting at the light going south on Park Drive, he looked across the four lanes and saw a vehicle that fit the description on the other side.
The driver was a kid in his twenties, and “I'm looking at him and he's looking at me,” McLean says. When the light turned green, Biff pulled out, glanced at the kid's license plate and grabbed the radio: “I got that vehicle down near Fenway.”
Tires smoking against the pavement, the kid gunned the engine of the Gran Torino, darting in and out of traffic as he raced north on Park Drive. Clearing the light, McLean ran his cruiser up on the island and over the grassy median, bumping down the curb on the far side. He pressed the accelerator to the floor, chasing the Ford over the bridge behind the Museum of Fine Arts. When the kid tried to go left on Huntington Avenue, he spun out, and McLean, gritting his teeth and locking his elbows, shot across the intersection and T-boned him, the vehicles smashing together with a loud, dissonant clang. Bits of glass and chrome rained onto the street and other motorists screeched past on either side, blasting their horns.
Quick as a squirrel, the thief popped out of the driver's side window and took off down the street “like he'd fucking practiced,” says McLean.
The car thief was a lightweight kid, wearing jeans and sneakers and an old sweatshirt. McLean went straight after him on foot, watching as the kid jettisoned bags of heroin left and right. At that moment, McLean recalled the advice of his first partner, a cop with twenty years on the job: “When they run, take the gun out. Don't fuck around with the stick.” Doing his best John Wayne, Biff pulled out his .38 and yelled at the kid to quit fucking around and stop— he was a police officer.
Zigzagging through parked cars and down an alley McLean began to close in, and the kid, ten years younger and forty pounds lighter, couldn't believe it. (“That's why I started running,” says McLean, who has made foot chases his specialty, “because the little bastards were getting away from me.”) He got close and shoved the kid high on the shoulder and the car thief lost his balance and went ass over teakettle onto the sidewalk. Leaping on him, McLean yelled that he was a fucking cop and the two of them went sprawling over the pavement in a fury of knees and elbows.
When McLean started to apply the handcuffs, the kid put up the fight of his life. At that point, the young Met cop had produced a high-speed chase, terrified motorists and pedestrians, a wrecked cruiser, and a totaled stolen car— he needed a live body. While the kid continued to scrap, McLean smacked him in the head with the gun butt, opening a cut above the kid's eye that produced large amounts of blood.
A middle-aged woman cried out from a window above them, “Hey. You can't do that.”
“Shut the fuck up and get back in your house,” said McLean, still struggling with the kid.
McLean subdued the heroin dealer and had him cinched up pretty tight when a Boston policeman came galloping up on a huge white horse and the two cops arrested the kid. A couple of days later, the drug dealer accused Metropolitan Police Officer William Joseph McLean of pistol-whipping him and filed charges of excessive force. McLean was placed on restricted duty, and while inside the Lower Basin waiting to be interviewed by Internal Affairs, he noticed a big, strapping, white-haired guy who turned out to be Joe McCain, the dean of all Met detectives and known throughout the ranks as a cop's cop.
McLean was sitting there by himself and McCain walked over and offered his hand. “That was a good pinch, kid,” he said.
Then Officer McLean went into a room with the two I.A. detectives, and one of them asked if he had hit the drug dealer with his gun.
“Yeah, I did,” said Biff.
Both detectives looked up fr
om their paperwork. “Hey, you're not supposed to say that,” one of them said.
“But I fucking did it,” said McLean, explaining that the kid had resisted and that he'd been alone and needed to protect himself and get the heroin dealer off the street.
Nothing ever happened as a result of the interview; no official reprimand, not even a mention of the incident in his personnel file. “I always felt that Joe helped me out with the I.A. guys,” says McLean.
He goes on to say that “Joe McCain was not universally loved by law enforcement types, but he was universally respected. Some of it was political, some of it was jealousy. Most of these guys, they couldn't have been a pimple on Joe's ass. Hey, he could be difficult to work with. He had a temper. But we always had fun.”
And when Biff McLean was asked to join McCain and Mark Cronin in the Special Investigations Unit, the fun really got started. One of their most memorable cases involved the investigation and subsequent arrest of sixty-five-year-old Louis Colangelo, a crack-smoking, whore-chasing drug dealer from Swampscott. When they closed on the house, the Met detectives discovered that Colangelo had a half pound of 95 percent pure cocaine and more than $35,000 in cash hidden behind a picture in his basement.
“Aren't you a little old for this shit?” asked McLean, as they handcuffed Colangelo.
“Don't knock it unless you tried it, kid,” said the white-haired drug dealer.
After the uniforms took Colangelo away, Cronin sat down in the living room to tally up the money and cocaine while Al DiSalvo, Chris Brighton, Gene Kee, and McLean searched every drawer and cabinet. The doorbell rang, and Fat Al, dressed in plainclothes but with his badge, handcuffs, and gun attached to his belt, answered the door. A stout, gruff-tempered man who's rarely in the mood for anyone's bullshit, DiSalvo asked, “Whattaya want?”
Two punks from East Boston were on the stoop, wearing their wife-beater T-shirts and gold chains. “We wanna buy an eightball,” one of them said.
DiSalvo jerked his thumb toward the living room. “Go see Sarge,” he said.
Hunched over a coffee table, Cronin was busy making thousand-dollar piles out of hundred-dollar bills when the two greaseballs entered the room. Several other detectives were coming in and out.
“Hey, Sarge, we want an eightball,” one of the East Boston guys said. “But we only have half the money.”
Cronin glanced up, regarding the two men with a disgusted look. “Leave me your driver's licenses and I'll give you the coke,” he said. “But you have to come back with the rest of the money by six o'clock.”
The two cokeheads looked at each other and shrugged. Then they gave Cronin their I.D.s, which he examined and put aside, and the punks handed over several twenty-dollar bills.
Cronin shook his head. “Look around,” he said, gesturing at the other detectives. “Do you see what's going on here? Do you know who we are?”
“Hey, man, we just want an eightball,” one of them said.
“Are you idiots?” asked Cronin. “We're police officers. You're under arrest.”
DiSalvo was called back into the room to handcuff the two men and read them their Miranda rights. “You should be ashamed to call yourselves Italian,” he said, leading the men out. “Dumb freakin' guineas.”
On another case, Gene Kee and Biff McLean were asked to join Lieutenant “Shaky” Blaine in questioning a suspect, a fresh little Greek kid from Roslindale, who had been arrested with one-half pound of 98 percent pure cocaine. “Tell us who your supplier is and we'll talk to the D.A. for you,” said Kee.
The young drug dealer smirked. “Fuck you, you three-hundred-dollar-a-week clowns,” he said. “My lawyer'll have me out of here before you finish your reports.”
Approaching swiftly, Kee knocked the kid's chair over backwards while Blaine averted his eyes and headed for the door. McLean pressed his thumb and forefinger to his lips, stifling a laugh. It was hard to feel sorry for the bad guys.
Two bad guys that Joe McCain never felt any sympathy toward, according to McLean, were the murderous Winter Hill gangsters James “Whitey” Bulger and Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi. Like other cops in the know, McCain always had a feeling that Whitey Bulger was some kind of rat and thus shielded from prosecution for his own crimes, including multiple homicides. Even with all his contacts in law enforcement, McCain was unable to get at the nature of that relationship: who, exactly, was complicit, and how pervasive was it? Long before it was public knowledge, McCain suspected that Bulger was being protected by the feds and that his protection extended to all manner of heinous deeds and cloaked his position as an FBI informant. It also created a firewall between Whitey and his “legitimate” older brother, the longtime president of the Massachusetts Senate, William Bulger. So McCain was delighted when Flemmi turned up on another surveillance, and he soon struck upon the notion of taking Stevie and Whitey down via a case that somehow circumvented Whitey's immunity.
Joe pulled Biff McLean out of uniform for good to work on what became known as the Davis brothers case. Stevie and Mickey Davis were cocaine dealers from Randolph, Mass., small-timers mostly, with a supply connection to a big-time heroin and coke dealer named Marchand, who was the son of a Boston cop. Although Marchand was the original target of the investigation, the real attraction for McCain was that the Davises' twenty-five-year-old sister, Debra, a good-looking blonde with a penchant for bad boys, had been dating forty-six-year-old Stephen Flemmi. (When Debby's father voiced his disapproval of their relationship, he drowned in Boston Harbor after “accidentally” falling off a boat.) Like a lot of wiseguys, the Rifleman had several girlfriends at once, providing them with cash and jewelry and squiring them around Boston in his shiny new Jaguar. By injecting a little capital and a lot of gangster charm into a number of households, Flemmi and Bulger had access to untapped phone lines and rent-free offices, an arrangement that made their operation very hard to pin down.
Joe McCain's informant, a grizzled, balding ex-con named Tank Gaffney, provided the news about Flemmi and the Davis girl. Gaffney also told McCain that the girl's mother, Olga Davis, was aware of her sons' drug dealing and taking money from Flemmi, and that the Rifleman had designs on Debby's sister, fourteen-year-old Michelle Davis, who was described as a “young Ava Gardner.”
Outside the ken of Boston's FBI office, McCain secured a warrant for a wiretap on the Davises' telephone and rented an apartment a mile away with the intention of “putting the ears” on the Davis boys, as well as Flemmi and Bulger. Since Biff McLean had grown up in neighboring Mattapan and knew people who were buying coke from the Davises and acting as lookouts and couriers— including a kid named Danny Jacie, who had been seeing Debby Davis before Flemmi and was missing— Joe wanted Biff on his team.
The young Met was thrilled. “If you were gonna try to be a detective, Joe was the guy,” says McLean.
It was going to be an expensive operation and the district attorney in Norfolk County, where the wiretap was located, told the Mets that his office couldn't afford to pay for it all. They were going to need help from an agency with deep pockets. In Boston, that meant the FBI.
There's a saying in law enforcement: The feds eat like elephants and shit like birds. Joe McCain was already wary of the supervisor in the Boston FBI office, a man named John Morris, and had heard rumors about the friendship between Agent John Connolly and the Bulgers, who had grown up in the same South Boston neighborhood. Because previous spats between local police, the Norfolk County D.A.'s Office, and the bureau had derailed efforts at targeting organized crime, McCain knew that creating a partnership in the Davis brothers case would be tricky. He called a meeting at a pancake house on Route 1 in Norwood, during which he convinced those in attendance to forget their old grudges and “do our master's business— which is the public's.” Through some delicate maneuvering Joe was able to get FBI backing for the wiretap operation, as well as the assignment of two agents he trusted, Jimmy Crawford and Matt Cronin (no relation to Mark Cronin, McCain's friend, former
supervisor, and an MDC cop).
But as part of the deal McCain received one thing he didn't want, a shapely young FBI agent named Tanya Roberts, formerly a sheriff's deputy in Georgia and known for leaving broken marriages and turmoil in her wake. More than anything, McCain respected hard work and those who enjoyed doing it; in Tanya Roberts, he encountered a do-nothing who couldn't be bothered to show up for meetings and surveillance assignments and who had already “fucked half the agents in Boston,” according to Joe.
At the apartment complex in Randolph where the Davis surveillance was being maintained, as many as eight detectives were seen coming and going at irregular intervals. McCain instructed Biff McLean and Chris Brighton and the other members of the unit to tell the neighbors they were airline pilots, since they often traveled in pairs, arriving and departing in the wee hours of the morning. But he didn't have to worry about Tanya Roberts; she was too busy working out at the Boston Athletic Club to need a pretext.
There were long, tough days in Randolph, with McCain and Biff McLean and the other handpicked guys working their tails off but always moving closer to Bulger and Flemmi. Joe's early years on Revere Beach had led to an intense interest in the Winter Hill gang, which had come a long way since then. Whitey Bulger had taken over most of the North End mob's loan sharking, racketeering, extortion, contract violence, and drug dealing. His henchmen— Stephen Flemmi in particular— were rumored to be committing murders at an astonishing rate; a number of those killings had nothing to do with “business” and were carried out on personal, petty whims. It was believed that Stevie Flemmi had an inside guy at a West Roxbury crematorium and was eliminating his victims by placing second bodies in coffins before they turned on the furnace.