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

by Jay Atkinson

  When the bartender, a squat, florid-faced gent with wavy hair, comes over, Brighton winks at him and says; “You look familiar. Ever been locked up?”

  I'd been told that “Kegs” Brighton likes to tip 'em and has been dogging his favorite hangouts for a while now: the Burren in Somerville, Tavern on the Green, the Fours. Chris is a close friend of the McCains and played a significant role in the defining moments of big Joe's life. But instead of the bitter, introverted, perhaps even hostile man that I had imagined, state trooper Chris Brighton is friendly and charming. He apologizes for his busy schedule and keeps trying to buy me another drink.

  Brighton looks more like a professional golfer than a cop. He's a shade over six feet but looks taller, and is dressed in a blue madras shirt, beige slacks, and tasseled loafers. Brighton has high-crowned dark hair, his face is tanned very dark from cruising on his boat, and his eyes are brown and lively, crinkling at the edges when he smiles, which is often.

  But there's something about him that suggests a Johnny Mercer lyric: detached, world-weary, with a profound sadness lurking beneath the grin.

  Quarter to three. There's no one in the place Except you and me.

  Brighton became a cop in 1978, choosing the Mets over the State Police because they allowed him to keep his monthly $681 disability pension from the Marine Corps. Several of Joe McCain's feats were mentioned at the Police Academy, and when the two met by chance a year later, recalls Brighton, “Just the way he said his own name set the tone for his personality. Joe was tough, he was honest, and he had a great knowledge of organized crime.”

  Shaking his head, Brighton says, “He could meet somebody once, just once, say, walking down State Street, and five or six years later he could tell you exactly where he met the guy and what he was doing at the time.”

  When our conversation turns to the night that big Joe got shot, Brighton borrows a pen from the bartender, squares up his place mat, and sketches a diagram of Melvin Lee's kitchen in Hyde Park. The drawing is meticulous and precise; it looks like a geometry equation.

  “I was sitting at the table,” says Brighton, making a little x on the place mat. He stares at it for a moment. “Right here.”

  The room was occupied by Brighton and the three drug suspects and filled with boisterous talk. Melvin Lee wanted Brighton to get him a bartending job up in North Conway, New Hampshire, and Brighton was kidding him about never having skied before. Then, in the space of a minute, Melvin Lee and Tommy Lofgren disappeared upstairs and Vladimir Lafontant retreated into the bathroom off the kitchen.

  Where'd everybody go? Brighton asked himself.

  It didn't take long to find out. Brighton heard a click from somewhere behind him and Lafontant rushed back into the room. The drug dealer circled the table, menacing Brighton with a sawed-off shotgun.

  “Take off your fucking clothes,” said Lafontant.

  When the barrel of the shotgun reached eye level and Brighton could see right into it, he thought, This is it. I'm dead.

  In one movement, Brighton says, he shoved the gun barrel aside and leaped up from the chair while reaching for the .38 tucked into his waistband. But Lafontant kicked him in the balls and snatched his gun away and ran out of the room, down the narrow hallway toward the front door.

  I've been in that house and that hallway, and can picture everything Chris Brighton is saying: the cramped, filthy rooms, the dirty dishes and musky odor; even the sense of desperation oozing from the walls. Poorly lit and badly ventilated, 276 Wood Avenue is the sort of place where evil things are likely to occur— and they did.

  Several gunshots echoed through the house. Brighton crawled over the grimy linoleum, staggered to his feet and jumped out the back door. There was a four-foot drop-off from the porch and he tumbled onto the ground.

  His gun drawn, Mark Cronin ran through the yard and up the back stairs. On his way by, Cronin asked Brighton if he was all right.

  “I'm okay,” he said.

  When Brighton ran around the house, Joe McCain was lying on the sidewalk bleeding, with Al DiSalvo and Biff McLean kneeling over him. Backup was arriving from every direction and there were a lot of revolving lights and sirens.

  “Did we get him?” McCain asked Brighton.

  Brighton looked over toward Lafontant, who was lying dead in the street. “Yeah, Joe,” he said. “We got him.”

  Then the paramedics pushed Brighton away and he walked over to the porch and buried his face in his hands.

  Later, after the investigation was finished, one of the Boston cops who was on the scene gave Chris a memento: the sawed-off Continental shotgun that Lafontant was carrying. He keeps it at home, in the lockbox next to his service revolver.

  * * *

  AROUND THE CORNER FROM WHERE Chris Brighton and I are sitting is a giant concrete structure known as the Fleet Center, where the Celtics and Bruins play their home games. A few years ago, it replaced a much more beloved and significant architectural landmark, the Boston Garden, a dilapidated brick building that contained a dank ice rink and the famous parquet floor.

  Atop the Garden was a huge billboard depicting a fifty-foot animated camel smoking a cigarette. To simulate a burning ember, the tip of the cigarette featured a red lightbulb. You could see it from miles away.

  In that era, Joe McCain and Chris Brighton and Leo Papile and Sergeant Tommy White liked to drink at the 99 restaurant over on Friend Street. When they left the bar in the wee hours of the morning, the quartet would draw their revolvers and take potshots at the giant cigarette until one of them put it out. It was over 200 feet on the wing, in the dark, under the influence.

  Brighton laughs as he tells me this, adding that the outdoor shooting range was all Joe McCain's idea. “He wasn't that bad of a shot,” says Brighton. “He hit it once in a while.”

  Behind us, three college kids are hooting over a Red Sox home run, and the scent of broiling meat wafts out from the kitchen. Chris Brighton did his tour in Vietnam and worked undercover for years, got shot at, blown up, stabbed with a hypodermic needle, and threatened with knives, guns, and baseball bats, all with the insouciance of Dean Martin, a cocktail glass in his hand and a wisecrack on his lips. So what if he hasn't eaten a thing all day and puts away the beer like he expects Prohibition to be reinstated? He's entitled.

  Saying there's a blonde waiting for him down the street, Brighton gets up from his barstool. As he puts on his coat, it occurs to me that I haven't asked him how he really feels about Joe McCain and what happened that night. Anyway, I don't have to. It's all right there, in his eyes.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Big Joe's Last Case

  I've still got a few teeth in my head— and a few friends in town.

  — NOAH CROSS, CHINATOWN

  IN THE FALL OF 2000, MCCAIN INVESTIGATIONS was churning along with a steady flow of business. Most of its employees were in the field and making out reports, permitting the agency to bill a fair number of hours, and more and more big Joe was staying in the office, working the phone in search of new contracts and directing his investigators from behind a desk. Although he downplayed their effects on his habits, the bullet wounds he had suffered nearly thirteen years earlier played a major role in limiting his activity. Compounded by years of physical strain and more than a few sips of hard liquor, brittle diabetes was taking a toll on Joe's legendary constitution. His blood sugar rose and fell precipitously and with little warning; Helen kept a testing kit handy and a notable supply of candy and other sweets.

  Then one day the flamboyant defense attorney J. W. Carney, Jr., called McCain and said he needed him on a big case. In a lurid tale worthy of the supermarket tabloids, James Kartell, a fifty-nine-year-old plastic surgeon, had confronted his estranged wife's lover in her sickroom at Holy Family Hospital in Methuen, Mass., where Dr. Kartell frequently treated patients. The two men quarreled and during what began as a fistfight, Kartell felt himself being overpowered, drew a revolver from the waistband of his trousers and fired two shots at cl
ose range, killing his rival in front of his wife, psychotherapist Dr. Suzan Kamm.

  The Kartell case had already drawn a lot of play in the Boston newspapers, and none of it was helping Jay Carney's client. Dr. Kartell, small, roly-poly, and less than photogenic, stretched the caricature of the arrogant physician to its absolute limit. In possession of Mensa-level intelligence and renowned for his prowess with a scalpel, Kartell had trouble uttering a syllable that did not advertise itself as condescending, and the notion of a fat, dumpy egomaniac shooting an unarmed man in a hospital room was not raising an iota of public sympathy.

  Enter Joe McCain. In this case, McCain's sympathies would appear to lie with the prosecution: what sort of man fires a second shot into another man's skull when his first shot ended their fight, and why the heck is a doctor carrying a gun in the first place? But as McCain often said to Al Seghezzi, the one thing that he'd always been interested in was the truth. Seghezzi and McCain went back to the late fifties, when Al was a sergeant and Joe a patrolman in the Old Colony district and they both worked in the same building. And while Seghezzi was sometimes troubled by the notion that the P.I. firm was “helping the bad guys” by working on behalf of people like Kartell, the retired Met was comforted by McCain's belief that “sometimes we couldn't help the guy— you don't find stuff that isn't there.”

  The day that he was headed to a fact-finding on the Kartell case in Jay Carney's office, big Joe sought out Mark Donahue in his cubicle on Fulton Street. “C'mon. You're gonna work the Kartell case with me,” said McCain.

  Donahue was ecstatic but struggled to maintain the stone-faced professional demeanor he'd been taught. “It was kinda Joe's acknowledgment that I was an adult,” said Donahue, who was thirty-seven at the time. “A real murder case.”

  McCain and Donahue arrived at the Statler Building in downtown Boston and were joined by a ballistics expert, a doctor, another lawyer from Carney's staff, and Carney himself. “This is like stepping up to the plate for your first major league at-bat,” said Donahue.

  The object of the meeting was to arrive at what actually occurred on February 23, 1999, in Room 440 at Holy Family Hospital. Carney explained that James Kartell, plastic surgeon, had been married to Suzan Kamm for thirty-two years and that they had no children, were quite wealthy, and had become estranged. During their separation Dr. Kamm, a moderately attractive woman, had been living with fifty-six-year-old Janos Vajda, a native Hungarian and divorced father of three daughters. The day of the shooting, Dr. Kamm had called her estranged husband to her room, ostensibly to consult with him on her medical condition, which was pneumonia. She had also invited Vajda, a tall, muscularly built man who had once been an Olympic swimmer and still competed at the Master's level.

  Kartell told his wife to ask Vajda to leave the room, since he wanted to discuss her case in private. But Kamm replied that her other visitor was free to stay or leave as he wished. Kartell became agitated and took Vajda by the arm. The larger man resisted, and a fight ensued. Vajda quickly got the better of the doughy Kartell, looming over him, knocking him to the floor, smashing punches into his face at will. Afraid that he was about to lose consciousness, Attorney Carney said, Kartell reached around to his lower back, groping for the concealed .38-caliber revolver that he had a permit for and always carried. He fired two shots, dropping his assailant.

  Next, the ballistics expert explained that such a weapon could not be accidentally discharged. In minute detail, he described the type of gun that Kartell used, its weight, the properties of the bullets, and the grain of the powder, as well as the exact amount of pressure required to pull back the hammer and depress the trigger. Illustrating his presentation with drawings and crime scene photographs that Mark Donahue called “absolutely gross,” the ballistics man depicted the trajectory of the two bullets and estimated the time that elapsed between them.

  “Someone deliberately pulled that trigger,” said Donahue.

  Although some media accounts claimed that the first shot disabled Vajda, and then Kartell, extricating himself, walked around the kneeling victim and delivered the fatal blow, execution-style, to the back of the head, Jay Carney's medical expert stated that “the first shot killed the guy,” according to Donahue. The bullet's path through Vajda's shoulder and down into his chest severed a major artery, causing his heart to fail due to volumic incapacity. When that occurred, “the body's natural response was to drop to its knees,” Donahue said.

  Newspaper photos taken immediately after Vajda's death showed that Kartell had been absorbing a terrific beating when he drew his gun: both eyes were swollen shut, his nose and jaw broken. A substantial number of people believed— and a jury could perhaps be convinced— that Kartell's initial response was in self-defense. Vajda was banging Kartell's head against a very hard floor, and the first shot had put a stop to that unpleasant activity. What the majority couldn't stomach was that Kartell had fired a second round.

  After the doctor finished giving his medical opinion on how Vajda had died, Jay Carney took over the discussion. A colorful, gifted lawyer and veteran of several high-profile defense cases, Carney first set out to establish a reason for Kartell to carry a gun into Holy Family Hospital, which was against their well-established policy. Carney stressed that James Kartell was a gun collector and enthusiast and had never been in trouble with the law. Kartell's father, a New York City judge, had once foiled his own abduction by producing a gun, and Dr. Kartell had lawfully carried one for twenty years. He often performed surgery at Lawrence General Hospital, in a rough inner-city neighborhood, appearing there at all hours to see his patients, and thus had a valid reason to carry a gun, Carney asserted. Ergo, the presence of Vajda in his wife's sickroom had no bearing on the presence of the .38 revolver in the waistband of Dr. Kartell's pants. The gun was always there.

  What most people also didn't realize was that Dr. Kartell was almost legally blind. Early in the fight with his wife's lover, Kartell's glasses were knocked off his face. Just as he was losing consciousness, he reached for the gun and fired it “center mass” on his assailant, by that time an indistinct target. Although Vajda was mortally wounded, his adrenaline and superior fitness allowed him to continue fighting, even as he lurched downward, his weight pinning the much smaller man to the floor. Unable to see, Dr. Kartell remained in fear of his life and fired another round.

  Jay Carney had a brilliant tactic planned for the courtroom. He was having twelve pairs of eyeglasses made up in Dr. Kartell's prescription so that jurors would understand just how poor his vision was, according to Mark Donahue. “The papers would have you believe that Dr. K said ‘Now you're going to get it,' and then shot him deliberately in the back of the head,” said Donahue. But Carney reminded his team that only two people knew what really happened in Room 440 at Holy Family Hospital: Dr. James Kartell and Suzan Kamm. The job of a good defense lawyer was to create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors regarding the scenario that the prosecution would describe.

  Carney acknowledged that his hardest task would be getting the jurors to like Dr. Kartell. A markedly unattractive fellow, Dr. Kartell compounded his first impression on people by talking down his nose at them. His favorite topic was himself, and he went around town and through the hospitals where he operated as if ordinary folks weren't even there. He was wealthy and he was smug, never a good combination for eliciting sympathy. But in the course of their investigation, McCain and Donahue spent a lot of time with Kartell, often meeting him for lunch at Bishop's Restaurant in Lawrence, where the doctor would have at their Middle Eastern cuisine like “a man on his way to the gas chamber,” said Donahue. “Which he was.”

  * * *

  IT CERTAINLY LOOKED LIKE the deep six for Dr. James Kartell. When Jay Carney was through talking that day, Joe McCain asked a lot of questions about the ballistics evidence, the exact cause of death, and so on. The D.A. wanted to portray the case as premeditated murder, and it would be up to Joe McCain to prove that Kartell may have despised Janos
Vajda but he didn't plan on killing him. The list of witnesses included nurses, security guards, nurse's aides, and other patients who had responded to the tumult in Room 440.

  “We have to take every name we have and work it,” McCain said to Donahue.

  The first name on everybody's list was Brian McGovern, twenty-seven-year-old nurse's aide who was purported to have been the first person on the scene, just seconds after the shots were fired. McGovern told police that he ran into the room, grabbed Kartell, shoved him against the wall, and asked, “What kind of man are you?”

  Upon hearing McGovern's account of these events, McCain said, “It doesn't make sense that he ran into the room. Most people run away from a shooting.”

  McCain and Donahue convinced McGovern, after half a dozen attempts, to talk to them. In this instance, McCain was blunt. “Do you think you might have embellished a little?” he asked.

  “Basically, he told us to go shit in our hats,” said Donahue of McGovern.

  McCain was ailing by this time and was often visited by dreams of Vladimir Lafontant, the man he had killed in a gun battle. One day it got to him pretty bad, and Joe walked over to St. Clement's Church, where he found Father Dever alone in the sacristy, laying out his vestments. “Father, I'd like to talk to you,” he said.

  Pastor Dennis A. Dever was roughly the same age as his troubled parishioner, a thin, white-haired man with a raspy voice. “What's bothering you, Joe?” he asked.

  “Well, you see, Father, a few years ago I killed a man . . .”

  The priest nodded his head. “I know, Joe.”

  “Yeah, everyone said he was no good, a Jamaican posse guy, and over the years, Father, I knew the good, the bad, and the ugly, believe me,” said Joe. He wiped his face with a handkerchief and stared off toward the altar.

  Father Dever regarded him with a calm look, and after a moment or two in the great silence of the church, Joe continued: “He shot me, and he shot Paul, and I returned fire, and after I was shot he went out in the street and he died right there, in the street.” He rubbed his chin and worked his lips and then looked up at the priest. “It's just bothering the hell out of me, Father, and I want to confess that part of it, and get it over with.”