As I started to consider the alternatives to baseball, I returned to my dorm from practice one afternoon in late October 1977 and received a message to call my brother. He informed me that Dad had suffered a major heart attack and died. It happened six months after his retirement from the Haverhill police force at age fifty-four.
Angrily, I smashed my hand into the wall. I was nineteen years old and suddenly without a father. I had no trust fund to fall back on, or wealthy relatives to help me out. I said to myself: You’re a big boy now. Rub some dirt on it and figure things out.
Like most people, Dad had his good side and his bad. When he drank, he could be an abusive monster. But when sober, he was fun to be around and fatherly. It was a puzzling contradiction that I vowed I would never put my own family through, if I had one. God rest Dad’s troubled soul.
Other cops in town had a code of taking care of their own and rallied around our family. Soon after my father’s funeral, I remembered that my college offered a six-week work-study program during winter session for anyone interested in learning a profession. I asked one of the Haverhill cops if there was any way I could do an internship with them.
They graciously arranged a program that allowed me to remain in Haverhill over winter break. And they treated me like family, picking me up from our house at the beginning of their shift and returning me at the end. At first, I had to remain in the backseat when they responded to calls. But eventually they let me out to observe everything they did, and took the time to explain what, why, and how they were responding to particular situations.
Having grown up around cops, and accompanying Dad as he walked his beat starting when I was eight years old, I assumed I knew what cops did. Now a behavioral science major in college, I developed a real appreciation of the psychological complexities and nuances of police work. It wasn’t just about knocking heads and keeping people in line. The cops I rode with spent most of their time dealing with the rejects of society—the mentally unstable, drunks, drug addicts, and homeless. And some of the officers I observed were among the most compassionate souls I’d ever met, giving people money out of their pockets and trying to help them out.
Also, I was shocked at the venom directed toward the police when they entered certain neighborhoods, and the restraint and good humor they showed when dealing with uncooperative people. I concluded that police work wasn’t for the faint of heart. It was a nasty, difficult, thankless job, and I was hooked.
Junior year, when I returned to Rollins, I quit baseball to concentrate on my studies. My baseball coach, the infamous Boyd Coffie, bless his heart, arranged things at school so that I could keep my scholarship. Now focused on preparing for a career in law enforcement, I stopped acting like an immature idiot, buckled down, and started earning As.
It wasn’t the major league dream I had imagined as a kid growing up in Haverhill. And it was a far grittier career than most kids pursued at prestigious Rollins College. But it was a future that intrigued me.
Like Dad used to say: Rub some dirt on it.
I did.
3
POLICE WORK
After graduating from Rollins College in 1979, I returned to my home state of Massachusetts with the expectation of quickly getting a job on a local police force. Actually securing one turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.
Since Massachusetts was (and continues to be) a civil service state, all applicants for public service jobs have to take an exam. I scored in the ninety-ninth percentile, whereupon I was placed on a waiting list. Although I had a high score, there were two things working against me. First, military veterans who applied for public service jobs were given preference. Since it was ’79 and the Vietnam War had ended four years earlier, there were a large number of vets who wanted to get into law enforcement—all of who were placed ahead of me on the list.
Second, the city of Boston had recently enacted a consent decree, which determined that for every Caucasian hired for a city job, they had to hire a minority applicant.
* * *
I stuck around Massachusetts for a while, doing odd jobs, and hoping to get called. After a year, I started looking for police work in other states.
It was during this time that I met my future wife, Sam, who was working her way through college as a bartender in Boston. After a year of me trying and failing miserably, she finally agreed to go out with me. For our first date, she didn’t show up and later claimed she had “forgotten.” I think she also mentioned the word “stalking” once or twice.
Most guys would have given up. But I persisted, and once we started dating, we quickly fell deeply in love with one another. Then, I was offered a job with a police department in Florida.
I was torn—excited to get started in police work, but unhappy to leave the woman I was planning to marry. Soon after I arrived in Florida, I ran into two other complications. One, I had a problem with my retina that had gone undetected and needed to be corrected with medication. And, two, unexpected family problems made it necessary that I live closer to Boston.
I was starting to wonder if I’d ever become a cop. Determined to be with Sam and land a police job, I kept searching and finally found one with the Burlington, Vermont, PD and received my badge on September 23, 1983.
Three months later, Sam and I were married in a small family wedding in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. With no money or time for a honeymoon, we moved into a tiny apartment in downtown Burlington. Sam found a job bartending and I started probationary field training with the Burlington PD.
Burlington in the early 1980s was a city in transition with an energetic young socialist mayor named Bernie Sanders. Sandwiched between the Green Mountains and Lake Champlain, Vermont’s capital had once been the third largest lumber port in the nation. In the early twentieth century, it transitioned into a fuel depot for oil and gas shipped throughout New England. When I arrived in ’83, the lakefront was badly polluted, the rail lines and oil storage facilities unused and rusting, and the city of fifty thousand was in decline.
In many ways, Burlington reminded me a lot of Haverhill and its population was a similar mix of blue-collar workers, the elderly, young professionals, and college students. The city’s two largest employers were General Electric and the University of Vermont.
Sam and I were poor, but happy. While we were dating she told me she had a medical condition that made it impossible for her to have children. Six months after we moved to Burlington, Sam found out she was pregnant. We were ecstatic.
Meanwhile, I was a probationary rookie learning the ropes of being a cop. First thing I realized was that the dynamics of police interaction with the public is complicated. It’s not like being a fireman, who is applauded when he or she arrives to rescue people, and save property. As a cop 80–90 percent of your contact with people is negative. You’re called when someone has been assaulted, robbed, raped, or killed.
Because Burlington was predominantly a blue-collar town, we faced a constant stream of drunken-and-disorderlies, sexual assaults, stabbings, and incidents of domestic violence. On a daily basis, I was dealing with abused children, violent criminals, and the mentally disturbed, and dealing with things that most people in society never had to face.
My Field Training Officers (FTOs) taught me the critical requirement of a successful career in law enforcement—a sense of humor. Both of them had me laughing my ass off at the strange and crazy shit we saw every day.
Where they differed was in their approach to police work. My first FTO was a tough New Yorker, who locked everyone up and sorted out their stories later. The second, Hugh Edwards, aka “the Chaplain,” had been an Army chaplain in Vietnam. His way of dealing with people was firm but compassionate. I adopted his methodology.
He taught me to be proactive and always be on the lookout for “bad guys” with outstanding arrest warrants, and to stop suspicious-looking cars. As we patrolled the downtown streets, the Chaplain would turn to me and ask, “Who’s the guy in the plaid pants? Who’s
that guy drinking beer on the corner?”
Some days at the end of my shift my neck was tired from swiveling so much. The Chaplain would say, “The trick is to sniff out trouble before it happens.”
His touch was deft. If we pulled up to a street corner where a group of questionable characters were hanging out, he’d roll down his window, and say, “We’re watching you, gentlemen. Behave.”
Then, he’d wink at one of them and ask, “Hey, Bobby, how’s your mom doing? Next time you visit her in the hospital give her my best.”
At the time Burlington was experiencing an epidemic of smashed windows and radios stolen from cars. My own Golf VW had been victimized, so I knew how it felt. We were aware that a particular gang was responsible for a lot of the break-ins and included a kid named Barry Glenn.
If we saw him outside his neighborhood, we figured there was a 98 percent chance he was committing a crime. So we’d bumper-lock him, which meant following him in our patrol car at five miles per hour, or getting out and walking beside him.
Sample conversation:
“Hey, Barry, you lost?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“That’s no way to talk to a friend who is offering you a ride home.”
“Yeah, right.… Feels more like you’re threatening me.”
“No, Barry why would you say that? We’re offering to take you into custody now for something you’re going to do later.”
“Very funny.”
We would ride his ass until he got so frustrated he went home.
After four months, I was assigned to a patrol car by myself. I quickly learned that the way to earn the respect of your fellow officers was to get to police distress calls in a hurry and call for backup only when absolutely needed.
The Chaplain had told me, “Don’t be one of those cops who sits in the station talking shit. You shouldn’t be in there for more than five minutes. Put on your uniform and get to work. There’s no crime going on in the station house.”
First thing I did was learn the city inside out. It was important to know how to quickly get into a particular area, and the best way to exit in an emergency. If I was patrolling six blocks of a high-crime sector downtown, I had to memorize every store, house, and apartment building.
I quickly realized that no matter how hard I worked, I was merely sticking my finger in the dike of crime. We averaged twenty to twenty-five calls for a ten-hour shift. If I answered a domestic call, I might be two sentences into writing a report when I’d get another call and have to rush off. If my calls backed up, my bosses would get on my ass.
I saw both horrible things and people at their finest. The biggest challenge was keeping up with the paperwork. It soon became obvious that given the pace and the physical nature of some aspects of the job, police work was a young man’s game. No way I wanted to be an out-of-shape fifty-year-old officer climbing a fence chasing a suspect.
We did ten-hour shifts in fours and threes. That meant four days of ten hours each to make up a forty-hour workweek, and three days off. Most of us spent some of those three days off working special details to earn overtime, either directing traffic or looking for drunk drivers.
Our son Russell was born in February 1985, a healthy, cherubic boy who immediately became the center of our lives. Months before, shortly into a night shift, I had received a medical assist call from a nice residential neighborhood. Code 3 meant hurry to the scene with lights and siren. Code 1 was normal patrol. Since the dispatcher hadn’t communicated a code, I drove to the scene at a leisurely pace.
On a medical assist, the fire department usually responded first, and we’d show up later. As I entered the neighborhood, I heard a call go out to the fire department. This time the dispatcher called it a Code 3. So I flipped on the siren and hit the gas, and arrived before the fire department and EMTs.
When I pulled up to the house, I saw that the front door was open and there was a woman standing in it screaming and waving her arms in distress.
I hurried up to her and asked, “What’s the problem, ma’am?”
“My … oh my God.… Help! My … my baby…! Oh, God.…” She was so upset, she was choking on the words.
I tried to get her to calm down, and tell me what was wrong, but she remained hysterical so I decided to search the house on my own.
The woman offered no resistance. What I saw when I entered was a nice starter home with everything in order.
“My baby!” the woman screamed behind me.
I got it. I was searching for a baby. I poked my head in a room toward the rear of the house and saw two cribs. There were infants in both of them of the same approximate age. One was moving around and acting like a normal baby. The second, who appeared to be a twin, lay still and was a shade of purple I’d never seen before.
My first thought was: Oh, shit.…
I reached down to find a pulse and the infant’s skin felt like cold porcelain. A shiver went up my spine. I’d been a cop for less than two years at this point, and had never been on a call like this. The fire department and EMTs still hadn’t arrived.
What do I do now?
As the mother appeared in the doorway behind me, screaming about trying to contact her husband at work, I scooped up the stricken infant in my hand. I remembered from the basic medical training I had learned at the police academy that when you do CPR on an infant you can’t breathe in too hard or you risk bursting their delicate lungs.
So I started breathing into the baby’s little mouth in gentle puffs. The mother continued to scream uncontrollably. It seemed as if the baby was responding, but I wasn’t sure.
A hundred thoughts careened through my head as I puffed into the infant’s mouth again. Then I remembered that there was a hospital emergency room four miles away. The medical personnel there would be better equipped to deal with the situation than me.
I ran past the mother with the baby in my arms and said, “I’m taking him to the hospital. Fletcher Allen, ma’am. I’ll get back to you later.”
She offered no resistance. I climbed behind the wheel with the baby in one hand, fired up the engine and siren with the other, and took off like a rocket. It was raining cats and dogs outside and the streets were slick. I said to myself, Don’t get into an accident and kill us both.
As I steered through wet suburban streets, I tried massaging the infant’s heart with my thumb. They were the longest four miles of my life.
Finally, I pulled to the curb and ran with the baby into the ER. Breathless, I handed him to a nurse. From the expression on her face and those of the other two hospital technicians standing with her, I could tell that the baby was lost.
Still clinging to the last vestiges of hope, I followed them down a corridor as they ran with it to an examination room. As I watched them massage the baby’s heart, the enormity of what I was doing for a living hit me. Here was this wonderful family. It had been a normal night when they put their baby down to sleep. Then the unthinkable happened, and they were forced to rely on someone like me.
Somewhere amid the melee and shifting emotions, the mother and father arrived at the hospital, the infant was declared dead, and I had to inform them. My hands shook the whole time and I had to hold back the tears. The official cause of death was Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
After a few hours’ sleep, I returned to work. The first thing my supervisor said when he saw me was, “Where’s your paperwork on the medical assist call last night? You didn’t submit a report.”
As I typed it up, I relived every second of the experience—the mother’s screams, the baby’s ice-cold skin, the disappointment I had felt in not saving the baby.
I was in my midtwenties and a relative kid. Nobody counseled me or talked to me about the incident or the impact it had on me. It was part of the job, and taught me two things: One, always be prepared to the max, particularly when it comes to providing emergency medical assistance. And, two, life is precious!
For many years, the family who lo
st the baby sent me a Christmas card. Every time I opened one and saw a picture of the wife and husband with their son, along with their names and the name of the son who died, my heart broke again.
Less than a year after that incident, I’d become an FTO, too. Looking at the new recruits assigned to me, I’d think: That was me a little while ago. Remember how scared and unsure you were, and how you couldn’t really appreciate the responsibilities that come with the job?
I tried to be both firm and sympathetic. Not like one FTO I knew who threw a trainee out of his car in a McDonald’s parking lot and shouted, “You’ll never be a cop, so go fill out an application,” and then drove off.
I had mostly good trainees and a few who struggled. Winter of ’85, I was training a kid named Morgan, who fell into the latter category. Guys at the precinct house constantly busted his balls about his name. “Hey, Morgan, how come you got a name that goes both ways. You trying to tell us something?”
He was earnest and kind with a master’s degree in criminology. When we went on calls together, I talked to him about the importance of establishing control. I explained that as kids we’re taught to be polite to strangers, but police work required something called “command presence.”
For example, if you got a call to respond to a disturbance at a drunk’s house and walked in and saw he had a beer in his hand, you didn’t say, “Sir, please put that beer away so we can talk.” Instead, you delivered something blunter and more direct like, “Put that beer bottle away before I knock it out of your fucking hand. Then tell me calmly what the hell is going on.”
I said to Morgan, “When you walk into someone’s house you’ve got to establish control in your own way.”
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