The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (7 page)

At the corner of Arcadia Street was a beautiful red brick structure dating back to the turn of the century that held both Boston Police District 11 and a branch of the Boston Public Library. I knew my way to the library like a homing pigeon.

I could get lost in books for hours. I found a series of seven or eight Civil War novels designed for kids, no pictures, and I whipped through them. I was only sorry that there weren't more. When I was about eleven years old, I found one of the most influential books in my life on the shelf.

It was called
Your Police
, and it was a child's history of the New York Police Department. I couldn't read it often enough. It was a picture book, published in 1956, with photographs of the NYPD motorcycles, police
cars, emergency trucks, helicopters, the equipment a police officer carried, the phone boxes, all the details and minutiae that you could want to know about a police department, everything I'd put onto my figurines. I was completely fascinated. I took that book out of the library regularly for years. Sometimes I would just go there and read it over and over.

I always wanted to be a police officer. I didn't know any police officers, no one in the family was a police officer—I just always wanted to be one. The influences were mostly from television and the movies,
Badge 714
and
Dragnet.
I watched
Dragnet
on TV every week, and when the movie came out, I saw it with my dad. I still remember the opening: A guy gets killed with a shotgun, and the detectives come to the scene to check the body out. Those shows and
Your Police
captured my imagination.

It also helped that the library shared the building with Police District 11. Sometimes I went outside, stood on the corner, and watched the cops file out for four o'clock roll call.

The officers marched out of the station two by two and piled into open-back blue paddy wagons to be delivered to their walking posts. The wagons had no rear doors, and you could see all these uniformed cops packed inside. The few police cars were all two-toned, gray top and blue bottom. The cops had gray shirts. I sat there and watched as they drove away.

But as often as I watched this daily parade, I never got up the nerve to walk inside. Some curious kids wander into firehouses; I think I was too much in awe to do anything but look.

Finally, I got my chance.

I don't know why my father had to go to the police station—maybe he needed a report for insurance or a claim number—but when he asked if I wanted to come with him I jumped.

We were going in.

My father ambled to the big desk on the left-hand side of the room. “What do you want?” the cop behind it asked. My father told him, and I just stood there and gaped. One of the cops must have noticed my fascination.

“You ever been in here before?” He was looking down at me from some height.

“No, sir.”

“Like to take a look around?”

“Yes, sir!”

He took me downstairs to the basement, to the cell block. Iron bars,
cold cement floors, the whole place painted flat gray, the clanging of everything in the room—I was in another world. There were no prisoners down there that day, but the place had its own particular odor.

It smelled of urine.

Cell blocks all smell that way. The waste sits there until someone comes to flush it down. The place smelled of unwashed human funk, deep, unavoidable, foul. It's one of those smells that stays with you. A cop can walk in blindfolded and know, yup, I'm in a cell block.

“You got to stay out of trouble,” the uniformed officer told me, “or this is where we'll put you.” He didn't seem to be joking.

Then, he took me upstairs to the detective room. I remember cigars and big hats. Detectives in those days were known as the Big Hats because they all wore fedoras. The building had been built in 1890, and seventy years of stale smoke had built up in the room—you felt it in your chest when you came in. The walls were green and peeling. Four men were lounging behind old oak desks. Irish faces. I couldn't place it, but there was something unfriendly about these guys. They didn't react to a kid, and they didn't interact with the uniformed cop. We were out of there pretty quickly.

After my father's business was finished, we walked home. I was thrilled that I had gotten inside. The only exposure we had to police, the only time they arrived at the house, was every few years when they came around to take the census. In Boston in the fifties, hundreds of cops were assigned to go door to door and fill out census cards. Sometimes, they'd show up to verify and validate voter registration.

There just wasn't any crime to speak of in our neighborhood. Maybe now and again something was broken into or vandalized, but I don't remember anyone's car ever being stolen, and my group of kids certainly wasn't the kind to give them any trouble.

When we got to an age where we had begun to earn some money doing odd jobs or were being given our first small allowances, the kids on the corner started playing cards and gambling—seven-card draw and five-card stud poker with our pennies and nickels and dimes, all the time and into the night. Once, we had a card game going, and from working and my allowance and my winnings I amassed the considerable sum of one dollar and sixty cents. My sister's friend Ann Marie Anderson had a penny. She was a tall blonde girl, kind of gangly, and she sat in with a bunch of us. I was going to win that penny.

She won the first pot, and now she had a nickel. She won the next one.

And the next. I got in deeper and deeper. Eventually, she won my entire buck-sixty. Taught me a lesson. I lost everything trying to win a penny.

I remember sitting under the new electric light pole on another evening, four or five of us in the game, and I thought I had been treated unfairly, cheated. I stood up and started swearing a blue streak. It was the thing to do at the time, to use rough language, and I was just getting good at it.

Our apartment was on the second floor, and it looked directly over the corner. It was springtime and my mother was sitting by the window, taking in the breeze, looking out at the night. Next thing I knew, she came charging down the stairs, grabbed me by the ear and dragged me into the house.

“I don't ever want to hear you use that language again!” she yelled at me. My friends were all watching. She gave me a few whacks and kicked me upstairs. That nipped it in the bud. I would use certain words for emphasis, but I seldom truly swore from that time on.

While I could be completely happy sitting in my room and reading, I definitely liked getting attention. I was in my glory in sixth grade when they made me school crossing guard and gave me a white strap to wear across my chest (I always kept it spotless) and a shiny silver badge. My post was the corner of East Street and Adams, and I would stand there with my book bag and my metal lunch box—Hopalong Cassidy, Wild Bill Hickok, Zorro, Davy Crockett, whoever was the latest craze—and I would stop traffic and cross the kids from one side of the street to the other. Everybody stayed between the white lines while I was on duty. Maybe I took it a little too seriously; a gang of girls used to chase me home at the end of the day.

That year, I really started to shine. If there was a center stage, I sought it. When I brought my clay figures into school and talked about my hobbies, the teacher was so impressed she sent me to see the principal, who assigned me to be master of ceremonies for our celebration of Flag Day. I stood in the auditorium in front of the whole school in my Boy Scout shirt (we didn't have enough money to buy the pants) and my good school trousers, which always seemed to be too short. I graduated with honors and passed the exams to get into the most prestigious public school in the city, Boston Latin.

The best part of Boston Latin was getting there. I walked up Meeting House Hill and then down to Kane Square, and every day I passed the same police officer at the same crossing. His car was always parked in exactly
the same spot and was one of the first I'd seen with the new-style rotating gumball-machine light, so that fascinated me. Every morning, this red-faced Irish cop with a cigar in his mouth had the police radio running through his loudspeaker so he could hear his calls while he was on his post. I'd hear the crackle as I crossed the street. I never talked to him.

Kane Square was a turnaround for the trackless trolley. I got on and rode through Upham's Corner and into Roxbury, the all-black neighborhood of Boston, to Dudley Street station, a big hub of trolleys, trains, and buses. At Dudley Street, I fought a thousand other kids to get onto rickety old Mack buses, the oldest and most dilapidated in the fleet. Those buses were already riding on their rims and were serving their final days jam-packed, creaking, and chugging up and down hills, shuttling schoolkids to Boston Latin and to English High School. English was for rough-and-tumble types, dead-end kids; Boston Latin was for us smart guys, and those rides were filled with hard rivalries.

You had to study hard at Boston Latin. I was used to getting good grades and not putting in much effort, but that didn't work here. I did okay in most classes, but I found I had absolutely no proficiency with foreign languages, particularly Latin, which was a requirement. I just could not pick up the language, and in eighth grade I flunked out.

It was humiliating. I had been the boy wonder, off to conquer the world, and now I was back at Grover Cleveland Junior High School with the rest of the kids from the corner. The only saving grace was that Boston Latin had been all boys but Grover Cleveland was coed. Having girls in class was a big improvement.

Not that I was a great success with the girls. I spent one full school year pining for Camille Grasso. Camille was a pretty girl who lived around the corner, and I passed her house every day. I'd see her and never know what to say. I never got up anywhere near the nerve to ask her out.

In ninth grade, I passed the exams and got into Boston Technical High School. Boston Tech was so named because it was a multiple-career-path school. You could graduate with technical engineering and shop skills, or you could take an academic curriculum with machine shop and engineering on the side. I chose academics.

Boston Tech was in Roxbury, and this was my first significant exposure to black people, or Negroes as we called them in those days. I had seen blacks on my train expeditions with Franny McNulty and out the window on the trolley to Boston Latin, but if a black person walked past our corner in Dorchester, all of us really took note. We didn't see black people
often because there were no black residents in the neighborhood and little-to-no work for outsiders.

Boston Tech was about 10 percent black, and while there were tensions and a growing awareness of race conflicts—this was 1962 to 1965, a volatile time in race relations—by and large we all got along pretty well.

Race was never really an issue for me. While I was not one of the white kids who hung out with a black crowd, I had enough black friends to the point that it didn't make a difference. A lot of the people I grew up with didn't have the opportunity to interact with blacks, which sometimes led to unfortunate generalizations and misunderstandings. I didn't think of it at the time, but going to high school in the middle of Roxbury turned out to be a positive influence.

On occasion, I walked home from school, about a mile total. It was a distressed area, and I did feel uncomfortable—even in those days Roxbury was a high-crime neighborhood—but I never had an incident. Mostly, I looked forward to passing the Drake's Devil Dog factory and smelling the sweet little chocolate cakes. From there I'd pass the famous Kasonoff Bakery and breathe in the rye bread. It was a tantalizing walk home.

We were Catholics, but not very observant, my father more involved in religion than my mother. I had a brother who died shortly after birth, and although they never discussed it with me, I always had the feeling his death might have distanced them from the church. We went to church for the holidays, but other than that my mother almost never went, except for weddings. At the post office where my father worked, there was a chapel where a fifteen-minute quickie service was performed each Sunday without a sermon, so he tried to get there. After I made my first communion and got confirmed, my parents left the decision whether to continue to go to Sunday school up to me. I had no interest, and I stopped going.

So one day here comes Father Carney up the front stairs.

Father Carney was a young priest, kind of a Bing Crosby type, popular with the kids, the sort who was put in charge of the Little League. I answered the door when he knocked. I hadn't seen him in a while.

“Hello, Billy. I'd like to see your father.”

My dad was in the living room, reading. He didn't invite Carney in; he left the good father standing in the hall. Not to invite a priest into your home was unusual in our neighborhood. If we went to Mass, we'd hear buzzing in the pews about that one.

“You son's not been attending our Sunday school courses,” Father Carney told him.

“Well, Father,” said my dad, “I told him once he got confirmed that it would be his choice to go or not, and I guess he's made it.”

“You know, it's your obligation as a Catholic father to make sure your son is all right in the eyes of the Lord. Our courses …”

“There's nothing wrong with my son.”

They went at it pretty good. My father had made a commitment to me, I was old enough to make my own decisions, and no matter how the priest invoked the Lord and Scriptures, my dad was never one to bend to unreasonable authority. Father Carney never got his foot in our door, and I never set foot in Sunday school again.

Very early one hot and quiet summer Sunday morning when I was about fifteen, my father took me out in the car to teach me to drive. I didn't have a learner's permit, so I guess he was at some risk on his insurance, but he put me behind the wheel and off we went. There was not much traffic in Dorchester on Sundays.

We drove by the corner of Morrissey Boulevard and Freeport Street with the windows rolled down, and there was a cop at a call box, swearing a blue streak. Every other word out of his mouth was fing this and fing that, so routinely. It rubbed me the wrong way. For some reason, that stuck with me.