Scaling Boston’s blue wall of silence

July 21, 2009|Chuck Leddy, Globe Correspondent

In his riveting bestseller, “Black Mass’’ (coauthored with Gerard O’Neill), former Boston Globe reporter Dick Lehr told the shocking story of how agents inside the FBI protected infamous mobster Whitey Bulger. Now, Lehr chronicles corruption inside the Boston Police Department, focusing on the 1995 beating of African-American officer Mike Cox, who, while working in plainclothes, was pummeled by another officer during Cox’s pursuit of a murder suspect.

Neither the Boston Police Department nor any judicial body charged a single police officer with the brutal assault. As Lehr makes clear, the initial crime of viciously beating a fellow officer was compounded with a second outrage: a massive police coverup. Although several officers were on the scene when Cox was beaten, apparently nobody saw anything, nobody said anything, and nobody asked critical questions to find the truth.

It all began with a gang-related shooting at a late-night burger joint on Dorchester’s Blue Hill Avenue. As shooting victim Lyle Jackson lay dying, four suspects fled in a gold Lexus. Lehr describes in breathtaking detail the massive police chase that ensued. The chase ended when the Lexus drove down a dead end street in Mattapan called Woodruff Way. Mike Cox and his partner were in the lead car pursuing the four suspects. When suspect Robert “Smut’’ Brown jumped out and ran toward a nearby fence, Cox followed.

Suspect Brown hopped a fence and, as Cox began climbing over, he suddenly received a blow to the back of his head. “[T]he second blow then ripped open the right side of Mike’s forehead,’’ writes Lehr, “More blows followed, ferocious blows.’’ Cox never saw his assailant’s face, and officers on the scene remained silent. Regarding the post-incident reports, Lehr pulls no punches, accusing officers of holding “a creative writing seminar’’ and concocting a cover story that Cox had slipped and fallen.

Without police cooperation, the Internal Affairs investigations sputtered, as did state and federal investigations. As Cox dealt with his injuries, which left his speech and memory damaged, his urine dark, and brought regular headaches, only one police officer seemed willing to tell investigators everything he knew. That officer was Kenneth Conley of South Boston, who arrested the suspect Cox had been chasing. Fully focused on apprehending the fleeing suspect, Conley told investigators that he hadn’t witnessed the beating.