Common Ground (94 page)

Soon the Green Store Gang and its allies began stripping vacant apartments in the housing project for ammunition. Two buildings on Polk Street and two more on Bunker Hill Street were virtually gutted—sinks, shower heads, radiators, and toilets, even lath and plaster from the walls were ripped out and heaved at the cops. To many of those who lived in the project there was something fitting in this. The project was government property; busing was government policy; it was only just that one should be used as a weapon against the other.

When they went into the streets, the gang members frequently toted battered hockey sticks, convenient for many purposes. If they set up an ambush, leading a cop into a darkened hallway filled with kids, they could get in a jab with the taped shaft. Or when motorcycle cops gunned their big machines down the street, the kids could leap out and jam their sticks between the spokes of a spinning wheel, flipping the cyclist onto the pavement.

To Tommy and his friends, the police who came rolling up Bunker Hill Street those nights were an alien army of occupation. That was an old Charlestown reflex, rooted in the nineteenth century, when Boston’s police were overwhelmingly Yankee (the city’s first Irish cop, Barney McGinniskin, wasn’t
appointed until 1851 and lasted only three years before the nativist Know-Nothing Party sacked him). Yankee fear of an Irish-dominated police force was so intense that in 1885, when Hugh O’Brien became the city’s first Irish mayor, the state legislature immediately gave the Governor control of Boston’s police, a power the Mayor’s office didn’t retrieve until 1962. The Irish, of course, bristled at such slights, and especially those who had seen a bit of the “troubles” at home were quick to label Boston’s police “the New England Black and Tans.” Even after Irishmen joined the force in numbers, they often encountered resentment in Charlestown, which viewed them as cynical mercenaries, hired guns eager to turn on their own. A special loathing was reserved for the toughest cops, enforcers like the legendary “Dog Face” Jerome.

Eventually, many police assigned to Charlestown accommodated themselves to the Town, and as busing grew nearer, some Townies allowed themselves to believe the police would never enforce Garrity’s dictates. After all, whatever differences they’d had in the past, most cops were Irishmen too, neighborhood guys imbued with the ethos of church, school, and family. These hopes were fanned when, days before the buses were to roll, the delegate body of the Police Patrolmen’s Association resolved that police could refuse superiors’ orders to arrest anti-busing demonstrators. But Garrity quickly summoned the union’s attorney and sternly read him the penalties for such disobedience. A few police stayed home with the “blue flu,” but the law was enforced.

Captain Bill MacDonald, the new District 15 commander, had worked hard the previous summer to establish rapport with Charlestown, but he made his position unmistakably clear: “Whatever any of us may think about busing,” he told a town meeting in late August, “I can assure you, the buses will go through.” Not surprisingly, MacDonald became a target for the demonstrators.

If the youths along Bunker Hill Street disdained the District 15 police, they loathed the TPF. From the start, Boston authorities had recognized that district police were ill qualified to handle violent anti-busing demonstrations. Most policemen were accustomed to operating alone or in pairs, rarely functioning in larger units. But riots could be contained only by coordinated maneuvers, rigorous discipline. Confronted during the mid-sixties with a pronounced increase in civil disorders, many American cities had formed elite riot squads. Boston’s was the Tactical Patrol Force, seventy-five specially trained patrolmen augmented by specialists in the bomb squad and canine and mounted units. The TPF was blooded early in several black riots, scores of anti-war demonstrations, and other radical protests. Between riots, they functioned as decoys and undercover men, cultivating scruffy beards, fierce mustaches, matted hair, and nicknames to match (“Sewer Man,” “Rat Man,” “Frank the Snake,” “Cement Head”). In their jumpsuits, leather jackets, combat boots, helmets, and plastic visors, they were a formidable outfit, bristling with pride and camaraderie.

But nothing in their experience had prepared them for the rigors—psychological as well as physical—of busing duty. They had no misgivings about
doing battle with crazed blacks, foul-mouthed radicals, or long-haired hippies, no reluctance to wade in with truncheons swinging, teaching such people the perils of civil disobedience. But women and children from Southie and Charlestown—that was a different matter. With few exceptions, the members of the TPF were relentlessly anti-busing. Patrolman Robert Hayden spoke for most of his colleagues when, in an “open letter” to the people of South Boston, he discussed his feelings about such demonstrators: “They are fighting what almost everybody knows is a stupid law. I am one of many officers who wish them victory in their fight.”

In deference to that cause, the TPF entered South Boston rather hesitantly at first. “But after the third or fourth rock,” one patrolman explained, “you tend to forget the righteousness of their position.” Relations deteriorated rapidly. The TPF took some of its worst abuse out of the beery taverns along Dorchester Avenue, especially a cramped and flyspecked bar called the Rabbit Inn. On Friday night of Columbus Day weekend in 1974, someone heaved a rock through the windshield of a TPF car parked outside the bar. When a lieutenant and two sergeants captured a suspect, a dozen patrons charged from the Rabbit Inn and assaulted the officers. The next night, the TPF returned en masse and, after removing their badges, went in to even the score. In a matter of minutes they reduced the cigarette machine and jukebox to twisted rubble, demolished several shelves of bottles and glasses, and sent twelve customers to the hospital with assorted head injuries. Henceforth, throughout the resisting white neighborhoods, “Rabbit Inn” was invoked to denounce the TPF as “mad dogs,” “the goon squad,” and “Garrity’s Gestapo.”

Such enmity posed special problems for patrolmen from the affected neighborhoods, forced to confront their own friends and neighbors. When the TPF was summoned into Charlestown on the first day of school in September 1975, a lieutenant approached Gene Simpson, the only Townie in the unit. “Gene,” he suggested, “why don’t you stay down here at the foot of the hill and watch the cars.” It was a tempting offer. Gene hated the idea of marching up Breed’s Hill to impose busing on other Townies. A disaffected Democrat who had voted for both Goldwater and Nixon, he regarded busing as a tragically misconceived policy which could only drive the races further apart. But he was a police officer; he enforced the law. Seven years before, he’d impassively accepted injury from a flying rock in the riots following Martin Luther King’s death. Two years later, on the most memorable day of his life, he’d marched into Harvard Square to confront a bunch of berserk radicals. Surging up the avenue six abreast, the TPF had bellowed “God Bless America,” telling the world how fervently they believed in what they were doing. But Gene knew it couldn’t always be that easy. If you upheld the law against Communists and anarchists, you upheld it as well against God-fearing conservatives. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Lieutenant,” Gene said, “but I think I ought to go up there. I’ve got to face them sometime. It might as well be today.”

The lieutenant agreed and Simpson took up his position in the skirmish line thrown across the top of Concord Street, only six doors from his house.

Among the demonstrators facing him were three women he’d known all his life.

“You’re on the wrong side, Gene!” one of them shouted.

“Traitor!” hissed another.

Flushing red beneath his visor, he stood his ground, hoping the women wouldn’t rush the line.

In the months to come, the same scene was repeated a dozen times, but Gene never grew accustomed to the anger in his neighbors’ eyes. Once as he took a seat at his neighborhood tavern, a guy he’d known for years got up, grumbling, “I don’t drink with the TPF.” Later, his daughter reported that her best friend’s father had forbidden them to play together because Gene was with “that damned bunch of goons.”

Gene could understand why some Townies felt that way. The TPF weren’t like other cops. They didn’t perform routine police tasks such as walking beats, checking locks, making arrests. They were there for only one purpose: to intimidate people. Their very appearance had been carefully calculated to deter opposition: jumpsuits and combat boots reminiscent of the Green Berets, leather jackets and black gloves to hint of a Central European police state. They were trained to inspire dread with Grand Guignol theatrics: rapping their riot batons rhythmically on cars and light poles as they advanced, emitting guttural roars when they charged. Many a demonstrator had thought to himself: Oh my God, these guys are really nuts! And when sheer terror didn’t do the trick, the TPF could swing their clubs with fierce resolve, reinforcing their fearsome reputations.

Alice had been raised to “respect the uniform.” She had real affection for Nick Minichiello and a few other Charlestown detectives who’d kept a stern though kindly eye on her children over the years; she’d developed a sneaking respect for Captain MacDonald, whom she regarded as a tough but dedicated professional; she tolerated the Metropolitan District police, who, when they drew Charlestown busing duty, seemed to resent their distasteful task. But the TPF! They were the only ones who profited from this whole mess, many of them working thirty hours of overtime a week at ten dollars an hour. Alice had heard of one TPFer who built himself a home he called “Phase I,” a boat he called “Phase II.” No wonder they enjoyed their work so much!

On the streets they reminded her of wild animals. One night, as she was coming home from the Powder Keg office, the TPF charged up Bunker Hill Street, enforcing a 10:00 p.m. curfew. Alice ran for home, but two officers of the canine squad cornered her and several other women in a project courtyard. She didn’t know which were more frightening, the German shepherds baring their fangs or the leather-jacketed cops growling obscenities. Even after the women ducked into a friend’s apartment, the TPF kept their dogs at the door, potent reminders of their determination to control the streets.

If there was anyone worse than the TPF, Alice thought, it was the Mobile Operations Patrol, the motorcycle cops often employed, like cavalry, to charge unruly groups. One Saturday night, she was searching for her kids along
Bunker Hill Street when she heard the MOP squad gunning their motors in Hayes Square. First came a single cyclist, moving slowly to make sure the kids hadn’t strung chicken wire across the roadway. Then a wedge of eight cycles swept up the street and through the protesting crowd. Watching from the sidewalk, Alice thought: It’s as if we’re Jews in the ghetto waiting for the storm troopers. All of a sudden, she couldn’t stand there any longer, silently witnessing the violation of her town. Leveling her finger at the advancing motorcycles, she shouted, “Here come the Nazis! Here come the Gestapo! Heil Hitler!” At that, a helmeted cyclist veered from his course, jumped the curb, and came jouncing along the sidewalk toward her. She fled, but the cyclist pursued relentlessly, shouting as he came, “Garrity’s whore! Get home, you goddamned trash! You’re nothing but a white nigger!” Shaking with fear and rage, Alice finally took refuge in the Red Store.

Through the winter of 1975, the TPF—and, by extension, the MOP squad—became Charlestown’s principal grievance. “The most brutal men I’ve ever seen,” Pat Russell called them. “We’ve had it with the TPF. We want them out of our town.” An ad hoc panel of community leaders denounced “excessive police presence and, in several instances, an overreaction on the part of the TPF. The TPF should be removed from Charlestown or, at least, held in reserve to be used only as a last resort.”

But the TPF was already just that—a last resort, called into emergencies where ordinary police methods would not suffice. To those responsible for maintaining order, Charlestown that year seemed a permanent emergency, one which required extreme measures. The Town’s protests were brusquely rejected, and the TPF’s banshee yell went on echoing along Bunker Hill Street.

Feeling manhandled by the police, misused by City Hall, and oppressed by the courts, Charlestown now fell back on the process which in years past had often produced a redress of its grievances: an appeal to its United States congressman. Few American communities could boast the formidable array which had represented the Eleventh (now the Eighth) Congressional District—among them John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, James Michael Curley, John F. Kennedy, and Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill. Each was a Democratic sachem known for his savvy, clout, and capacity to collect and dispense favors. And none of them practiced the fine art of political
quid pro quo
more skillfully than the incumbent, the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill.

For years, O’Neill had been widely regarded as just another Kennedy retainer. When John Kennedy advanced to the Senate in 1952, he helped to ensure that Tip, then Speaker of the Massachusetts House, would inherit his congressional seat, and O’Neill returned the favor by rallying House Democrats and big-city Catholics behind Jack’s presidential campaign. Once Kennedy was in the White House, O’Neill faithfully supported his legislative program.

But theirs was never more than a marriage of convenience, for they had utterly different political styles. Raised in New York, accustomed to the
cosmopolitan good life, Jack Kennedy early set his sights on a national constituency, assiduously avoiding entanglements with most Massachusetts politicians, for whom he harbored an undisguised contempt.

O’Neill was dedicated to the opposite proposition: “All politics is local.” His was the ethos of the Corner—Barry’s Corner on Rindge Avenue in heavily Irish North Cambridge, where he hung out from adolescence through early manhood with guys named Beefstew McDonough and Blubber Sheehan. That clapboard hutch served successively as a grocery, barbershop, pool hall, and eventually as a clubhouse called the Stumble Inn. For years, its worn wooden steps were the center of Tip’s existence—a place to lounge on a hot summer’s day gulping 3.2 beer; a table on which to play nickel-ante poker; ultimately a recruiting ground for his political organization. Long after he went to Congress, he remained deeply involved with Barry’s Corner and the network it spawned. He was fond of quoting another political canon, attributed to Boston’s celebrated boss Martin Lomasney: “The politician who thinks he can get away from the people who made him usually gets what is coming to him: a swift kick in his political pants.”