chapter 6

JOHN

THE second time I regained consciousness, I was looking at an aluminum ceiling with thousands of tiny holes in it. I knew I’d been shot and I’d had surgery. I didn’t know what day it was. I couldn’t figure out why my stomach hurt so badly. Slowly I began tracing where the lines went from all the bottles and bags hanging around the bed. A few of them were smaller tubes—IVs with blood, water, meds. I found a big tube, about a half-inch in diameter, that went under the sheet. It looked like it had milk in it.

I inched the sheet down and saw that this tube ran into my stomach. I realized that they had inserted this tube to feed me since I had no mouth to eat with. A machine rumbling next to the bed was connected to hoses attached to my trachea tube—it was mixing the right amount of H₂O vapor with the air I was breathing.

Polly was there and gave me a kiss on my forehead and welcomed me back into the land of the living. She held a pad of paper for me so I could write her a note. With all the needles and tape in my hand, it hurt to hold a pen, and my writing was shaky. I wrote that my stomach incision hurt, and that my throat where the trachea went in was burning. Polly, with her own nursing training, quickly figured out that the stuff the nurses were using to clean my incisions didn’t agree with me—she guessed I was probably allergic to it. Polly said she would make them use something else.

She told me that two MDC officers who were formerly on the Falmouth PD responded to Mass General the night before—Paul Stone and Mitch Morgan—and they stayed through the night so Craig could go home. Two officers would be stationed outside my hospital room around the clock. “Don’t worry about anything, it’s all taken care of,” she said. She also told me that Joe had picked up the kids, and that they were safe at his house; that my parents were here too. That I should rest. And I did.

She didn’t tell me what the doctors had said to her about my prognosis. That I might never talk again due to the damage to my larynx. That I would never be able to eat food, smell, or breathe through my mouth or nose. That I would probably need a permanent trachea tube.

When I opened my eyes again, it was another day. Sunday. The doctors needed me to do a breathing exercise, to cough through the trachea hole in my throat. Polly explained that I needed to do this to clear the airway, keep my lungs clear, especially since I was immobile. But the coughing raised holy hell with the stomach incision. I found that by holding a pillow down hard against my abdomen, I could cough without pushing at the incision.

Next time I was conscious, Joe and his wife, Kate, were in the room. Kate was a surgical nurse at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston. “He’s reached the maximum swelling now,” she said, looking at what was left of my face. “Now it will start to go down and we’ll see what we have here.”

Polly joked that with my face so swollen and distorted, I looked like Chip and Dale, the cartoon chipmunks. I was glad to hear a joke, see a smile. Maybe things weren’t so bad after all. I had drainage tubes inserted in my face that the nurses changed every so often, and when they did, they kept shooting heparin into an IV lock, which I could taste. Polly and Kate explained that this was to keep the IV locks open so they wouldn’t clot and need to be changed, which would be extremely painful.

Even with people in the room whom I wanted to see, I got tired quickly and drifted in and out of consciousness. I hurt all over, but my face was the worst. The bone pain was excruciating—my jawbone had been pulverized, and there are so many nerves in the face, sometimes it just felt like I was on fire. I was on an IV of Demerol, a strong narcotic, for the pain, but the medication wore off every four hours. When the nurses came to inject more Demerol, it would take about fifteen minutes to start working. I would break out into a cold sweat, followed by a warm tingling sensation all over. Then the pain would slip away, but so would I. I wasn’t sure what was really happening and what I was imagining.

A doctor came in to see me from the Harvard Maxillofacial clinic—Dr. David Keith. He had headed up the medical team that did my emergency surgery, but this was my first time meeting him. He told Polly that they needed to remove the metal from my nose and face—metal not from the bullets, but from the car’s roof. When the bullets went through the car’s frame, they were carrying some fragments that got embedded in my face.

So the next time I was awake, I was being wheeled to the Harvard Maxillofacial Unit at Mass General. Maybe they thought that since I was already on so many heavy painkillers, they didn’t need to use a local anesthesia for the procedure (and here’s when not having a mouth can be a real problem). As they started slicing into my nose and upper cheek to remove the pieces of metal, I could feel everything, but I had no way to tell them. I didn’t want to motion too much because they had a scalpel next to my face. So I just waited for it to be over. And besides, everything else hurt so much that on a scale of one to ten, this felt like a three. They stitched me up and sent me back to my room.

Afterward, Dr. Keith had some good news for Polly—that maybe it wasn’t as bad as the other oral surgeons thought. “He’s lost a lot of blood, and his body needs to recover from the trauma, but he will recover,” Dr. Keith told her. He also said that he wanted to take on my case, and that he believed he could reconstruct my face with some other surgeons from Harvard Medical. He even thought that I would be able to talk and eat and breathe again. But, he warned her, it would take years of surgery and need to be done in steps. Polly was so happy to hear that I might have some semblance of a normal life that she didn’t care about the timeline. I was only thirty-six, what was a few years?

When I was wheeled back to my room after the surgery to remove the metal fragments, there was a visitor waiting for me. Sergeant Don Price. He was the first cop I rode with when I started on the Falmouth Police Department and a good friend.

Don was a spic-and-span, spit-and-polish officer. His voice was deep and gravelly and reminded me of James Coburn’s, an actor who was popular at the time. He was a little over six feet tall, two hundred pounds or so. He’d been on the force almost ten years when I met him and was studying to be a sergeant. We were assigned to the same cruiser, the so-called party car.

Falmouth was a beautiful town, on the tip of Cape Cod—long sandy beaches; a warm, calm oceanfront; great weather; lots of nice places to eat and drink. In the summer, when the weather was good, our shore town drew all types of tourists: kids on break from college, rich folks from Boston, New York, New England. And, on occasion, some not so lovely folks from South Boston, looking to party and have fun. The town had passed a noise ordinance designed to keep those summer celebrations from getting out of control and to keep Falmouth from getting a reputation as a party town. The ordinance stated that any noise emitted from a dwelling or property that was harsh and/or objectionable at a distance of one hundred feet was in violation of the bylaw. Hence the “party” car—an unmarked Ford we used to roll around town and check out noise complaints.

The first night I met Don was in early July 1970, a few days before the Fourth—a major party week on the Cape. College-aged kids by the thousands would be pouring onto the beach for a good time. And youthful exuberance being what it is, we were going to be busy.

Polly and I hadn’t even bought our house on the Cape yet. I had been on duty only a few days or so. It was just starting to dawn on me how precarious my position as a cop was. I didn’t know how to do the job, couldn’t understand half of what the other cops were saying, where the streets were, who the bad guys were. And I didn’t know how long it was going to take me to learn these things, to get some confidence in the job.

“You’re going to help me study, rookie,” Don told me as we went out to the car. “Maybe you’ll learn something yourself.” He handed me the books he was using to study for his sergeant’s exam and off we went in the line captain’s unmarked Ford to save the residents of Falmouth from the party-loving tourists. It was only 6:30 p.m., parties wouldn’t get going until 11:00 or later, so Don drove and I read question after question. He got them right for the most part. The only answer I remember still is that you can’t have a battery without an assault. I must have been a pretty good instructor; Don passed the exam a couple of months later.

As the night wore on, calls began coming over the radio, and wonder of wonders, I began to understand some of them. It was also my job to write our calls in the logbook kept in the car. Time in, complaint, location, finding, action taken. About nine o’clock, Don heard a call that I didn’t totally follow. He put me out at Maravista Avenue, southern end, telling me to divert traffic from entering. So I directed cars away, responding to questions with the answer that there had been an accident, but really I didn’t know more than that. About midnight, Don comes back to pick me up. By then, I’d waved my arms to exhaustion trying to imitate traffic cops I’d seen in the movies and on TV. Seems two people on a motorcycle had been killed up the street—that was the radio call I hadn’t understood.

We headed down to the Pizza Shack, where Don knew some guys in the kitchen, who gave us pepperoni slices. By 4:00 a.m., we had been to a few noise complaints, but all were unfounded. In any event, I got a chance to watch how Don approached a house, talked to people, and took action like the authority law figure that he was. By the night’s end, I was feeling a lot better about the job. I’d be spending at least another month with Don, a good guy and experienced cop. Maybe things wouldn’t be so bad after all.

And so there I was, nine years later, in a hospital room with all kinds of tubes and machines keeping me alive. And it was Sergeant Don Price, along with a Falmouth police detective named Leno and another cop whose name I didn’t catch, asking me questions about the vehicle the shooter was in. I wrote out my answers for them, everything I could remember about the car, type, and color.

I wrote them a note telling them I’d had a run-in with Raymond Meyer shortly before this—and was supposed to go to court to testify against his brother, James Meyer. Had either of them been questioned?

Leno told me that they were aware of that. “No one has seen Raymond Meyer since the shooting.”

“Maybe one of your guys already took care of him, if you know what I mean,” the other cop chimed in, and gave Don a knowing look. Cops looked out for cops. At least, that’s how it was supposed to be.

When they were done with their questions, I was so exhausted, I drifted off. When I came to again, there were more cops in my room. Paul Stone, Mitch Morgan, John Ayoub, and Jack Coughlin. Don was still there, and he was organizing the police security detail assigned to protect me. This was part of the police contract: any officer who was threatened was entitled to protection at the town’s expense. There would be two guys on duty at all times, twenty-four hours a day. Paul had been a tight end on the BU football team. Jack, a body builder. Both with Hollywood good looks. I noticed that the nurses started coming by my room more often after the security detail kicked in.

As part of the security detail, anyone who wanted to visit me had to be cleared by the Falmouth Police Department first. This was not a major issue in the first few days, as most of my visitors were cops anyhow. I was visited by just about every officer in the department while in the intensive care unit. A lot of the guys made the trip all the way to Boston just to donate blood, even if they weren’t my blood type, even if I couldn’t see visitors because I was still in surgery. The only notable absences were two cops who I knew were tight with Meyer: Larry Mitchell and Arthur Monteiro. The fact that they didn’t show their faces made me more certain that it was Meyer who wanted me dead, if there had ever been any doubt. And of course there was the rather glaring absence of our chief of police, John Ferreira, who was kind enough, when he heard I might survive, to send me an insurance form that I’d have to fill out pronto or the medical bills were mine. In all the weeks that I would later spend in the hospital, he never once made the trip to Mass General. In fact, I don’t think he even sent a card.