FOR MY FIRST CASE AT MCCAIN INVESTIGATIONS, I expected to work the late night repo detail with Mark Donahue, retrieving cars from remote or inhospitable locales on behalf of an insurance company. If I was fortunate, I'd get to sit in the cab with the tow truck driver and tell him when to back up. But Joe McCain, Jr., called me late one Friday afternoon to say he needed my help with a countersurveillance, right there at the McCain residence in Somerville. It seemed a neighbor had reported to Joe's wife that early on the previous Monday morning, after Maureen McCain had carried the family's trash out to the curbstone and gone back inside, a brown-haired stranger wearing a “carpenter's coat” had approached the McCains' house, grabbed the four bags of trash, pitched them into the trunk of his car, and driven away. The neighbor described the man's car as a plain, dark blue Crown Victoria— an undercover cop's car, Joe said.
Snatching a guy's trash is an old detective's trick, Joey told me, often used when trying to “do” somebody. Using the early morning darkness as cover, you tiptoe up to somebody's garbage, haul it away, and then pore over the receipts, phone bills, discarded bottles and wrappers, and any unusual or illicit paraphernalia that turns up. The goal is to determine what your subject is doing, buying, drinking, smoking, or snorting. What was unusual about this case was grabbing the trash at 7:00 A.M., after the light had come up; the dark blue Crown Vic, which indicated that the trashman was a fellow police officer; and the fact that the guy getting “done” was none other than Joe McCain, Jr.
Joe had a theory, too, about who it was. After his late father's high-profile career and his own propensity for grabbing headlines, Joey has his share of enemies both inside and outside the Somerville P.D. Working off the detail of the trash taker's “carpenter's coat,” he surmised that his early morning visitor could have been a Somerville cop attached to the DEA named Jimmy Hyde.
A burly veteran cop, undercover operative, and martial arts expert in his mid-forties, Hyde often wears a scally cap and a lined, midlength canvas jacket like the one noted by the witness. An old enemy of Joe McCain, Sr., Jimmy Hyde is “no fucking good,” according to Joe Jr. In 1999, two plaintiffs, Christopher Mittell and German Alfonso, brought a successful civil lawsuit against Jimmy Hyde, after alleging that he inflicted a beating on them and a handcuffed prisoner named Michael Henderson in 1994. The jury found that Hyde had used excessive force against Mittell. Both McCains went ballistic when they heard about that particular rights violation, but Joey says Hyde got off easy by intimidating the victim and his fellow police officers. Joey goes on to compare Hyde's use of force against Mittell with an episode his father was involved in several years earlier. On that occasion Joe Sr. got into a fistfight with another cop in the rear lot of the Revere police station because the guy had struck McCain's handcuffed suspect.
“Look. I've made three hundred arrests and pissed off about four of 'em,” Joey says. “I treat 'em like human beings. I don't find it necessary to belittle people.”
The day after the incident with Hyde and Mittell, Patrolman Timmy Doherty, who was an eyewitness, came to visit Joe Sr. and asked him what to do. Doherty was troubled by what he had seen happen to Michael Henderson that same night, but was reluctant to break the law enforcement code of silence. Nobody likes a rat.
“Tell the truth,” said Joe Sr.
His young colleague wasn't so sure. But McCain Sr. repeated that Doherty had to tell the truth— if only to avoid being named a coconspirator when the real story came out. When the case against Jimmy Hyde for violating Alfonso and Mittell's civil rights eventually went to federal court, Doherty testified that he had watched the beating of Henderson through a two-way mirror. Henderson had a couple of teeth knocked out, his eyes were swollen shut, and at one point an enraged Hyde had leaned over and bitten him on the chest, according to Doherty. At trial, however, Michael Henderson contradicted Doherty's testimony by saying under oath that nothing had occurred, even though he had previously told news reporters that he had been bitten on the chest by Hyde. The police department never disciplined Jimmy Hyde, and a line was drawn between him and the McCains, who had sided with Doherty.
This is the sort of thing that Joey McCain fears the most. It's not difficult to damage someone— to ruin a career or a life, especially a cop's. With even the slightest taint to a good cop's reputation, he can be passed over for promotions, ostracized by his colleagues, and distrusted by his neighbors. McCain always believed that Henderson's waffling was a result of pressure from Hyde. Now he wondered if he was feeling some of that pressure himself.
Over the years, the McCains had accumulated a few enemies on the police force. An unscrupulous cop might be expected to rummage among Joey's trash for a few weeks, then produce some “evidence”— perhaps a tiny amount of planted cocaine, syringes, or a bogus record of drug transactions— showing enough to procure a search warrant. During a subsequent tossing of the house, the dirty cop could slip a bag of coke into the McCains' bureau, let another cop find it, and voilà, the demise of Joey's career, as well as four decades' worth of a sterling family reputation.
It's not easy to get a search warrant, particularly for a cop's house. Joey was hoping that whoever it was (and wouldn't he like to know) would come back to gather more phony evidence, and he had arranged this countersurveillance to catch him in the act. The idea was, as Joe Sr. always said, to “think like the criminal” and thus head off his next move. If Joey could videotape the person who was grabbing his trash in the act of doing it again, I.D. the person, and then take the tape to the chief, he could make the argument that it was a setup. Then, later, when the guy went in to the chief and said, “Acting on a tip, I've been pulling McCain's trash for two months and found cocaine residue and syringes— I think we should get a warrant,” the chief could turn around and say, “Yeah, Joe's been watching ya do it, and has a videotape, and this case you're trying to make is bullshit.” The big question, then, is who's got the jump on whom right now?
It's 4:00 A.M. and as black as a dirty cop's soul when I get up and leave the house. As I go down the highway toward Somerville, it's thirteen degrees, the cold seeping in around my windshield and through the tiny spaces of the doorjambs. These fucking guys, they can't pull Joey's trash in nicer weather? No one is on the road at this hour, and the sleepy voices on the radio indicate that it's more last night than this morning. Rounding Stoneham, I enter the Central Artery and see the skyline of Boston spread out like a celestial city. The illuminated clock faces are shining atop the Schrafft building, and the dark spires of Boston Sand & Gravel show themselves black against the sky.
Mark Donahue has given me two conflicting pieces of advice. First, he said, whatever happens, don't get “made”— don't let this perp get a good look at me. I'm going to be helpful on this case only insofar as nobody on the other side knows who I am. But he also told me to do whatever I could to get the trash taker on videotape.
“It's gonna happen fast,” he said. “If you think you might miss it for any reason, run right out there and put the camera on him.” What if he sees me? I asked Donahue.
He shrugged. “Too bad for you,” he said.
Situated toward the top of a quiet, crowded street near Tufts University, the McCain residence is a neat, clapboard structure three stories high. Joe and his family live on the upper floors; his mother lives downstairs. As I inch along, peering at the numbers in the dark, Joey materializes at his front door, standing beneath the giant American flag strung from his upstairs balcony. He's dressed in black jeans and a black sweatshirt, his shaven head gleaming in the dimness, and he points to a space farther up the road. I park my car and walk back to him, hands in my pockets, head bent against the cold. “Hey,” he says, in a whisper. “What's up?”
We go inside, and Joey closes the door. “Most people don't live like this,” he says. “They don't get up at four A.M. to set up a surveillance on their own house— just because they've been one of the good guys, like forever.” With his father gone, Joe figures, Hyde is looking for some payback.
The key to a good surveillance is to keep from tipping off the suspect that you're watching for him. To that end, Joe plans to leave his car in the driveway and the house dark, since on his days off, like today, he'd be home sleeping. Maureen will put out the trash just after six-thirty, as always, and Joe and I will take up positions in his mother's living room on the first floor, armed with a video camera.
It's just after 5:00 A.M., and since I had to make sure to arrive before the trash puller, we have over an hour to kill before we set things up. Entering the hallway, we walk past the open door to his mother's house and tiptoe up the stairs. Inside the McCains' white pine kitchen, Joe switches on the tiny light above the stove and fills a kettle with water from the tap. “Want some tea?” he asks.
Tattooed arms bulging from his T-shirt, Joe puts a flame under the kettle and picks up a tiny dinosaur from underfoot, and places it on the kitchen table. A man is never so vulnerable as he is in the wee hours, his wife and children sleeping in adjacent rooms, his mother asleep downstairs. Even Joe McCain, Jr., professional hard guy, wears a troubled look as he pours the water for the tea and we stand in the half-lit kitchen, palming our mugs.
“What really sucks is, my wife and my mother, who's sixty-six and whose husband died last year, get pulled into this filthy little world,” says Joe.
He moves aside a plastic rifle lying on the table; the McCain children are a well-armed bunch. There's an arsenal of toy weapons on the nearby counter and scattered over the furniture and floor: pistols and ray guns and a fake shotgun with a cork on a string. “My wife has to worry if her husband's gonna get framed and go to jail. What a great fucking place to work.”
At my urging, Joe excavates his long, bad history with Jimmy Hyde. “The sad lesson learned in this case was that, in my opinion, the city's lawyers backed the cops who lied in open court, and the guy who was excoriated by cops and lawyers alike was Timmy Doherty, the one who got up there and told the truth,” he says. “Timmy wasn't trying to fuck good cops, as was portrayed. It was the other way around.”
Jimmy Hyde has gone around with Joe Jr. more than once. A few years ago, Denny “Rat” Shaughnessy, a friend of Joey's who owns a motorcycle shop, was being harassed by a merchant named Vincent Titone, whose tire shop was across the street. (Shaughnessy had begun living with Titone's ex-wife; aggravating perhaps, but not illegal.) One day Joe got a call from Shaughnessy, who said that Titone was pointing a silver handgun at him from across the street.
“If he does it again, call me back,” Joe said.
A short while later Rat called again to say that Titone was now parked across from his store in a white pickup truck. “He's pointing it at me right now,” Shaughnessy said.
Joe headed right down there with another Somerville cop named Jimmy McNally. They told Titone to get out of the truck, and McNally searched through the driver's side and Joe took the passenger side. Neither found anything; then they crossed over and switched. Joe stuck his hand way under the driver's seat, back where the wall of the truck bed comes down. Groping around, he felt a metal object inside the liner of a work glove that was pressed against the back of the cab. It was a silver-plated .38, with two loose rounds stuck in the fingers.
Titone was charged with assault and battery and possession of an unregistered handgun. The case was eventually dismissed because McCain and McNally had searched for the gun without a warrant. But later Joe Jr. heard rumors that Jimmy Hyde was behind a push with the district attorney to have him arrested for planting the gun in Titone's pickup. It went nowhere; Titone flunked a lie detector test.
“The only thing he got right was his name,” says Joe.
“Maybe Hyde figures I don't have the juice anymore,” says Joe Jr. “Look— there's only a couple people capable of ‘doing' a cop. Is Hyde capable of doing this? Yes.”
It's time to set up the surveillance. We pad down the staircase and into the front room of his mother's apartment. Against the windows, which let in some reflected light from the street, is a narrow table crowded with pictures of Helen McCain's three grandchildren and an old photograph of a youthful Joe Sr. in his double-breasted uniform with the pinched motorman's cap and glossy boots. In the photo, Joe and a grim-faced fireman are carrying a body up from the banks of the Mystic River. The figure on the stretcher is covered with a sodden blanket.
We each take up a position near one of the windows, and Joe Jr. gives me a quick lesson on how to operate the video camera. He points out where the Crown Vic was parked last week, and the approach its occupant took to the house.
“It sucks that it's right at eye level,” he says. “So stay low, and I'll tape him until he gets to the sidewalk out front, then I'll hand you the camera and go outside and you follow me.”
“You gonna confront him?” I ask.
“That's right. And I want you to tape the whole fucking thing. It ain't gonna last very long.”
A faint odor of Murphy's Oil Soap inhabits the room, and not a speck of dust resides anywhere. Every Saturday morning Helen McCain blasts The Irish Hour on the radio and to the skirl of Gaelic music cleans her apartment from top to bottom. A ship's clock is ticking from the mantelpiece, and beside me on an end table is a propped open book of Psalms. I can't make out the entry in the dimness.
“You carrying a gun?” I ask Joe.
“Nah. These guys have balls, but they're not gonna draw down on me here. They wanna come back and take me out in handcuffs in front of my wife and kids.”
I'm kneeling on the edge of the rug, which is patterned with a pink, aqua, and teal seascape. Three glass dolphins decorate the coffee table, and there are several vases filled with dried flowers scattered across the room. I drop my hand below the windowsill and press the little button that illuminates my wristwatch.
“What time is it?” Joey asks.
“Six-thirty.”
There are several moments of quiet, just the ticking of the clock. “I'd be so psyched to see that car pull up,” Joe says.
I tell him that I can't believe anyone would do it; that a snoop would just walk up to a man's house in daylight and grab his trash.
“I've done it a thousand times,” Joe says. “You just act like it's the most normal thing in the world. No rush. Then you just walk away.”
The floorboards creak overhead. We can hear the door tilt open, and Maureen comes down the stairs in her pajamas and Joe's leather jacket and goes out with the trash. She makes two trips to the curb, returns to the house, locks the front door, and goes back upstairs.
“If it's gonna happen, this is gonna be when,” Joe says.
It's getting light. Neighbors begin to stir, heading off to work. “I gotta take a quick piss,” says Joe, getting up. He hands me the video camera.
“Don't miss it,” I say. Joe laughs and goes out.
I fiddle with the zoom for a couple of seconds, then pick my head up and stare out the window. Did I miss something? Somebody just walked by the end of the street. I shut my eyes for a nanosecond and study the image that's printed there: was it a guy in a brown coat?
You picture yourself in this situation like Sam Spade, cool, hatted, invisible, with a blackjack in your pocket and a snub nose in the waistband of your pants. But with Joe out of the room, I feel more like one of the extras in Lancelot Link/Secret Chimp, the old kids' show with live-action chimpanzees wearing trench coats and fedoras. Fumbling with the camera, I'm about as useful as a trained monkey, distinguished only by my clean-shaven face.
Joe returns from the bathroom and takes up the video camera. Full daylight has come up, and we crouch by the furniture to remain out of sight. “I'd love to get these bastards this morning,” says Joe, peering out the window.
Suddenly there's a grinding noise at the end of the street, and Joe stands up. “Look at this,” he says. Snorting plumes of exhaust, a garbage truck lurches around the corner and two men in reflective vests leap off the back and grab Joey's and his neighbor's trash. It's seven-thirty; the surveillance is over.
“Not this time,” says McCain. “But they'll fuck up. You watch.”