ON MAY 26, 1980, AS THE PIPE BANDS and Civil War reenactors and high school glee clubs in the Memorial Day parade marched past, five men drilled and blasted through the wall of a neighboring storefront and robbed the Depositor's Trust Savings Bank in Medford, Mass. Among the crooks were Metropolitan Police officers Gerald W. Clemente and Joseph Bangs, as well as Lieutenant Tommy Doherty of the Medford Police. (In a saga of irony and interconnectedness that no fiction writer could make up, Tommy Doherty, who is not a blood relation to the Somerville cop Timmy Doherty, later became the beleaguered patrolman's father-in-law.) Bangs and Clemente had been friends for more than ten years when they dreamed up the bank robbery. By that time, they had collaborated on other larcenous schemes, including insurance fraud, drug trafficking, and the theft and sale of civil service promotional examinations, a far-reaching, lucrative caper that would eventually tie the dirty cops to the Depositor's Trust robbery. Nicknamed Exam Scam, the illegal distribution and sale of the stolen tests netted Clemente and Bangs three thousand dollars per exam and resulted in unfair promotions for certain Mets, as well as other cops and firemen from departments across the state.

Soon after the bank robbery, one of Clemente's pals in the Exam Scam, MDC Sergeant Frank “Indian” Thorpe, tried to sell a copy of the sergeants' test to a former Met turned Wilmington patrolman named David McCue. A large, broad-shouldered man, Thorpe claimed to be a descendant of the Olympic and professional athlete Jim Thorpe and was known more for smashing up cop cars than for the breadth of his intellect. McCue told his boss about the overture, and together they went to the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office. The A.G. had McCue wear a recording device and meet with Thorpe in the parking lot of a Dunkin' Donuts in Lawrence, Mass., where the parties hashed over the terms of the deal. The contents of the wire led to Thorpe's indictment on a misdemeanor charge of trying to corrupt a public official, and the extent of the Exam Scam began to emerge.

Meanwhile, a mob associate named Vernon “Gus” Gusmini approached Tommy Doherty to say that a large amount of money stolen from one of the safe deposit boxes at the Depositor's Trust belonged to the Winter Hill gang, and Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi wanted it back. In fact, Gusmini went on to tell Gerry Clemente that the mob wanted a piece of all his action. Later, sources reported that Gusmini was upset because he had conceived the original plan to break into the bank, and Clemente had welshed by going ahead without him.

Hearing that Gus Gusmini was busy applying the screws to Clemente on behalf of the Winter Hill gang, the superintendent of the Mets, a former Marine and straight shooter named Laurence Carpenter, summoned Joe McCain from the Suffolk County D.A.'s Office and briefed him on Clemente, the Depositor's Trust burglary, and Gusmini's extortion plot. After big Joe recovered from the shock that Gerry Clemente was dirty, he suggested that, for the time being anyway, they treat Clemente like a legitimate police captain being harassed by a hoodlum, and Carpenter agreed. They'd get more out of him that way.

McCain conducted interviews with Clemente and members of his family, then returned to Superintendent Carpenter with the recommendation that Clemente be taken to East Cambridge District Court to swear out a complaint against Vernon Gusmini for extortion. That way, McCain reasoned, they'd be able to hook Clemente and Gusmini, since the warrant would contain a tacit admission that Clemente had taken part in the burglary. In the meantime, Gusmini fled the state. But within just a few days he was arrested on an unrelated drug charge in Florida.

Joe McCain, Jr., was in his second year at the University of Miami, living on the eleventh floor of a high-rise dormitory, when he heard a voice coming from the elevator that sounded a lot like his dad. “Gee, I must really be homesick, because I'd swear that's my father out there,” he said to himself. Tossing aside his book, Joey ran into the hallway, and there was the old man, big as life, smiling and laughing as he hugged young Joe, explaining that he was in Miami to bring back a prisoner.

When Gusmini was busted on the cocaine charge, the Mets issued a warrant for him and sent big Joe to execute it. At the same time McCain heard a rumor that the Mass. State Police sensed an opportunity to undermine their old rivals, the Mets, and had dispatched their own man.

Young Joe took a ride with his father over to the Dade County Sheriff's Office, where they were holding Gusmini. In the sun-baked parking lot, the McCains encountered Tommy Spartachino, a former Met who was by this time a Mass. state trooper. Earlier in his career, Spartachino had served as the “third man” with Joe Sr. and Leo Papile when they all worked together on Revere Beach.

Joe Sr. sent his nineteen-year-old son back to the car and hailed Spartachino. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I got a warrant for Gusmini,” said Spartachino. “He's going back with me.”

“Fuck you he is,” said McCain, showing Spartachino a Metropolitan Police warrant. “This is a Met case, not a State Police case.”

Joe McCain and Superintendent Carpenter wanted to go after the dirty Mets themselves, to prove that only Clemente and Bangs and their henchmen were corrupt, not the entire system they worked under. Big Joe also wanted to avoid the embarrassment of having the Mass. State Police meddling in what he considered his business— the reputation of the Mets. In the end, McCain won the argument and processed Gusmini out of the Dade County jail into his custody.

After McCain returned home with Gusmini, he was summoned to appear in front of a special grand jury on obstruction of justice charges. The implication was that McCain, and by extension the Mets, had wrested Gusmini away from the State Police to protect a widespread conspiracy. No one really believed that Joe McCain had a shred of information about Clemente's gang or the heist, but certain elements in the Attorney General's Office and the State Police, including Spartachino, wanted to give him “a little tickle.” By painting all the Mets with the same brush, these individuals hoped to consolidate their own power and, by weight of negative publicity, force Governor Michael Dukakis to dissolve the Metropolitan Police.

Other than funerals, McCain's grand jury appearance was the first time in twenty years he'd worn his Met uniform, and he was embarrassed, hurt, angry, and proud all at once. Most of the questions were horseshit, given the circumstances, and after an hour of testimony several participants were glancing at their watches. But near the end of the session, one of the grand jurors asked, “You think quite a bit of yourself, don't you, Detective McCain?”

“Yes, sir, I do,” Joe said. “The only thing a policeman has is his honor and his integrity, and I value mine very highly.”

Later, Joe McCain would say, “He asked me a question, and he got a fucking answer.” Emerging from the courtroom, McCain saw his adversaries grouped together in the hallway, laughing and talking. He started in their direction and his attorney, Jim O'Donovan, grabbed him by the sleeve.

“Joe, please don't say anything,” said O'Donovan.

McCain frowned. “Jim,” he said. “Fuck him.”

Big Joe twisted out of his lawyer's grip and crossed the hallway to where the district attorney was standing with his cronies. “You knew I had nothing to do with the Depositor's Trust and yet you let these fuckin' people torture me,” said McCain. “Shame on you.”

At the Exam Scam trial, Clemente admitted that he'd been cheating on police examinations since 1964, and that when he and Tommy Doherty broke into civil service headquarters for the first time, it was “like playing God.” Another immunized witness, the former Met sergeant Frank Thorpe, was asked on the witness stand if he was known by any nicknames.

“Everything but Late for Lunch,” said Thorpe, adding that he was also called Indian, Bear, Crazy, and Wahoo.

Thorpe's testimony provided some of the trial's lighter moments, including the admission that while a police officer he had crashed so many cruisers other Mets refused to ride with him. And he was asked about an incident in Roxbury where he shot a young man outside the district courthouse. “You and General Custer have something in common,” Thorpe had told his victim.

“What's that?” the man asked.

“You've both been shot by the Indians,” said Thorpe.

But it was the testimony of Joe Bangs that amazed some of the most hardened courtroom observers. A veteran cop and criminal, Bangs avoided prosecution on all charges and even wangled a tax-free disability pension of $1,950 per month from the Mets for a supposed heart condition. On the stand he admitted to knowledge of at least four gangland murders before they occurred, as well as having participated in a major drug trafficking business with a hoodlum named Bucky Barrett. The former Met boasted that he once sold fifteen tons of marijuana in two hours, over the telephone in a bar called the Little Rascals that he and Barrett had purchased with drug money.

Joe Bangs's most shocking revelation was that Gerry Clemente had asked him to murder his girlfriend Barbara Hickey and burn her house down because Clemente was afraid Hickey would testify against him in the Depositor's Trust case. Bangs refused, but only because Hickey wasn't aware of Bangs's own role in the burglary.

“If she had known about me, I don't know what I would have done,” said Bangs.

While Joe Bangs was testifying in the Depositor's Trust trial, Tommy Doherty's attorney, Tom Troy, asked Bangs if he had received the cash that the State Police had found in his trunk from Metropolitan Police Captain Bill McKay. In his testimony Bangs used McKay's name a dozen times, and even took the trouble to spell it for the court reporter.

That same afternoon a Boston Globe reporter named Paul Langner, who didn't really know Joe McCain, saw a big, white-haired man in the hallway outside the courtroom and asked another cop who he was. McCain was visiting the Middlesex Courthouse to testify in a rape case, but since he was talking to Attorney Troy, Langner believed him to be a witness in the attempted murder case.

In an article that appeared in The Boston Globe the next day, Langner made a significant error.

Q. (by Troy) Did Mr. McCain give you the $10,000 in Canadian currency? (Capt. Joseph McCain of the Metropolitan Police and Bangs had met in a bar earlier on the day of the alleged crime, according to testimony.)

A. No he did not, sir.

Another cop directed Joe McCain to the article, and after he read it, he wanted to tear the paper— not to mention Paul Langner— into little pieces. McCain called the new superintendent of the Mets to complain and was told not to worry about it. But Joe filed a million-dollar libel suit against Paul Langner and The Boston Globe, stating that they had “negligently, intentionally or recklessly inflicted emotional distress upon the plaintiff.”

In dismissing the charges, Superior Court Justice Thomas S. Connolly decided that Langner was just a harried beat reporter with no special animus toward McCain. Still, big Joe had made his point. And Langner's deposition in the suit contained an accurate description of the legendary Met detective:

Langner also revealed that he heard about his mistake the day after the story appeared, during a conversation with two lawyers in the courtroom hallway. In his deposition, Langner stated that, upon learning of the error, “I burdened myself of an indelicate expression, but it was too late.”

Despite the fact that the Boston Globe article wrongly linked his name to an infamous chapter in the doomed history of the Metropolitan District Commission police force, Joe McCain's essential puckishness allowed him to savor Langner's pained exclamation of “Fuck!” and his later description of that as “an indelicate expression.” For all Joe's street smarts and Winter Hill toughness, he admired refinement of speech and men in possession of great book learning. In fact, he laughed at the very idea; he was, after all, an Irishman.

Joe McCain avoided any official taint related to the Exam Scam by virtue of the fact that the only test he took in his professional life was to gain entrance to the Mets in 1958. He was more than content as a detective, supplementing his pay by working at a second job.

Bangs's and Clemente's testimony was like Nero's fiddling— it signaled the beginning of the end for the Mets. The department was rotten with graduates of their accelerated promotion program and over the next few years, good honest cops like Joe McCain's old friend, deputy superintendent Al Seghezzi, were demoted and transferred to the hinterlands while the bad guys flourished.

A few years later, as several dirty cops were being paroled from jail, the state legislature debated the future of the organization these men had ruined. In 1992, four years after Joe McCain had been shot on the job and forced to retire, the Metropolitan Police department was dismantled and active officers in good standing were absorbed into the Mass State Police. Although there were more than six hundred Metropolitan Police officers and the vast majority of them were honest, hardworking cops, Gerry Clemente's criminal activity was the linchpin that decided the fate of the MDC.