Jay Atkinson - Legends of Winter Hill: Cops, Con Men, and Joe McCain, the Last Real Detective

T HAT PARTICULAR MORNING Detective Joe McCain arrived late to the office of the MDC Special Investigations Unit, located on the sixth floor of the old Registry of Motor Vehicles building in Boston. A veteran cop with thirty years on the job, McCain, fifty-eight, was an imposing man, six foot three and every one of the three hundred and something pounds he admitted to, but solid, with fists like prize hams and forearms the circumference of a grown man's neck. He was whistling as he came into the Nashua Street office because during a recent physical the doctor had said he was in good shape his heart was sound and his blood pressure was fine. He just needed to lose some weight, and there in the office Joseph E. McCain, Sr., announced that he was starting a new regimen that very day: January 29, 1988.

No more bloody steaks at the Parker House, or hot pastrami sandwiches from the North End. Big Joe was going on a diet.

His younger colleagues, Detectives Gene Kee and Al DiSalvo and Biff McLean, were eyeing each other over their desks and snickering like teenagers. What a fat shit, Kee said under his breath.

What'd you say? asked McCain, looking over at them.

He said you're a fat fuck, said DiSalvo, smiling over at Kee, who was trying to shush him.

McCain raised an eyebrow. Well, I'd like you geniuses to know that I'm down to a svelte three twenty, he said, turning to profile.

Fuck you, Joe, you're three forty-five, easy, Kee said, while the rest of them broke out laughing.

Gathered for a briefing on coke dealers in Hyde Park was a veritable all-star team of Metropolitan District Commission police detectives, or Mets, as they liked to be called. Their work was complicated and dangerous, and they were good at it. The leader of the unit, forty-one-year-old Sergeant Mark Cronin, a tall, quiet fellow, had served in Army Intelligence during the Vietnam War. Among such hard chargers, who drank and fought and crashed their share of police vehicles, Cronin was the most cerebral and straitlaced, and a meticulous planner and organizer. When Cronin walked into the office with a rookie detective named Dennis Febles and another man named Chris Brighton, who looked and acted like a drug dealer, the rest of the guys quit piling on Joe McCain and fell silent.

Joe, what are you doing here? asked Cronin.

I'm working, Sarge, what the fuck does it look like? McCain said, and the guys all laughed.

Sergeant Cronin was surprised to see McCain, who had requested the day off so he and his friend Jim O'Donovan and their wives could attend a dinner dance in Hingham. But when Joe McCain heard that the kids, as he called his youthful counterparts, were going to sting the drug dealers today, he'd canceled his outing and driven to the office. And although the unit had made a large number of significant arrests in its short history and the other detectives were putting on a bold front, McCain detected a sense of gloom in the office that morning, an uneasiness that had never attached itself to their meetings in the past.

Wearing a scruffy beard for this operation, ex-Marine Christopher Kegs Brighton was the unit's undercover man, wiseass, and resident beer drinker. William Battlin' Biff McLean and thirty-five-year-old Gene Kee were adept at handling informants. Fat Al DiSalvo was the surveillance expert. In the unit for just two weeks, former New York City gang member Dennis Febles spoke Spanish and had a hankering for some action.

Even among such a stellar cast of cops, Joe McCain stood out. Hailed on all sides as the genuine article, big Joe was punching out mobsters and solving murder cases when Gene Kee and Chris Brighton were in grade school. He was a Somerville guy, and lived with his wife, Helen, on a quiet street adjacent to the Tufts University campus. The McCains' only child, twenty-six-year-old Joe Jr., had just been discharged from the Marines and was planning on becoming a cop himself. But the figure of his old man was an imposing one. A large, white-haired, cigar-smoking fellow who resembled John Wayne in both physique and bearing, Joe McCain was a legend in law enforcement circles, and his file contained a sheaf of commendations over an inch thick.

On this case, thirty-nine-year-old Chris Brighton had spent weeks developing a relationship with a coke dealer named Melvin Lee, purchasing a half ounce here and an ounce there, building up the trust necessary for the sting to move ahead. Posing as a ski bum who drove down to Boston to score coke for the kids partying up at Cannon and Loon, Brighton had recently upped the ante with Melvin Lee. He told the dealer that he had $15,000 and wanted to buy a half kilo of cocaine. Subsequently, Mark Cronin had made the decision that they would arrest Lee today and perhaps get the dealer above him who could supply that much blow. When Joe McCain came into the office, Brighton and the rest of the guys were waiting for Lee to hit Brighton's beeper.

Finally the pager went off. Brighton saw Melvin Lee's phone number and went into an adjoining office to return the call. A few moments later, he emerged with a smile on his face. It's on, he said.

One last time Mark Cronin went over each man's assignment. Also present that morning were two seasoned detectives from the Boston Police Department, Paul Hutchinson and Jack Honan. It was a practice of the Special Investigations Unit to work with other departments in the jurisdiction of a case, and men like Honan and Hutchinson would be helpful in the surveillance and arrest of Melvin Lee and his associates.

Jack Honan rode with Dennis Febles in an unmarked van driven by Gene Kee. As part of the takedown team, charged with taking the suspects into custody when the time came, all three detectives wore bulletproof vests. Mark Cronin and Biff McLean were to park on the street behind Lee's house on Wood Avenue in Hyde Park, monitoring the whereabouts and conversations of Chris Brighton, who was wired with a hidden microphone. Al DiSalvo was on the far side of a park near Lee's residence, maintaining surveillance. And Joe McCain and Paul Hutchinson, both good-sized men, were squeezed like circus clowns into a tiny gray Toyota that had been seized in a different case. Their assignment was to stay close and watch the front door.

Following Brighton's vehicle at a safe distance, the teams moved to within a block of 276 Wood Avenue and took up their positions. Cronin and McLean found a secluded place behind the house and opened up the Kel, a briefcase-sized listening device that included a short antenna they attached to the roof of the car. The only two officers who could hear what Brighton was saying and what was being said to him, they relayed the necessary information to the other members of the unit. Inside the house, Lee told Brighton that the coke hadn't arrived yet and he should wait. Both men went into the kitchen and sat down.

Melvin Lee rose from his chair and paced back and forth, then returned to his seat opposite Brighton. A slightly built, forty-seven-year-old black man with close-cropped hair and a large, flat mustache, Lee was more nervous than he'd been on the other occasions when he and Brighton had done business.

Miko checked you out, and he thinks you're a cop, said Lee, naming his supplier.