The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide by Dick Lehr

water views. But even as the outsiders arrived, Southie’s public image remained largely negative. The tumult of busing in the mid-1970s might have long subsided, but Southie had been scarred deeply.
    “Although the crisis over busing was a relatively brief episode in South Boston’s 300-year history,” the historian Thomas H. O’Connor wrote, “it was an unusually bitter and violent period that stereotyped the neighborhood forever in the minds of people throughout the nation as a place where beer-bellied men and foulmouthed women made war on defenseless black children.” The stereotype was ripe for exploitation and would be used against Southie—the sense of loyalty made into a vice, not a virtue.
    Kenny would someday experience this firsthand. But in 1987 he was riding on his own modest-sized version of cloud nine. Following the strong finish at Don Bosco, he spent the summer hanging out with friends, driving a delivery truck, and enjoying himself. He lived at home and had few expenses. His parents’ marriage was unraveling, but they had stayed friends. Kenny began playing basketball in a new adult CYO league at Gatie. One of the other teams, called the Evans Club, consisted of the Evans brothers, including Paul, a high-ranking officer in the police department who was twenty years older than Kenny and eventually became police commissioner during the 1990s.
    Kenny also was accepted into Suffolk University in Boston. He registered for classes and lined up financial aid and grants. But when September rolled around, Kenny was a no-show. “I just didn’t want to go.” He decided he’d had enough of school and was talking to his father and Uncle Russ about the Boston Police Department. With their guidance, he filled out an application. He took a police cadet exam. Then, one day in November 1987, Kenny got the call to be a cadet, the first step in his dream of becoming a full-fledged police officer. Kenny was told to report for duty on December 5, 1987—six days before he turned nineteen. Mike Doyle was also accepted into the cadet program.
    Kenny’s first assignment was working in the traffic division. He was on the job only two months when tragedy struck the department. Heavily armed members of the Drug Control Unit had quietly made their way up the stairs to an apartment on the third floor of 104 Bellevue Street in Dorchester. It was around 8:30 on the night of February 17, 1988. Using what was known as a no-knock search warrant, the plan was to surprise a cabal of drug dealers known to be working out of the apartment. The cops paused outside the bolted steel door and then began smashing their way inside using a battering ram and a sledgehammer. That’s when the whole thing went awry. Shots were fired from inside. One of the officers, Sherman Griffiths—thirty-six years old, married, and the father of two little girls—was hit in the head. His partner, Carlos A. Luna, and other cops hauled him out of the line of fire. They tried desperately to treat the wound and resuscitate the burly, bearded eighteen-year police veteran. He was rushed by ambulance to Boston City Hospital and was pronounced dead a few hours later. The police world mourned.
    In the aftermath of Sherman Griffiths’s death, Police Commissioner Francis M. Roache called the drug unit officers “highly trained and very professional.” But as time went on the tragedy erupted into scandal. When it came to prosecuting the man charged in the cop’s death, Detective Luna could not produce the confidential informant cited in paperwork to obtain the search warrant. Luna had written on the warrant application he’d obtained probable cause for the raid because “John” had provided him with firsthand intelligence about the drug den. But it turned out there was no John; he did not exist.
    The drug unit’s unlawful practice of lying on search warrants—a practice that amounted to a violation of the constitutional protection against unwarranted