Common Ground (130 page)

Colin and Joan were baffled. They knew that as soon as the Anti-Crime Squad left, the muggings would resume. Billy Dwyer was sure of it too. Convinced that his decoys had somehow been spotted, he abandoned that operation and launched another. This time he put his men in unmarked cars, vans, and station wagons, instructing them to cruise the South End’s streets at irregular intervals.

The new plan paid off with six arrests in barely three weeks. The most important break came on February 18, when Dwyer himself, riding down St. Botolph Street, spotted a young woman holding a bloody towel to her head. The woman told him that she’d been walking along St. Botolph Street when she heard footsteps behind her. Turning, she saw a young man drinking from a green bottle. As she went on her way, she heard a bottle crashing into the bushes, then felt a heavy blow to her head as someone grabbed her purse.

After putting her in an ambulance, Dwyer searched the bushes, examining half a dozen old bottles until he finally found a fresh one—a green Fanta ginger ale—still ice cold. Back at the crime lab, the bottle yielded a clear set of fingerprints.

On February 20, two other crime squad members were cruising by the railroad tracks when they saw someone snatch a woman’s handbag. Running up West Newton Street toward Columbus Avenue, the mugger tried to hide in a darkened doorway at the top of a stoop. The two cops arrested the youth, and when they compared his prints with those on the Fanta bottle, they proved to be identical. The youth was Anthony Black, the acknowledged leader of the Soul Center gang. Tried on both counts, Black was sentenced to five to seven years in prison.

But the very night Black was arrested, another incident took place a few blocks away which would have profound repercussions in the neighborhood. Shortly after midnight, two young blacks scaled the rear wall of a house on Pembroke Street, popped the lock on a window, and climbed into the home of stockbroker Chip Huhta and his wife, Marie. At gunpoint, they roused the Huhtas and Ginger Brown, a teenager from suburban Sudbury who was staying with them for an “urban experience” semester. While one of the youths held Chip and Ginger in the study, the other put his arm around Marie’s neck, held a screwdriver to her throat, and demanded that she show him where the valuables were. He took a ring off her finger, sixty dollars from a drawer, and the children’s collection of silver dollars (but never disturbed the three children, asleep on an upper floor). The intruders then bound Chip, Marie, and Ginger with lamp cords and ripped the telephone from the wall.

The smaller, more easygoing of the pair was almost apologetic. “We do this all the time,” he explained. “You gotta understand. This is our job. You go to work every day. We go to work every night.” But his larger, more menacing partner seemed consumed by rage at the white world. “Shall we kill them?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he turned to the Huhtas and shouted, “It’s all your fault! Why do you come to our area? You honkies should be in South Boston with all the other racists! You don’t belong around here!” Fortunately, after further invective, the pair simply walked out the front door. Numb with terror, the Huhtas managed to rouse their tenants on the fourth floor, who summoned the police. Within twenty-four hours, word of the events on Pembroke Street had raced through the South End, seeming to confirm the neighborhood’s worst fears. Colin and Joan, who were old friends of the Huhtas, got a blow-by-blow description of what had happened.

In truth, the police offensive—even the arrests—had done little to curtail crime in the area. All through late winter and early spring, fresh bulletins poured into the Divers’ house. As Joan meticulously recorded them in her notebook—page after page of muggings, holdups, assaults, and burglaries—Colin went on pressuring the police for better protection. By now the policemen of District 4 had grown accustomed to the Divers. They knew Colin and Joan had powerful friends at City Hall and police headquarters, but they were also impressed by the couple’s determination to protect themselves and their friends. Some of them even seemed abashed at the department’s failure to provide better service to the neighborhood, although others defended their performance, laying the blame on other sectors of the criminal justice system.

One night, Detective Sergeant Frank Coleman turned in exasperation to Joan and said, “Look, Mrs. Diver, maybe we didn’t do too well by you for a while. But you’ve got a lot of help now—the TPF, the decoys, special patrols. We’re getting arrests. The trouble is, we’re getting the same people over and over.” As evidence, he pulled out Anthony Black’s record—a dozen arrests beginning at the age of fifteen. “We pull him in,” Coleman said, “the courts release him. We pull him in again, the courts let him go again. What do you want us to do? Your real beef now is with the courts. You ought to go down there and get a meeting with the judges.”

Coleman’s remarks echoed much of the Divers’ own experience with the courts, much they had heard from the neighborhood judges, Doerfer and Garrity. In late February, Colin drafted a letter to Judge Jacob Lewitton, chief justice of the Boston Municipal Court. To buttress his position, he had the letter co-signed by six other South End activists, among them two blacks—Adrian du Cille and Willie Mandrell.

In March, Colin and his co-signers met with the judge in his chambers. Lewitton heard them out politely, then launched into an elaborate explanation of the court’s problems in dealing with crime. But Colin was ready with a vigorous rebuttal. Based on his own survey of Massachusetts statutes as well as practices in other communities, he urged that the court tighten bail procedures to keep dangerous criminals off the streets while awaiting trial; his own preference would have been a preventive detention system similar to that recently enacted in the District of Columbia. A few years earlier, Colin couldn’t have imagined himself taking that position, and even now it was widely regarded as heresy for liberals to support such tough measures against crime. But after months of battling the South End’s hoodlums, Colin had lost patience with procedures that set habitual criminals loose on the community to commit one or more additional crimes before being brought to trial on the original charge. Some escaped trial altogether. Take Ruberto Caban, the man he’d chased and captured in January—that was the most open-and-shut case he could imagine. Colin had taken up the chase within seconds of the mugging and had recovered LeSola Morgan’s purse from the man’s grip. Yet Caban had been released on bail and had never shown up for trial in Superior Court. God knew where he was now.

In a state like Massachusetts, Colin conceded, outright preventive detention wasn’t politically feasible. But given existing statutes, he argued, the courts could do a much better job of protecting the public, while still preserving the constitutional rights of defendants. “It’s a jungle out there,” he warned the judge. “If you don’t do something quickly, we’re going to lose the war against crime. Then we might as well get gun permits and barricade our doors.” Lewitton promised to consider Colin’s point of view, but the South Enders left the judge’s chambers with modest expectations.

By then, Joan was in a better position than her husband to promote some measure of judicial reform. That January, Governor Michael Dukakis had named former Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox to head a blue-ribbon committee on Massachusetts’ antiquated court system. Convinced that judicial unaccountability was aggravating Boston’s crime situation, eager to find a forum for her views, Joan had called Dan Taylor, an old friend then serving as the Governor’s counsel, to ask if Dukakis planned to include on the committee any consumers—rather than dispensers—of justice. Taylor didn’t know but said he’d find out. Barely an hour later he called back to say that the Governor would be delighted to have Joan on the panel.

On February 4, the Select Committee on Judicial Needs met for the first time at the State Office Building. A formidable group, its twenty members included State Attorney General Frank Bellotti, Supreme Judicial Court Justice Edward Hennessey, and former Senate Judiciary Chairman John Conte.
All were lawyers, except Florence Rubin, president of the Massachusetts League of Women Voters, and Joan.

The committee’s principal assignment was to find ways of reducing the massive backlog of cases in state courts. A survey showed that of the ten slowest courts in the nation, five were in Massachusetts. Suburban Middlesex County was the slowest of all, with a five-year delay before a civil jury trial could be held. “Justice is being denied with each passing day in Massachusetts,” the Governor had said.

The committee zeroed in on administrative measures to alleviate overcrowding of the dockets: a new chief administrative judge to manage the entire state court system; greater flexibility in assignments, permitting judges to transfer from court to court; and consolidation of court budgets.

Joan was more interested in strengthening the criminal justice system. She was particularly concerned with lenient bail policies and excessive continuances. In Boston, she knew, one out of every four defendants failed to appear for trial, while the probability of a defendant defaulting increased 10 percent for every month a case was continued. But neither Cox nor his staff was eager to grapple with such divisive issues, afraid that they would make it more difficult to reach a consensus on administrative reforms. Nevertheless, Joan persisted, submitting several lengthy memoranda to the committee which argued, among other things, that the courts should be stricter in granting continuances; that judges should more carefully consider a defendant’s previous arrests, releases, and defaults before setting bail; and that defendants who failed to appear for trial should be more aggressively prosecuted. When Archibald Cox suggested that she favored preventive detention, Joan—like her husband—insisted that she wasn’t going that far. She emphasized that any bail system “must take into account the individual rights of the defendants, such that the imposition of bail is not used as punishment.” But, like Colin, she argued that “the courts must take into account the legitimate demands of the public for accountability and should ensure that the bail system is adequately administered and enforced.” The committee’s report, written by Cox himself, included Joan’s recommendation on continuances, but only a pallid paragraph on bail.

Joan had other worries that winter and spring of 1976. The Bancroft School, where both her sons were now enrolled, was in greater turmoil than ever. The spring before, parents had prevailed in their effort to preserve the Bancroft as a unique enclave of open education in a sea of traditional scholasticism. But theirs had been a Pyrrhic victory. Forced to choose between a “district” school, to which students would be rigidly assigned by “geocode,” and a “magnet” school, offering special programs and drawing applicants from throughout the city, the parents had opted for district status to guarantee that the Bancroft remain a South End institution. But in June they learned that the geocodes from which the Bancroft would draw had been significantly altered, retaining most of the school’s white students but transferring many of its original blacks
and enrolling other blacks whose parents neither sought nor wanted open education for their children. Moreover, the School Department had somehow miscalculated the Bancroft’s enrollment. By opening day, 253 students were assigned to a building with a capacity of barely 200.

The result was total chaos. With the large new enrollment crammed into seven classrooms, anything approaching organized instruction—much less the Bancroft’s innovative program—proved impossible. Teachers struggled to maintain acceptable levels of noise and discipline. Books and materials were in desperately short supply. To alleviate overcrowding, one teacher gave her classes in a former supply closet.

These conditions proved especially difficult for Lois Varney, the young primary-grades teacher whose imaginative techniques had drawn Joan Diver to the Bancroft in the first place. Lois had thrived in the old Bancroft, where she could offer her abundant talents to twenty-five children, all of them there because their parents had selected this alternative form of education. It was something quite different to preside over forty youngsters, half of them utterly new to the Bancroft and there against their families’ wishes. It took months to show such children that the unstructured and spontaneous atmosphere carried with it corresponding responsibilities. Meanwhile, Lois was compelled to give the newcomers a disproportionate share of her time, diverting energy from the more settled students who knew what was expected of them. Among these was Brad Diver, at eight years of age a comparative veteran of the Bancroft.