Mayor for a New America (22 page)

A symbol of the New Bostonians renewing the city, Richel Nova was a fifty-eight-year-old Dominican immigrant who worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, putting twin daughters through college. Michelle and Marlene were summer interns at City Hall during the four years they attended Boston Latin, the city's premier high school. I knew them well. “They loved their father so much,” I told reporters.

At the funeral, as the front rows formed up behind the coffin, first Richel's widow, Marilin, was overcome, and then one of the twins, and on the procession up the aisle I had to steady mother and daughter.

Meeting with Emerson College students, I was asked whether the killers should get the death penalty. I gave my standard answer—that I don't support the death penalty because it unfairly targets the poor. Then I remembered how Richel was killed—stabbed sixteen times and his throat slit. And I lost it. “If I saw these guys in a dark alley,” I said, “I'd like to have a fight with them. I'd do something that would be worse than the death penalty. . . . Because it wouldn't happen in a second. . . . I would slowly torture them.”

I instantly regretted it. And apologized on TV. Anger and fear don't belong in public life. Citizens can say what they feel; officials can't afford the luxury.

I was careful not to speak what I felt about the suspects in the Mattapan murders. Two of them met in prison, the school of violent crime. Despite their criminal records, they had obtained semiautomatic pistols. One of the three, thirty-four-year-old Dwayne Moore, knew drugs were being sold from an apartment on Sutton Street. They got a modest haul—a safe, a television, some drugs, and $1,800 in cash—from the three men and one woman in the apartment. They stripped the men, to discourage them from running for help. Then they marched the naked men and the woman, carrying her son, into the vacant lot, made them lie facedown on the ground, and executed them.

Moore was the shooter. He'd spent half his life behind bars. He didn't want to go back. Maybe that's why he killed the four adults—they were witnesses. But the child? Friends described Moore as a hard man dragging a hard life behind him. When his mother came to Boston for his trial, she stayed in a homeless shelter. A hard life. It had made him a monster.

 

About a third of murders in Boston are retaliatory. A member of Gang A shoots a member of Gang B, and in retaliation a member of B shoots a member of A. There's the contagion of violence, and there's the gun. I mounted initiatives to address both.

One was in public health.

What moved me to adopt that approach to violence prevention was a gang shooting. A mother who witnessed it was courageous enough to tell the police what she saw. I wanted to thank her for helping get the bad guys off our streets. She came to my office, her young kids in tow. I asked what they did after school, and she said, “Nothing.” She was afraid to let them play outside. I thought,
No way, not in my city
. That afternoon, I told my team we had to come at the neighborhood-killing problem of youth violence in a new way.

Boston's Violence Intervention and Prevention (VIP) program is a comprehensive strategy to strengthen communities to resist the epidemic of kids shooting kids. VIP volunteers knock on doors in high-risk areas. Ask people about their concerns. Give out numbers to call for help with jobs, rent, mental health, immigration issues, schools, and crime. Youth development specialists instruct kids in conflict resolution and peer leadership skills. Public Health Commission educators assigned to community centers run parent-support workshops. As part of VIP, the schools teach a K–8 violence prevention curriculum named for Louis Brown, the fifteen-year-old honor roll student who was my first dead kid as mayor. And Neighborhood Peace Councils bring together police, residents, clergy, and representatives of city agencies. The Peace Councils make public safety a shared responsibility, though in some neighborhoods apathy limits their effectiveness in preventing violence.

Not apathy but fear sustained violence in “Bowdoin-Geneva,” a sixty-eight-block patch of Dorchester where shootings were four times the rate for the city as a whole. It wasn't only that gangs intimidated residents from identifying shooters. Gang values had taken hold in Bowdoin-Geneva. Forty-one percent of residents in one survey believed violence was a justified response to insults.

Police classified Bowdoin-Geneva as a violence “hot spot,” and Hendry Street off Bowdoin as a “red zone.” Only 570 feet long, this dead end was the most violent street in the city and the street hardest hit by the foreclosure wave of 2007–8. Of its twenty dwellings, ten were in foreclosure, most were abandoned, several were overrun by squatters, and tenants in the multifamily house at the end of the street were dealing drugs.

In disaster I saw opportunity. A chance to foreclose on Hendry Street's violent past.

In early 2008, dozens of city workers converged on the street. They towed away derelict cars, installed new streetlights, swept up trash, planted trees, and put up a new street sign. Standing before a poster announcing
THE HENDRY STREET PROJECT
, I proclaimed “a new start for Hendry Street.” Its derelict condition made three-family houses purchasable for as little as $24,000. The city's Foreclosure Intervention Team
^*
bought four, a local nonprofit four more. We sold them to a local developer, who rehabbed them. The PBS home improvement show
This Old House
filmed some of the work. By 2010 the houses were selling for $250,000, a sum affordable for first-time buyers, who could live in one unit of the three-deckers and rent out the other two. I declared victory: “Families can once again call this place home.”

But the big house at the end of the street still harbored dealers, the nucleus of a local gang. After a rival gang sprayed bullets into a backyard Fourth of July cookout in 2010, wounding two gang members and two women bystanders, I ordered a patrol car parked on Hendry Street around the clock. That stopped the shootings; the dealers, who avoided arrest by peddling their drugs elsewhere, remained. I promised residents to keep the car on Hendry for a year. After that, I knew the dealers' rivals would attack again, beginning a new cycle of retaliatory violence.

The dealers were legal tenants. To drive them out, we hit on the idea of condemning the building. The public health approach to crime prevention. In December 2012 a team of twenty inspectors converged on the big yellow house. They encountered a pit bull on one porch and spotted a half dozen other dog cages on balconies and side porches. And ran for their lives. A hurry-up call went out to the city dog officers. The inspectors tried again. In the basement they found what they were looking for: rat droppings, faulty wiring, rusted-out exhaust pipes on the furnace. The house was a health hazard. Everybody was ordered out immediately. A blue
NO TRESPASSING
sign with my name on it was nail-gunned into the front door.

In 2008 Hendry Street was tenanted mostly by squatters. Now owners occupy just about every house. They have a stake in the street, a financial incentive to help them overcome their fear of helping the police collar the bad guys.

Dr. Barbara Ferrer, my public health commissioner, framed the challenge of violence prevention this way: “It's really about getting the community to feel like they have an essential role in building peace in the neighborhood. It's about creating a culture of peace.”

 

The other initiative was in national politics.

In 1995, the first year of the “Boston miracle,” John Rosenthal, founder of Stop Handgun Violence, erected a huge billboard beside the Massachusetts Turnpike in Boston showing photographs of people shot to death. Since the billboard went up, more than 600,000 Americans have died by the gun.

I once asked a fifth-grade class at one of the city's best charter schools, How many of you know someone with a gun? Over half raised their hands. The headmaster almost had a nervous breakdown. Fifth-graders.

Massachusetts has strict gun control laws. But more than 60 percent of the illegal guns seized in Boston, like the one that killed Officer Wayne Anderson, come from out of state. There's a flourishing interstate commerce in gun murder. Only federal action can stop it.

Yet after a gunman with an assault rifle massacred twenty children in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, and with 90 percent of Americans demanding action, the Democratic Senate could not pass universal background checks. The Republican House did not so much as hold a subcommittee hearing on guns.

In 2006 New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and I started Mayors Against Illegal Guns. We began with fifteen members; today MAIG includes over one thousand mayors, representing 56 million Americans. We're the people's lobby for safe streets. Our goal is not gun control but crime control.

After national legislation died on Capitol Hill, MAIG outlined an ambitious agenda to hire fifty professionals to take the fight to state legislatures in Nevada, Oregon, Colorado, Maryland, Delaware, and Connecticut. I asked Mike Bloomberg where we'd get the money for that. Don't worry about the money, he said.

If a slaughter of six-year-olds won't move politicians cowed by the gun lobby, maybe Bloomberg's millions will. For the first time in decades, the National Rifle Association is on the defensive. Already MAIG has run ads attacking NRA-cozy senators of both parties. More ads will follow against more senators who stood with the NRA against America.

Let's be real. The only language senators understand is money. The only message certain to get through to them is defeat. Democrat or Republican, some have to be driven from office as an example to the others. Then votes will change, and kids and cops now under the gun will live.

 

A CITY FOR ALL

 

St. Patrick's Day is a day when the Irish-American community swells to embrace everyone.

 

—
Mary Robinson, Ireland's president, during her visit to Boston, March 11, 1994

 

I was among the first elected officials in the country to endorse gay marriage. The political wise guys said I was taking a big chance: Boston is a heavily Catholic city. So I conducted a focus group with Frankie, a neighbor who runs a garage:

 

ME:
What do you think about this same-sex marriage?

FRANKIE:
If they want to be miserable, let 'em do it.

 

I knew I was safe after that.

 

I was mayor of all the people.

That included Boston's newest residents, the immigrants from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America who, with so much else, have changed the tastes of a city where London broil was once considered an exotic import. My mother's son, I set up a special office to help these New Americans.

All the people included Boston's women. I appointed Boston's first woman police commissioner, first woman corporation counsel, first woman director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), first woman mayoral campaign manager, and first woman chief of staff to the mayor. Under my administration, all city employees were given four paid hours off each year for cancer screening. When my public health commissioner told me how many African American women suffered from breast cancer, we fitted out a van to conduct mammograms and parked it in front of beauty parlors in minority neighborhoods. Thousands of women gained years of life from preventive care.

In my last State of the City address I outlined a plan to make Boston the “premier city for working women in the country.” A citywide conversation began about increasing workplace opportunity for women. Fifty employers representing 130,000 employees signed the Boston Women's Compact, pledging to achieve pay equity for women. My use of the bully pulpit influenced President Barack Obama's call to employers to pay men and women equally for the same work.

I also defended abortion rights for women. The Church disapproved. At the funeral for former mayor Kevin White, word came down from the hierarchy: Menino can't speak from the altar during the Mass.

I could expand on what we did for immigrants and women. But my record would not be so different from other big-city mayors'.

On gay rights, I made a historic difference. See if you don't agree.

 

Growing up in Hyde Park, I heard the slurs for “homosexual” but never the word itself.

Harry Collings was the first gay man I met. We worked together at the BRA. He is a good-looking guy, and some of the women in the office, curious why he hadn't asked them out, peppered me with Harry questions. I didn't want them to feel rejected, but I couldn't reveal his secret. So I hinted he had a girlfriend and left it at that.

As a city councilor in the 1980s, I held hearings on needle exchanges to contain the AIDS epidemic. I wanted to know if the rate of infection among addicts was falling in cities that were handing out clean needles in exchange for used ones. To find out, I commissioned two researchers at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, double-degree candidates in medicine and government, to study exchange programs in cities like New Orleans. Their recommendation that Boston set up a needle exchange was accepted by Mayor Ray Flynn, who claimed the idea as his own. As mayor, I wasn't eager to share credit either.

In my time in office I lobbied a conservative speaker of the Massachusetts House to pass a bill extending to the partners of gay city employees the same health benefits as the spouses of their straight co-workers. I came out for civil unions when it was still considered politically risky. When I endorsed gay adoptions, the Cardinal boycotted a Catholic Charities dinner honoring me. The controversy boosted ticket sales. Right-wing protesters shouted endearments as I entered the hall. My staff printed up hundreds of cards inscribed with the corporal works of mercy and put one on every plate. Haven't read them lately? Consider number seven. By adopting kids who would otherwise grow up in foster homes, weren't gay couples “harboring the harborless”?