The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston's Racial Divide

Front Cover
Harper Collins, Jun 23, 2009 - Biography & Autobiography - 383 pages
The Boston police officers who brutally beat Michael Cox at a deserted fence one icy night in 1995 knew soon after that they had made a terrible mistake. The badge and handgun under Cox's bloodied parka proved he was not a black gang member but a plainclothes cop chasing the same murder suspect his assailants were. Officer Kenny Conley, who pursued and apprehended the suspect while Cox was being beaten, was then wrongfully convicted by federal prosecutors of lying when he denied witnessing the attack on his brother officer. Both Cox and Conley were native Bostonians, each dedicating his life to service with the Boston Police Department. But when they needed its support, they were heartlessly and ruthlessly abandoned. A remarkable work of investigative journalism, Dick Lehr's The Fence tells the shocking true story of the attack and its aftermath—and exposes the lies and injustice hidden behind a "blue wall of silence." -- Provided by publisher.
 

Contents

January 25 1995
1
ParT one Two coPs and a drUg dealer 1 Mike Cox
7
Robert Smut Brown
29
Kenny Conley
45
The Troubled Boston PD
64
Mikes Early Police Career
78
Closing Time at the Cortees
93
The Murder and the Chase
102
No Official Complaint
158
Can I Talk to My Lawyer?
176
Dave I Know You Know Something
197
Cox v Boston Police Department
213
ParT Three JUsTIce denIed Then The TrIal 14 The White Guy at the Fence
227
The Perjury Trap
248
Acknowledgments
331
Notes
337

The Dead End
123
ParT Two TrUe blUe 9 8Boy
139
Court Cases
361
Index
369

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About the author (2009)

Dick Lehr is a professor of journalism at Boston University. He is the author of six previous works of nonfiction and a novel for young adults. Lehr coauthored the New York Times bestseller and Edgar Award Winning Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI and a Devil's Deal, which became the basis of a Warner Bros. film of the same name. His most recent nonfiction book, The Birth of a Movement: How Birth of a Nation Ignited The Battle for Civil Rights, became the basis for a PBS/Independent Lens documentary. Two other books were Edgar Award finalists: The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston's Racial Divide, and Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind The Dartmouth Murders. Lehr previously wrote for the Boston Globe, where he was a member of the Spotlight Team, a special projects reporter and a magazine writer. While at the Globe he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in investigative reporting and won numerous national and local journalism awards. Lehr lives near Boston.

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