Frank Fasulo doesn’t know it, but in the last nine days he has learned the original meaning of the word outlaw. Today the word has come to refer to any criminal. In the ancient English law, it had a more specific definition. If a court declared you an outlaw, you were literally outside the law — that is, the law no longer protected you. An outlaw could be robbed or even killed without penalty. There was no sanctuary for him in all England. So it is for Frank Fasulo. The Boston Police Department has no interest in arresting and trying him. They want him dead. No sanctuary.
They caught up to Darryl Sikes just two days after the murder. Found him holed up in the old Madison Hotel, near the Boston Garden. Four BPD cops burst into the room and fired forty-one rounds into his body. To a man, the entire entry team swore Sikes was reaching for a gun; none was ever found.
Now it’s Fasulo’s turn. The police want him even worse than Sikes. It was Fasulo who had… well, most of them can’t even say it.
And where can Fasulo run? Every law-enforcement agency in the world will return him to the Boston police on a murder warrant.
So it has to end this way. That is all Frank Fasulo knows for sure. As he plummets, in those three seconds as he feels his body accelerate and the wind tugs his jacket off his shoulders like a helpful host, it is his only thought: There was no other ending — some cop was going to find him sooner or later.
Ten years later. August 17, 1987, 2:25 A.M.
Again we are in Mission Flats, in the sort of three-family wood-frame structure Bostonians call a triple decker. On the third-floor landing, eight policemen crouch. They stare at a door, listening intently as if the door might speak.
The door is lacquered in China red. There are two small holes in the door frame, just above eye level, where a mezuzah was once attached with little gold brads. Fifty years ago, this neighborhood was predominantly Jewish. The mezuzah is long gone now. Today the apartment is a stashpad for a crew called the Mission Posse.
No doubt the door has been reinforced somehow. Most likely, it is wedged shut with a makeshift police lock, a board jammed at a forty-five-degree angle between the door and the floor, anchored in place by wood blocks bolted to the floorboards. To get into the apartment, the police will have to reduce the door to splinters. That could take fifteen seconds or it could take several minutes — an eternity, long enough to flush cocaine, burn cuff lists, toss scales and baggies through holes in the walls. Too long. Now, a sheet-metal door you could judge, you could predict how it would hold up. The thin ones bend, become distorted, and quickly twist out of their frames. The thick ones just dent, and your only choice is to try to rupture the hinges, the lock, or the entire door frame. But these old wood doors? Hard to say. This one looks solid.
Julio Vega certainly doesn’t like the look of it. Vega glances at his partner, an Area A-3 Narcotics detective named Artie Trudell, and shakes his head. Vega’s message: They don’t make doors like this anymore.
Trudell, an enormous man with an orange-red beard, smiles back at Vega and flexes his biceps.
Vega and Trudell are excited, nervous. This is a first, a raid that is all theirs. The target is a major player: The Mission Posse moves more rock in this neighborhood than anyone else by far. The no-knock warrant is all theirs too, based on their own investigation — two weeks of surveillance, and a stream of information from a CI endorsed by Martin Gittens himself. The warrant is bulletproof.
Detective Julio Vega could be bulletproof, too, with a few more scores like this one. Vega has a plan. He’ll take the sergeant’s exam in the fall, work drug cases a couple more years, then try for an assignment in Special Investigations or even Homicide. Of course, Vega keeps his careerism to himself because his partner, the big redhead Artie Trudell, doesn’t get it.
Trudell does not dream of going to Homicide or anyplace else. He is happy just to work narcotics cases. Some guys are like that. They prefer cases that are victimless, with suspects as professional as their police adversaries. It’s neater that way. Vega has tried to instill a little ambition in Trudell. Told him he won’t climb the ladder without working victim crimes. He even hinted once that Trudell should take the sergeant’s exam, but Artie just laughed it off. ‘What?’ Artie said. ‘And give up all this?’ At the time, they were sitting in a battered Crown Vic looking at the moonscape of Mission Avenue in the Flats — block after block of ashy, broken tenements. How do you deal with a guy like that?
The hell with him, Vega figures. Let Artie chase crackheads around the Flats forever. Let him rot here. But not Julio Vega. Vega is a player. He’s moving up. Up and out. If, if… See, Detective Vega can dream about Homicide or SIU all day, but first he needs to make a little noise. He needs a few skins to show the Commissioner’s office. He needs this score.
Vega and Trudell stand beside the apartment door like sentinels.
The other men avoid the area directly in front of the door as best they can, but the landing is small, and they wind up arrayed along the stairs leading up to the next floor. There are four uniforms among them. The rest — the Narcotics guys — wear jeans, sneakers, and Kevlar vests. Casual. None of the commando-style gear other units use. This is the Flats; these guys have gone through doors before.
For several seconds the men listen for noise in the apartment and, hearing none, they turn to Vega for the signal.
Vega kneels against the wall, then nods toward Trudell.
The burly detective steps in front of the door. The temperature in the hallway is pushing ninety degrees. Trudell is sweating in his vest. His T-shirt is stained. His beard is damp; curly orange tendrils glisten under his chin. The big policeman smiles, maybe out of nervousness. He hoists a five-foot steel pipe into the crook of his right elbow. Later, the newspapers will describe the pipe as a battering ram, but in truth it is just a segment of water pipe filled with concrete and fitted with two L-shaped handles.
Vega holds up five fingers, then four, three, two — on one he points at Trudell.
Trudell smashes the door with the pipe. The stairwell echoes with a sound like a bass drum.
The door does not budge.
Trudell steps back, drives the pipe into the door again.
The door shakes but it holds.
The other cops watch, increasingly uneasy. ‘Come on, big man,’ Vega encourages.
A third strike. The bass-drum sound.
A fourth — this time with a different sound, a boom-crack.
One of the upper door panels bursts out from the inside blasted out — a shot fired from inside the apartment a spray of blood sneezes out of Trudell’s forehead red mist a scrap of scalp and Trudell is on his back, the crown of his head butterflied open.
The pipe falls to the floor with a thump.
Cops jump back, throw themselves flat against the stairs, against one another. ‘Artie!’ one yells. Another: ‘GunGunGunGunGun!’
Vega stares at Trudell’s body. Blood is everywhere. Red droplets spattered on the wall, a pool of it spreading thick under Trudell’s head. The pipe lies right in front of the door. Vega wants to pick it up but his legs won’t move.
PART ONE
‘The quality of a nation’s civilization can be largely measured by the methods it uses in the enforcement of its criminal law.’
1
