Trouble in paradise

A recent murder shocked Martha's Vineyard. But the way this island community has been changing, should anyone really be surprised?

by Jason Gay

When Gary Moreis, a 37-year-old native of Martha's Vineyard, was stabbed to death at his auto repair shop early on the morning of Saturday, July 11, it was the first murder on the island in more than 20 years. Moments later, the tragedy was compounded when Moreis's father, Peter, a gentle, blue-eyed patriarch known affectionately as Peter Pop, collapsed and died of a heart attack while rushing to see his son at the local hospital. Before Saturday ended, Troy Toon, a 24-year-old who had recently moved to the island from Roxbury, was arrested and charged with the crime.

The Moreis killing was unsettling for a number of reasons. Not only was this the first Vineyard murder in a generation, but it involved one of the island's largest and best-known families. The Moreises, whose forebears had emigrated to America from Cape Verde, are prodigious in number; when Peter and Gary's funeral was held, on a hot Wednesday morning, blood relatives alone could have filled the church. The case was also tainted with allegations of drugs and drug dealing; Gary had recently been arrested on cocaine possession charges, and though police refused to say whether narcotics had anything to do with the killing, they refused to rule it out, either.

But the most intriguing element of the Moreis murder, of course, was its setting. Martha's Vineyard is a famous vacationland, home to a summertime population of more than 100,000 people, most of whom choose the island for its secluded serenity, its sunny separateness from the rest of the world. It is a laid-back community that hosts presidents and princesses, where people leave their keys in their cars when they go to the beach; a place not normally associated with serious crime. But here was the homicide of a Vineyard native -- a week after the Fourth of July, no less.

For the mainland media, the combination of murder and an island paradise was too good be true, and a fleet of reporters arrived Sunday afternoon in satellite trucks, notebooks in hand. The Moreis tragedy led every Boston television newscast on Sunday night. The Globe devoted four reporters to the story for three straight days. The Herald gave it full tabloid ink. "It's a chance to put murder and Martha's Vineyard in the same sentence, and how many times has the media been able to do that?" says Nis Kildegaard, news editor of the Vineyard Gazette, an island weekly where I worked as a reporter from 1993 until 1997.

Consistent in the media's coverage was a single, incredulous question: how could such a horrible crime happen here? Indeed, it was easy to sow drama, both on TV and in print, by juxtaposing images of the island's picturesque beauty -- beaches, sailboats, fishing villages -- with the grim, yellow-taped murder scene outside Gary Moreis's cluttered car repair shop.

Boiling point African-Americans have been a vibrant part of Vineyard life for years. So why are police and local officials making such a big deal about it now? For generations, Martha's Vineyard has been home to a substantial African-American summer community. In the Victorian-cottaged seaside town of Oak Bluffs, for example, there are black families whose island roots stretch back further than the turn of the century, and there are African-American luminaries here as well. The last living Harlem Renaissance author, Dorothy West, lives in Oak Bluffs year-round. Spike Lee summers in a custom-built home (with a 40 Acres and a Mule weathervane on its roof) on a local golf course. Last August, when Henry Louis Gates Jr. wanted to host a forum on national race relations with a panel that included Cornel West, Orlando Patterson, Anna Deavere Smith, and Charles Ogletree, he held it in a Methodist church in Edgartown. The night of the forum, $50 tickets were being scalped for twice that amount. From time to time, the Vineyard's African-American community has experienced problems with racism, but relations with the island's white population have traditionally been solid. On summer nights, Circuit Avenue, Oak Bluffs's main byway, hops with a multigenerational crowd of African-Americans and whites mingling in stores, arcades, and eateries. The island's best golf course, Farm Neck, has a number of African-American members (and hosts twosomes such as President Clinton and Vernon Jordan Jr.). Not surprisingly, the Vineyard's vacationing liberal elite is quite proud of this tradition. After Skip Gates's race forum last summer, Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols threw a party for the panelists at their beachfront home. Jessye Norman sang. But the island's easygoing race relations have grown shaky. Over the past few summers, the Vineyard has become a Fourth of July hot spot for young African-American vacationers, especially professionals in their 20s. A small percentage of these visitors are new to the island, but most of them are not. There are major events throughout the weekend, a few of them sponsored by African-American celebrities or fraternities. In 1997, NBA star Alonzo Mourning hosted an outdoor party attended by more than 1000 people in an open field near the beach. For the most part, these celebrations have gone smoothly. But some island people have complained about the youthful crowd, saying that weekend parties have gotten too big and too loud. Some of the complaints are legitimate; some are not. But most of the people who are complaining are white, so tension has been the inevitable result. Earlier this month, the Martha's Vineyard Times printed a letter from an African-American man who was furious at the way he and his friends were treated over the holiday weekend. "Realize that most of us are in our late 20s and have very respectable jobs, spend large amounts of money in your community, and cause no problems," he wrote. "In the next few months, I guarantee that you will see your little community's image tarnished." Roni DeLuz, a medical professional and local NAACP member, says many Vineyarders are caught unprepared by the weekend of African-American celebration. "They're not ready for the crowds," DeLuz says. "They don't anticipate that this isn't going away. Next year, the crowd is going to get bigger. But the crowd is going to be unhappy and bigger unless we educate people." The main issue, it seems, is law enforcement. On an island whose population can swell to 150,000 on a summer weekend, the local police have a challenging task. Occasionally, their actions have provoked anger among African-Americans. In past years, some people were offended that police wore black gloves, as if preparing for combat, or rode horses to patrol areas where large numbers of African-Americans congregated, such as Circuit Avenue and Edgartown's South Beach. Police say these are standard crowd-control tactics. But critics charge that such measures were unnecessarily intimidating and that white crowds wouldn't be patrolled this way. Paul Condlin, Edgartown's police chief, says some of his well-intended crowd-control ideas have backfired. Last year at South Beach, for example, Condlin had ropes tied from the lifeguard stands to the ocean. The idea was to give lifeguards on a crowded beach an unobstructed path to the water. But some people saw the ropes -- which neatly divided a section of the beach that was filled with African-Americans from a section that was mostly white -- as blatantly segregationist. Even an off-duty African-American cop from the mainland told Condlin so. "That really caught me off guard," the police chief admits. Condlin, the brown-haired, blue-eyed son of a Randolph cop, says his department, which has 12 full-time officers, can feel overwhelmed during the July Fourth weekend, especially when it comes to some of the parties. The Mourning party, which ran until 3 a.m. and featured several fights, was out of control, he says. So was another party that included more than 500 guests, a slew of pro athletes, a camera crew filming a rap video, and several reputed Boston-area gang members. Neighbors were furious, but Condlin says he was cautious about being too aggressive in breaking the parties up. "I could just see myself being called the next Bull Connor," he says. "I didn't want to be placed in that situation again." This past winter, Condlin tried to avert future problems. He met with DeLuz and other local NAACP leaders and coordinated a strategy to handle the July Fourth crowds. Another island chief, Oak Bluffs's Joseph Carter (a recent hire from the Boston Police Department), helped assemble a plan, called Operation Cultural Synergy, for island officers to deal sensitively with African-American vacationers. Officers from the Boston Youth Violence Strike Force were consulted about gang members, and a number of strike force members came to the island for the weekend. So did additional troopers from the state police. Still, there were issues this year. Some African-American revelers thought the police presence was too large. Others grumbled that a South Beach shuttle bus, which ended up catering almost exclusively to African-American beachgoers, was divisive. And again, bringing in police on horseback was seen as too much. But DeLuz defends the strategy, saying that visitors who were unaware of July Fourth crowd problems in the past may have misinterpreted ideas such as the beach shuttle bus. "Our education process needs to be faster, so people don't misconstrue what we do," she says. For his part, Condlin says that this year's Fourth of July passed without major incident. There were some big parties, including one in a wooded area of Chilmark where police ended up closing the road to vehicles. The Boston Youth Violence Strike Force kept busy, reportedly spotting more than 100 gang members amid the crowds. But overall, a cautious peace was kept. "I really want this to work, I really do," Condlin says. "If it doesn't work, it could really be devastating to the Vineyard."

But while what happened to Gary Moreis was certainly tragic, it shouldn't seem so surprising. The Vineyard may be a vacationers' refuge, but it is by no means immune from trouble. In recent years, the island's population (particularly the year-round population) has been swelling, and the community has been hit with the same kinds of social problems usually reserved for cities and large-scale suburban areas. There have been other serious incidents of violence. Illicit drugs are prevalent. Problems with adolescents and kids are rising, too, and race relations -- for generations a point of island pride -- have become tense (see "Boiling Point," right).

"Over the past couple of years, we've been cased by all kinds of people, in both good ways and bad ways," says Beth Toomey, the chief of police in West Tisbury, one of the six towns on the Vineyard. "Some people are looking at the island as a place to live, some are looking at it for professional possibilities, and others are looking to see how vulnerable it is."

Such perceptions would cause most communities to respond aggressively -- call a meeting, bring in the cops, impose a crackdown, maybe toss some people in jail. But this is an island community, and anyone who has spent time on an island can attest to the way islanders resist mainland culture. There is a different approach to doing things here. A favorite expression among Vineyard natives is "We don't care how they do it in New York," and this philosophy is widely applied -- as in, We don't care how you deal with it on the mainland; we're going to take care of things our way. Whether that philosophy now can be applied to a murder, though, is another question altogether.

---

The vineyard that most of us know is the sun-drenched, celebrity-infested version that shows up regularly in the travel and gossip sections of newspapers and on the covers of magazines. It's the place where President Clinton plays golf with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett; where Ted Danson, Michael J. Fox, and Spike Lee go to blow off steam; where Carly Simon might show up to sing a few torch songs at her own nightclub, the Hot Tin Roof. Drop in at the Bite, a local clam shack in the port village of Menemsha, and there's no telling what luminary might be munching fried calamari beside you.

Though the island has always attracted celebrities -- James Cagney owned a farm there for decades -- it has traditionally been an understated place, where the rich and famous honored the casual, glitz-free style of the community and the locals, in turn, respected the stars' privacy. But recent years have heard grumbling about the "Hamptonization" of the island -- the invasion of wealthy new visitors who think little of showing off their fortunes. Some of these newcomers are building ostentatious waterfront homes, spiking already stratospheric real-estate prices. Demand is so white-hot, in fact, that real-estate agents have taken to cold-calling homeowners and making multimillion-dollar offers on behalf of Range Rover-driving clients.

But this world of pampered plutocrats has little in common with the Vineyard's year-round community, which totals around 14,000 people. This is not the island you read about in People or Boston magazine, the place that tanned celebrities jabber about while lounging in David Letterman's armchair. It is a place where hard-working people scratch and save simply to live.

Much of the struggle is economic. Most of the island's commerce depends on a tourist season that runs just a few brief months, from Memorial Day to Labor Day. More than 50 percent of island earnings are made at retail and service jobs: waitressing, landscaping, store clerking, and so on. Though some people make solid money in season, the average wage is usually low. Dukes County, which contains the Vineyard and the gumdrop-size island of Cuttyhunk, is one of the poorest in the state.

"People see the island as some rich man's paradise, but it's really not," says Charles Clifford, director of the Martha's Vineyard Commission, a local economic and land-use planning agency. "There are real people living here. You have your caretakers, your jacks of all trades, your babysitters, and you have this enormous service industry in the summer. We don't all drive Maseratis down here."

Finding an affordable place to live can be particularly difficult for year-round residents. There are more than 13,000 homes on the island, but during the summer, most of these are rented out to vacationers, who pay in excess of $1000 a week (for a water view, the price can quadruple). As a result, many islanders who don't own their own homes are forced to seek alternative arrangements. Even some islanders who own their homes rent them out in the summer to earn extra money. It is not uncommon for year-rounders to move into smaller quarters from May until September, sometimes doubling or tripling up in a single room. Others are forced to leave the island altogether.

Laury Binney, the principal of the Oak Bluffs School, one of five elementary schools on the island, says he regularly encounters students whose families move into the local campground for the summer -- starting a month before the school year ends -- in order to save money. This trend has become so prevalent, Binney says, that he regularly assigns an Oak Bluffs school bus to stop at the campground.

"You have kids moving from town to town with their families, just to find an affordable place to live," says Binney. "To be honest, sometimes you don't know where a student is living at all."

The summer can also affect an islander's psyche. For several months of the year, they are surrounded by a community of affluence that they, in all likelihood, will never join. It is no small accomplishment to carve out a modest living in a place where wealth is so omnipresent -- and where most people are relaxed and on vacation. Most year-round people will tell you that the summer is actually the most stressful period in their lives; many of them work multiple jobs all season. Few of them ever get to the beach.

Outside of the workplace, in fact, there is little mixing between the year-round and seasonal populations. Bill Jones, a guidance counselor at the Oak Bluffs School, says that in the late spring he can wander up Circuit Avenue -- a lively strip of eateries, clothing stores, and souvenir shops in downtown Oak Bluffs -- and find dozens of his students. But when Memorial Day rolls around, they are gone, replaced by a new batch of summer kids. "The year-round kids see all these summer kids with all of this money, and it can be difficult for them to realize that their lives are not going to be like that," Jones explains.

As difficult as the Vineyard summers are, it's the winters that are the toughest. Though the island off-season isn't as desolate as it once was -- there are more people, more stores, and more ferry trips to the mainland -- it can still be an extremely claustrophobic environment. Most of the Vineyard's retail outlets, bars, and restaurants are closed, and almost all the vacation homes are boarded up and vacant. Islanders get used to driving down a dark country road and never passing a car coming from the opposite direction, or going to the local movie theater and finding just three or four people in the audience.

The job market also shrinks dramatically in the winter. Double-digit unemployment is not uncommon. Factor in the increased cost of living -- 25 percent higher than the mainland's, in most cases -- and things can get rough. "This is a difficult place to scratch out a living for 12 months of the year," says Ned Robinson-Lynch, executive director of Martha's Vineyard Community Services, the island's largest counseling center. "A lot of people really struggle."

Indeed, the off-season combination of isolation and joblessness can be particularly overwhelming for year-round residents. Robinson-Lynch, who came to the island 10 years ago from the Norfolk County DA's office, leafs through a brochure listing all the services his agency provides. There is mental-health counseling, domestic-violence intervention, child care for single parents, and the federally based Head Start family assistance programs. All of these programs, he says, are overflowing. There are 42 island families in Head Start. A new child-care program for mothers in need has a waiting list of more than 100.

Substance abuse is a constant problem as well. Alcohol has always been the island's drug of choice, but virtually every other drug has permeated the Vineyard, too. There have been arrests this year for cocaine and crack dealing. Several people I spoke to said that heroin, as on the mainland, is increasingly popular, especially among the Vineyard's twentysomething population. "Kids around here tend to be exposed to drugs and alcohol at an early age," says Robinson-Lynch.

The island's winter substance-abuse problem is virtually a cliché -- as the joke goes, what else is there to do? But it's true that drugs and alcohol swallow their fair share of Vineyarders every year. Says Tom Bennett, director of the Island Counseling Center and a Vineyard native: "When a person's resources and social outlets are limited, it tends to lead to increased use of things like alcohol or drugs to escape, and it also leads to depression. Things can get out of hand."

Yes, they can. This spring, Chief Toomey and the West Tisbury police were summoned one night to Nip 'n' Tuck Farm, a rustic dairy farm off the town's main road. There, moving around the dark fields with their flashlights, the police found a farm employee who had been shot in the face by a coworker, apparently after a drunken argument over a woman. The victim, shot through the cheek with a .22, survived, and the perpetrator was apprehended, but the incident was unnerving to islanders. The farm is a place where hundreds of island people buy their milk and take their children for pony rides. And it was very nearly a murder scene.

Despite incidents such as this, however, the Vineyard remains an extremely safe place to live, statistically speaking -- last year, for example, Dukes County reported 44 violent crimes, one of the lowest totals in the state. Residents feel comfortable leaving their house doors unlocked and letting their children go out to play in the evening.

In some areas, in fact, the island's crime rate has leveled off substantially. Throughout the late 1970s and early '80s, the Vineyard was a virtual Wild West of the drug trade, a key stopover for drug dealers before they hit the mainland. Large busts were not infrequent: 20 people arrested in 1975 on marijuana charges, the breakup of a major Vineyard-Florida cocaine ring in 1980, the 1987 seizure of a 40-foot yacht with $12 million worth of marijuana aboard. (The owner of a now-closed island restaurant, the Blue Water Grille, was among several suspects nabbed in a $175 million cocaine ring in 1991, the state's largest drug bust ever.)

"It's an old story. As far as drugs and other crimes are concerned, we've always been pretty consistent with the national trends," says John McCarthy, the chief of police in Tisbury, the island's biggest year-round town. "The idea that we're immune to anything -- well, that's someone else's pipe dream."

---

There is, however, a definite and widening perception that the Vineyard is in the midst of a serious transformation. This applies to both the seasonal and year-round populations. The summer buzz is all about the island's wealthy newcomers, with their trophy houses and dazzling disposable incomes. The parking lot of the popular Lucy Vincent Beach is wall-to-wall with expensive SUVs, and retail areas like Vineyard Haven, once centers of basic year-round commerce, are stuffed with frilly boutiques and expensive restaurants.

But there's also change occurring in the year-round community. The island's full-time population is expanding considerably -- by some 25 percent in this decade alone. Many of these new arrivals are white-collar telecommuters who can live anywhere and work from home. There is also a burgeoning Brazilian population; a Catholic Mass said in Portuguese is held year-round to accommodate this growing group. And, as always, there are plenty of people who are simply drawn to the island for its beauty and unique lifestyle.

Like the summer visitors, this growing year-round population puts new demands on the island. There are more restaurants that stay open all year, more markets, more police and highway workers, and higher taxes. The year-round boom has necessitated more civic expenditures, including bigger schools and the expansion of services such as wastewater management. There are even minor downtown traffic jams in the middle of winter.

Not surprisingly, these changes have caused some consternation among long-time year-rounders, who are frustrated by the increased costs and hassles. "For new people, it's all about convenience," says Chuck Clifford of the Martha's Vineyard Commission. "Instead of coming down and adopting the Vineyard philosophy, they bring their mainland philosophy and want to change the Vineyard."

Indeed, it's fair to say that the differences between the island and the mainland are gradually eroding. There isn't a McDonald's on the Vineyard (the island successfully fought one off in the 1970s), but there is a Subway sandwich shop and an All-Star Video, and a new Mobil quick-lube station. The locally run island hospital, beset by financial woes, is likely to be snapped up by a mainland HMO. And the island kids who hang out in the floodlights outside the Cumberland Farms convenience store in Tisbury, dressed in their baggy jeans, steel-toed boots, and baseball caps, look and live like kids anywhere. (Several years back, when the Gazette asked island teens what they most wanted to have on the Vineyard, the top answer was a mall.)

"I think what's basically happening is that you have a culture changing from what was essentially a rural place to a more suburban one," says Tom Bennett, the Island Counseling Center director. "And with the increase of population, there are values being brought to the island from all over the country, and these affect our kids both positively and negatively. But they aren't always in keeping with the island way of life."

Bill Jones, the Oak Bluffs School guidance counselor, says the problems he encounters among his 430 students today are usually "no different" from what you'd find at most mainland schools. There are substance-abuse problems, students living in dysfunctional homes, and scattered episodes of violent behavior. Though Jones hesitates to categorize any of these as trends, he says that the island's academic environment has clearly changed.

"We're much bigger," Jones says. "When we were a school of 150 or 175 kids, you'd see every kid, every day. But now you can go a couple of days without seeing the teachers. There's not as much contact anymore."

In fact, there are few places left where one can find the kind of old-world insularity that used to epitomize the year-round community. It survives in small pockets: at the Moreis funeral, where you didn't need a program to tell who the local players were, or at the recent Portuguese-American fair, where dozens of sunburned natives sat under a white auction tent, placing bids on loaves of sweet bread and baskets of cherrystone clams. You can still find the old island on the wooden porch of Alley's General Store, in West Tisbury, where a solemn, denim-clad group of local men, farmers mostly, quietly commiserate over their morning coffee.

But that old, reserved way of life is fading. A few years ago, when Toomey, the West Tisbury police chief, sent one of her patrolmen to a conference on gangs, the locals laughed. They also chuckled when the chief, a personable straight-talker who had come to the island in 1994 after stints in Tewksbury, Concord, and Northborough, suggested that residents should start locking their doors, watching out for domestic violence, and paying closer attention to what their teenagers were doing after school.

People laugh less nowadays, the chief says. "This place isn't what it used to be. Anything that can happen someplace else can happen here. And you can't be ignorant about it."

---

Historically, vineyard people, like all good Yankees, have had a way of downplaying and deflating serious events, be they hurricanes or homicides. Even Chief Toomey begins her story about the Nip 'n' Tuck Farm shooting by describing how, upon arriving at the scene, she entered a dark barn and walked headlong into a cow's behind. The Gazette, too, found the lighter side of the incident, as the farm's owner -- an irascible, white-haired dairy man named Fred Fisher -- explained in print that no woman was worth getting shot over, and that despite the near-murder, there was still plenty of milk left for sale.

Around here, people were known to describe serious crimes as "isolated events" -- that is, the kind of thing that was not likely to repeat itself. For years, the Vineyard was the kind of place where a police officer, upon spotting a vehicle swerving on the road on a winter night, might pull the car over, remove the keys, put the driver in the back seat of the cruiser, and drive him home. It was the kind of place where the town drunk was gently tolerated, poor kids found anonymously donated presents under their Christmas trees, and people chipped in, without fuss, to find a warm room for the occasional homeless drifter.

"Things tended to be taken care of quietly around here," says Ned Robinson-Lynch. "As a result, you never were sure about what happened."

It's not like that anymore. Later this year, there will likely be a highly publicized murder trial on Martha's Vineyard. The jury is still out on whether it's a sign of things to come.

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.