Missing pieces

The Globe's Mickey Roache revelations were incomplete -- especially where the Globe's own actions were concerned. Plus, Fells Acres myths and reality.

by Dan Kennedy

It was bad enough that the Boston Globe last week let former police commissioner Mickey Roache get away with his disingenuous, self-serving remarks about the arrest of William Bennett in the Carol DiMaiti Stuart murder case 10 years ago. What made it worse was that the Globe offered absolutely no mention of its own role in whipping up racial hatred during those terrifying, ugly days.

Roache, now a city councilor, was given an enviable platform from which to share what might charitably be referred to as his "thoughts": the front-page off-lead in the October 20 edition. In the article, Roache told metro editor Peter Canellos that it was the office of then-district attorney Newman Flanagan that ordered Boston homicide detectives to arrest Bennett. "They served the warrants -- to this day, I don't know why," Roache was quoted as saying. And this: "The one thing that has really bothered me is Willie Bennett was not in jeopardy of being indicted. He was not a prime suspect. The investigation was headed the other way."

A brief history lesson. Carol Stuart and her husband, Chuck, a nice young white couple from suburban Reading expecting their first child, were shot in an alleged hold-up on the evening of October 23, 1989, while driving home from a childbirth class at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Carol Stuart and her unborn child died; Chuck, seriously wounded in the stomach, told police they had been attacked by a black assailant.

For several weeks police swarmed over nearby Mission Hill, rousting young black men. On November 11, Bennett, a 39-year-old career criminal, was arrested on outstanding warrants. Though he was never charged in connection with the shootings, police and prosecution sources immediately let it be known to the media that Bennett was, indeed, the prime suspect. Bennett was cleared only after the real murderer, Chuck Stuart himself, ratted out by his brother Matthew, jumped to his death from the Tobin Bridge two months later.

Trouble is, Canellos -- who helped cover the story 10 years ago and should know better -- allowed Roache last week to get away with a he-said/he-said back-and-forth, with Roache leveling his accusations and Flanagan defending himself. The poor reader is left to try to figure out who's telling the truth.

In fact, as Boston Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis and Globe columnists Adrian Walker, Eileen McNamara, and Derrick Jackson (all of whom covered the case) quickly pointed out, Bennett was arrested within the context of a police-led, racially charged assault on Mission Hill that began within hours of the shooting. If Roache didn't specifically condone Bennett's arrest, neither did he voice any objections to the tactics that led up to it. Nor did he do or say anything publicly during the nearly two months that Bennett was Public Enemy Number One.

Canellos also misses the mark by observing that "for much of Boston, the real scandal was that the mayor, police, and prosecutors bought the hoax." First, it's hard to blame the authorities for believing Stuart, given the severity of his self-inflicted wounds and the testimony of witnesses who said they had actually heard Bennett boast of his role in the shooting. But even more important, Canellos fails to mention that the media bought Stuart's hoax as fully as anyone. When Canellos writes that the case "remains an enduring source of mistrust in Boston's black community," he again neglects to identify the media as being prominent among those mistrusted institutions. Perhaps he's forgotten that a Globe poll taken immediately after Stuart's jump showed that 71 percent of blacks surveyed rated the media's performance on the story as average or below average, a view also shared by 64 percent of whites.

The Stuart story was huge, and there was an incredible rush to get the latest -- a rush that led the local media, as the New York Times and Newsweek observed at the time, to an over-reliance on uncorroborated leaks and anonymous sources. Rumors that Stuart had a cocaine problem, a girlfriend, and a $480,000 insurance policy on his wife were just three of the stories that the local press eventually had to back away from.

But it was the Globe, in the person of then-columnist Mike Barnicle, that played a unique role by continuing to whip up racially tinged hatred of Bennett even after Chuck Stuart's fatal plunge.

Barnicle, whose brother is a cop, wrote that the Boston Police had "merely covered themselves with glory" by not actually charging Bennett with murder -- never mind that Bennett was securely in custody and not going anywhere. He revealed some shocking moments in Bennett's past, such as his alleged role in shooting a legless cabbie. He wrote of Bennett's 62 IQ, and of the fact that the Boston schools had rated him a "mental defective." He defended the cops on Nightline. At a time when racial tensions threatened to escalate into violence, Barnicle's instinct was to fan the flames.

Barnicle's mind-boggling assertion that the case would have gotten "10 times the coverage" if a white man had been accused of murdering a black couple was angrily branded "a lie" in an essay by Harvard Law School professor Christopher Edley. And Christopher Lydon, now host of WBUR Radio's The Connection, wrote of Barnicle in the Washington Journalism Review: "Often in error, never in doubt, he whistled the police tune in the case even after the truth was out."

Roache's rambling appearance on WGBH-TV's Greater Boston last week ("My recollection after 10 years may not be as precise as it should be") bears out what a respected Globe insider told me on a not-for-attribution basis. "I have known Mickey Roache for many years and found him to be one of the most perplexing people on earth to interview, because he is all over the map," the source said. "He has trouble focusing on a subject and staying with it. Mickey's recollection of anything would worry me." So why the page-one take-out? As the Globe insider puts it, "I couldn't figure out why it was a story, especially of that length and prominence."

Canellos defends his article by saying, "I think that the circumstances of the arrest are unclear enough that it's quite possible that Roache's version is true. It's also quite possible that Flanagan's version is true. But we laid out the dispute, and that's what newspapers do." As for ignoring Barnicle's role, Canellos says, "I conceived of this as a news story on the events surrounding the arrest of Willie Bennett, not a retrospective of the whole Willie Bennett issue."

Sorry, but it doesn't wash. The Stuart case was among the more painful moments in the city's long history of poisonous relations between blacks and whites -- a moment as significant, in its way, as the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles. Something that deepened our understanding would have been welcome. Canellos's piece, to the contrary, was confusing and incomplete. Yes, Roache had his say, and the Globe generated a week's worth of buzz. But in writing about an episode that still cries out for insight, Canellos came up with nothing but a few out-of-context sound bites.

It's possible that the late Violet Amirault and her children, Gerald "Tooky" Amirault and Cheryl Amirault LeFave, are innocent of all charges in the notorious Fells Acres child-sexual-abuse day-care case. But the Amiraults' media defenders, led by the Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz, consistently refuse to deal with the actual evidence against them.

Rabinowitz and company have zeroed in on a few fantastical claims of torture and animal killings in order to discredit all of the young children who testified. Television programs such as 20/20 have played over and over videotaped interviews in which the kids are seen clearly resisting pressure to say they had been sexually molested.

The truth is that most of the children who claimed to have been molested told their parents about it before telling investigators. And the infamous videotaped interviews were conducted long after the children had disclosed what had happened to them. The coercion that's evident on video, though obviously inappropriate, was the result of a frustrated interviewer's trying to get the kids to repeat what she knew they had already said.

The most powerful argument to counter the mythological haze that has enveloped Fells Acres is a report prepared in 1996 by Diane Juliar, then chief of the Family and Community Crimes Bureau, under then-
attorney general Scott Harshbarger. Harshbarger was the Middlesex County district attorney who oversaw the Amiraults' prosecution, so Juliar is open to the accusation of giving the boss what he wanted. But Juliar's conclusions are based not on wishful thinking but on investigatory records, including court transcripts.

What emerges from Juliar's report is a clear and consistent picture of kids who provide grotesquely explicit details of sexual abuse, and of being warned that their parents would be harmed if they ever told.

To take just one of numerous examples, one girl, identified by Juliar only as "Jx.," became upset when her mother asked her about a "secret room," a phrase that had come up in early reports about the case. The police were called, and a social worker tried to interview Jx. The girl said nothing -- yet later told a chillingly specific story to her father. "That evening," Juliar wrote, "while Jx.'s father was reading . . . a bedtime story, Jx. told her father that she had played some games at school, including an `elephant game' which involved her licking ice cream off the elephant which was pink and `on Tooky's lap.' "

The Juliar report should be required reading for anyone interested in learning more about the case, as opposed merely to absorbing and parroting the conventional wisdom. To obtain a copy, call the office of Attorney General Tom Reilly at (617) 727-2200.

This is not to say the prosecution's behavior has always been above reproach. In fact, the Juliar report itself raises a disturbing question. Juliar purported to examine the evidence against all three defendants; yet the report focuses almost exclusively on Gerald Amirault, who was tried separately from his mother and sister. Considerable evidence against the two women was presented at their trial. But it's troubling that Juliar, who was primarily concerned with the children's very first disclosures -- that is, the ones least likely to be tainted by aggressive questioning -- offers little in that regard.

Nor has the current Middlesex County district attorney, Martha Coakley, distinguished herself. Last week Coakley agreed that LeFave, whose conviction was recently reinstated by the Supreme Judicial Court, could go free as long as LeFave drops her appeals and refrains from giving TV interviews proclaiming her innocence.

Coakley defended the move as a way of protecting LeFave's victims. But it's hard to imagine anything more destructive to the First Amendment than a prosecutor who allows someone her liberty only at the price of her right to free speech.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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