The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide by Dick Lehr

receiving stolen goods. Four months later, on March 14, 1989, he was caught in the suburban town of Norwood popping the ignition on a car. The next week, he and three friends were arrested by police in Waltham, Massachusetts, driving two stolen cars, a Chevy Camaro and a blue Oldsmobile. The next month, he was busted by Boston police for coke possession. In August, he was caught trying to use a screwdriver to steal a car in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, and later that month, he was stopped by police for driving while his license was suspended. In October, he was arrested again for coke possession.
    Smut faced seven new court cases in the year since his arrest for breaking into Coleman’s. Mattie Brown scrambled to find lawyers and keep her son out of jail on bail. Then, in the midst of his year of living criminally, Smut made his biggest mess ever at home. He burned down the house—literally. Smut and Indira were living in his basement bedroom. She had run away from home after Shanae was born. The baby slept in a bassinet in Smut’s parents’ bedroom, while Smut and Indira occupied the partially finished bedroom. The room was unheated. Smut’s father had warned against using a space heater, but Smut ignored him. The heater cut the nighttime chill of late winter.
    Smut wasn’t certain how the fire began. “I must have thrown a pillow on the space heater.” He awakened to Indira’s screams, Fire! Fire! His first thought was how his father was going to kill him. Smut tried throwing water on the flames, but it didn’t help. The flames spread, running quickly up the walls, fueled by the comic books he’d hung like wallpaper. Smut ran upstairs.
    Mattie, a light sleeper, heard her son outside her bedroom door. “He came into the bedroom and then walked back out into the hall, pacing.” Smut was afraid to tell his father what had happened until Mattie yelled, “What’s the matter, Robert?” Smut blurted out about the fire; his parents leaped from the bed. Smut grabbed Shanae. Everyone got out safely. But by the time firefighters extinguished the blaze, the house was uninhabitable. The smoke damage was extensive. They had to move out while the house was repaired. Smut’s family moved in with his aunt’s family in Hyde Park. Indira moved back with Shanae into her mother’s.
    Smut’s troubles were now not the kind his mother, Mattie, could be expected to straighten out.
     
    This was especially true for the pile of criminal charges he’d amassed while on bail in the Coleman’s burglary. There was no longer a way out. One year after the break-in, Smut stood in court on October 17, 1989, and admitted his guilt. The judge sentenced him to serve two and a half years in the House of Corrections. If there was any good news to pleading guilty, it was the resolution of the other seven criminal cases. That’s the way the system worked—once Smut pleaded guilty in the big case, the other cases were eventually disposed of with little additional damage. Some charges were dismissed, while Smut pleaded guilty to others. The new sentences ran concurrently to the time he was already serving. Still, the cleanup came with a price. To pay for her son’s legal bills, Mattie took out a second mortgage on their house in Mattapan in the amount of $50,000.
    Smut entered the prison system at age eighteen. He was released in July 1991 after serving twenty-one months of his thirty-month sentence, shortened for good behavior. He was now a twenty-year-old ex-con. But little was changed—in him, in his world. He moved back into the house on West Selden Street, which had been renovated. Indira rejoined him in the basement bedroom, and their second child was born on March 13, 1992. They named the boy Robert Brown IV, and soon he was nicknamed “Little Smizz.”
    Smut resumed the livelihood he knew best—dealing coke. He spent his days getting stoned and dealing the drug on the streets of Mattapan, Dorchester, and Roxbury, though