Free The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic by William Bratton, Peter Knobler Page A

wheel and my eyes on my dad.
    Fortunately, it was toward the end of the morning. If they'd met up with us in mid-tour, they probably would have busted my father's chops a little, but these guys had been riding around for eight hours and all they were interested in was getting home. My father couldn't have known that. He was interested in not getting pushed around.

Chapter 2
     
    BUT THAT RUN-IN DIDN'T MAKE MUCH DIFFERENCE. WHEN I GRADUATED FROM Boston Tech in 1965, I knew I wanted to be a cop. I was eighteen years old. The City of Boston wouldn't hire police officers under the age of twenty-one. How was I going to get through these years?
    I had a part-time job stocking shelves at the Finast Market, but I lost it and then dropped out of Boston State College after the first semester because I couldn't afford to continue. The tuition wasn't high, but I was living at home, and I needed to earn a living. That winter, my uncle, Peter Boyle, helped get me an interview at the phone company, which was a fairly good-paying company. I got the job. It was steady, very secure, the kind of job a blue-collar guy searched for, the private-sector equivalent of the civil service.
    The first couple of months, I worked in the money room counting coins, which was awful work, but after a while they put me on the road. They gave me a little Ford station wagon to drive around in, and off I went, picking up the coin boxes from pay phones. We never had a robbery; who was going to lug around a couple of thousand pounds of stolen dimes and nickels? But after a while, I was assigned “specials.” I'd go out and handle jammed or overloaded boxes, and in certain rougher neighborhoods of the city the company didn't want to leave the car unattended, so they hiredtraffic cops, on duty, with the white hats and gloves. I had a police escort, a cop in the backseat eight hours of the day. I thought that was great.
    It was a soft detail for the cops, and mostly they would sit back there and read the newspaper. I wanted to be a cop, and here was a real live one in the backseat. I'd try to strike up a conversation.
    “Jeez, I want to be a cop someday.”
    “Oh, yeah, kid, that's good.” They would go back to reading their newspapers. All they were interested in, basically, was the overtime.
    Late that summer, I was promoted into the central office as an installer/repairman. I was on night shift from five to midnight with two or three old-timers, and in the daytime I got a job working with my father in a plating shop in Roxbury Crossing.
    Holding down two jobs, putting in sixteen hours a day, I began to understand how hard my dad had worked all his life. Plating was tough—dirty, grungy, straight labor. With all the acids and fumes, it wasn't the greatest of working conditions, and there was no workplace regulation. There was no OSHA in those days. Still, I liked working with my father. We didn't work side by side, but we had lunch every day in a little cafeteria-style neighborhood restaurant, which was as much concentrated time as I had spent with him in my entire life. I really enjoyed and appreciated just how hardworking, how straightforward, how good a man he was.
    One of the few side benefits of working at the plating shop was that every so often cops at the adjacent Roxbury Crossing station house came in to get their badges shined—on the arm, of course. I talked with them every chance I got.
    I had no social life, but I was happy to have two paychecks. I put some into savings and gave some to my folks.
    Toward the fall of 1966, I decided to enlist in the army. The Vietnam War was heating up, and guys my age had two options: get drafted and serve two years in the service of the government's choosing or enlist in the regular army for three years and pick your own spot. The way I looked at it, this would be a good way to spend my time until I could take the civil-service exam to become a cop. More important, I could pick the military police. If I couldn't