1996-98: Corrupt Investigators
1996: Police drug robberies exposed
Five months after Sean Ellis’s conviction, the Boston Globe's award-winning investigative Spotlight Team broke the story of major corruption in Boston's Area E-5 station house -- the professional home of victim John Mulligan and task force investigators Kenneth Acerra, Walter Robinson, and John Brazil (until 1992).
The news exploded on the front page of the In February 10, 1996, Boston Globe: “Corruption probe shakes up Boston Police Detective Unit; The case of the disappearing money” .
It read like pulp fiction:
Tearing apart a West Roxbury apartment in search of drugs, a Boston police detective discovered a strongbox filled with cash. “I like this,” Kenneth Acerra exclaimed, an eyewitness recalled. He stuffed his coat with bundles of money and shared his bounty with his partner, Detective Walter F. Robinson Jr., tossing him thousand-dollar stacks, said the witness, who asked not to be named.
Accusations of police ripping off drug dealers usually dissolve into crossfire charges of lying between police and criminals. But it was not the first time for these two detectives, and there was something different about this case...
The Globe stayed on the story, and the reporters’ revelations unfolded like a movie drama.
For years, all three detectives had falsified search warrants to gain entry to the apartments of known drug dealers and illegal immigrants. Once in, they demanded money and drugs. But they didn’t turn it all in. They kept a large portion,of the drugs and money. – sometimes all of it – for themselves.
Considered workhorses by their colleagues for their aggressive policing, the trio actually reported finding drugs in less than half their 1992 searches, just forty-five percent of the time, and reported finding money with drugs only twenty-one percent of the time. As a former federal prosecutor noted to Globe reporters, “It is axiomatic that money is found with drugs during street-level arrests...Once you kick in the door, you almost always find cash.” Colleagues in comparable districts found money in 66% of their searches.
In exchange,for the victims’ silence, the dirty cops agreed either not to arrest themor to get their charges reduced. At times, by deliberately not showing in court up for scheduled appearances, the officers got the charges dismissed outright, extorting additional payments for this service.
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The Globe's series ignited an internal Boston Police investigation. Acerra and Robinson were stripped of their badges.
Soon federal prosecutors came in and were joined by the IRS. Secret grand jury proceedings got underway.
Months of federal hearing transpired in which local drug dealers and illegal immigrants found themselves in the unusual position of escaping punishment for their crimes in exchange for testimony against the criminal detectives.
It became apparent that the dirty cops’ scheme had netted them hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a decade - a criminal scheme that was ongoing before, during, and after the Mulligan murder and trials.
1997: Indictments
After eighteen months of probing, in March 1997 Acerra and Robinson were indicted on over forty counts of perjury and armed robbery.
The Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eileen McNamara (now Brandeis University journalism professor) took a jaundiced view of the convicted detectives' roles in Sean Ellis's conviction. After their indictments she devoted an entire column calling for his retrial, writing that he deserved a proceeding unsullied by dirty detectives:
March 12, 1997
“Indicted cops taint Ellis trials" by Eileen McNamara
It took the Commonwealth of Massachusetts three trials to send Sean Ellis to state prison in Walpole. It should take one more court appearance to send him home to await a new trial in the murder of Boston Police Detective John J. Mulligan… There was no physical evidence linking Sean to the murder, and no motive given beyond the ‘street trophy’ theory – for a killing that had all the markings of an assassination... An itchy street punk trying to snatch a gun dispatched his victim with such ferocity and precision?
The Mulligan case has stunk from the very beginning… and the odor of corruption that hung over the cop who was killed and over the cops who investigated his killing has to make one ask whether this case really was just a random act of violence....
Recapping that prosecution witness Rosa Sanchez “initially picked another man out of a police photo array” and pointed to Sean only after “an emotional chat” with Acerra and Robinson, McNamara asked:
... Is it such a leap to suspect that cops accused of falsifying search warrants, fabricating confidential informants and shaking down drug dealers might also have railroaded a street thug for the murder of...a fellow Area E detective whose own reputation was almost as shady as their own
1998: Convictions
At first, Acerra and Robinson vigorously denied all charges. But in 1998 they pleaded guilty in return for three-year federal prison sentences and $100,000 fines, paid in restitution to their victims. John Brazil escaped prosecution. He’d turned evidence against his "mentors” in exchange for a grant of immunity. He remained on the Boston force but soon retired.
After the convictions, several cases involving the corrupt detectives began to fall apart. In one instance, Brazil was accused by the defendant in a murder case of falsifying a police report in order to ensure his conviction.
More revelations of police corruption began rolling in, and the Boston Globe's editors decried a "Police Emergency in Boston." Among those charged were Sean Ellis's chief interrogator, Boston homicide Detective William Mahoney, who had "testilied" (lied under oath) in the trial of accused murderer Donnell Johnson, leading to his conviction. Implicated with Mahoney in the false story was Det. Daniel Keeler, another member of the Mulligan task force. (Johnson was later freed.)
To Sean’s attorneys, it all had a familiar ring . They’d patiently waited in the wings for Acerra and Robinson’s convictions to come down, to validate the retrial motion they planned to submit for Sean. The attorneys were convinced that Acerra and Robinson manufactured Rosa Sanchez’s photo ID of Sean.