Gary Nickerson: Judge or Cop?

It was winter, but I can’t recall the exact year. Around 1972-74.

I was commuting between Chatham and Boston, two nights a week. 

One evening, I boarded a bus in Boston for its return run to the terminal in Hyannis, where I had parked my car.

My habit, when getting back to Hyannis, was to drive up Main Street to the 24-hour Dunkin Donuts in the West End before heading back to Chatham.

This one night, as I, a young white guy, walked through the terminal’s lobby after having exited the bus in Hyannis, I overheard two young black passengers ask a middle-aged, black passenger for a ride to Dunkin’ Donuts. The gentleman declined their request.

I originally intended to keep on walking toward my car, but my conscience called me racist. I told the two young black guys that I was going to DD anyway, so hop in.

Little did I realize that police routinely kept an eye on the bus terminal from their station diagonally across the street.  

About half way to DD, three police cars suddenly surrounded us. In seconds, police hauled the two black guys out of the front seat.

Then a Barnstable officer, just before I was ordered out of the car, charged across the front seat from the passenger side. He stuck his hand in the crevice between the back of the seat and the bench. He immediately pulled out what he claimed to have found there – 20 small packets of heroin.

I do not now recall whether the passenger secreted the heroin there or not. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. But I do know that I was entirely surprised to see the cop find something like that so quickly.

All three of us were shortly thereafter arrested for possession of heroin with intent to distribute.

Immediately after my arrest and over the course of the next few days, several police officers who knew me well went to bat for me. They phoned the arresting officer, Manny Jason, and tried to convince him that I could never possibly be connected with these two black guys and certainly not with any heroin.

Their pleas and the pleas of others who knew me well fell on deaf ears. Barnstable police insisted that I was guilty.

I got a lawyer, Mitchell Benjoya.

Mitch told me the deal. Barnstable police would sever the case: the two blacks in one trial, with me as a witness against them, followed by me alone in a second trial.

If I testified in the first trial that I had seen the black guy hide the heroin in the seat crevice and the cop remove it, then they would drop the charge against me in the second trial.

It was totally clear. The police knew from the start that I had zero association with these guys, never saw them - or any heroin - before in my life. But the cops wanted my testimony in order to secure a conviction. In fact, they wanted it so badly that they threatened me with two and a half years in prison if I didn’t cooperate. 

I would not, said the police, go to jail for possession of heroin with intent to distribute if I, the prosecution’s only civilian witness, backed up their story of finding drugs that supposedly belonged to these black guys.

This “offer” came from a Barnstable police sergeant, whose name, I believe, was Gary Nickerson.

So I testified in the first trial according to plan, and the prosecution requested the charge against me dropped at the beginning of the second trial.

But the result was the same as the headlines. The arrest made the front page of the local paper; my exoneration was buried deep within the back pages weeks later. Ditto for the general public. They didn't know the details and didn't want to know them. Arrest was all that mattered. Today, sociologists call it an example of labeling theory.

Some things never change. It's a pattern I have seen repeated in my own life and in the lives of many others, some of them victims of a small-town grudge match that may have begun in high school or even in the family home decades earlier.

The arrest is the juicy part, the one that captivates the public's mind, but the details themselves are never known, no matter how exculpatory. Explaining these things to a lynch mob, including today's online version of one, is not even remotely possible. Social media, sadly enough, is composed too frequently of gangs of keyboard warriors keen for a taste of frontier justice. To them details are the devil.

I could be wrong, but I think the former Sgt. Gary Nickerson is now Judge Gary Nickerson, a superior court judge in Barnstable County. But who knows, maybe there are two Gary Nickersons, not an unusual name on the Cape.

Assuming the two Gary Nickersons are the same person – and maybe they’re not - then it’s not hard to believe that Judge Nickerson routinely approves the behavior that he himself practiced years earlier as a police officer.

Neither is it hard, therefore, to believe that the courts are merely rubber stamps for the continuing prejudices of law enforcement - and their vigilante proxies in today's world of Social Media.