A man in uniform
Pulido worked sporadically after high school, and remained in the worsening gang world of Hyde Square until the age 21, when he married Karen Soares. At that point he moved into Soares’s Mission Hill home and he had a child with her. He joined the Marine Corps reserves in September 1988.
Things took a downward turn for Pulido. In 1991, he and his wife separated and eventually divorced. And soon after, his father, Emilio, died of stomach cancer. Pulido took an honorable discharge from the Marines, and moved back into his mother’s Hyde Park home on Edge Hill to help his mother raise his younger siblings. A few months later, the IRS issued him a federal tax lien for $1126.
Pulido joined the Boston Municipal Police in December 1992 and the MBTA police the next fall. He also met another woman, Evelyn “Reese” Tucker; they had their first child in 1993, and married the following year. He paid off the tax lien and they moved around the corner to an apartment on Walden Street.
But street violence was never far away. His new apartment was practically within the Bromley-Heath development, which was fast becoming a focal point of Boston violence. Its Heath Street gang was not only in hot rivalry with Academy Homes, its nemesis across Columbus Avenue, and with Mission Hill on the other side; it had also become entwined in a vicious network of alliances and disputes with nearby Roxbury gangs.
In fact, it was just a block away from both the Pulidos’ Edge Hill house and his new Walden Street apartment that bullets struck Heath Street gang members on Halloween, 1994, sparking a misguided retaliatory strike that killed nine-year-old Jermaine Goffigan.
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In 1996, the Boston Police Academy accepted Pulido into its class. Carlos Pizarro was in the same class, of just under 100 people. So was Larry Celester Jr., brother of a Madison Park classmate of Pulido’s. And so was Roslyn Williams, who would have a child with Pulido in 2000.
Their affair may have been going on for several years. In a restraining-order application Williams took out against her ex- husband in 1997, she referred to “my boyfriend . . . a Boston Police Officer.” One person who knew her believes the boyfriend in question was Pulido, whom she had met in the academy. (Williams declined requests to talk to the Phoenix for this article.)
Williams did not make the force, despite a criminal-justice degree from Northeastern University and praise from her employers at the Suffolk County Superior Court criminal clerk’s office. According to documents from her appeal to the Civil Service Commission, she was rejected “for having had a significant association with known gang members in the city of Boston.”
Williams, at age 17, had been pregnant with Anthony Johnson’s son when Johnson — better known on the street as Tony C., or in the rap world as Tony Rhome — was stabbed to death by an Academy Homes gang member in 1988. Johnson, the commission noted, “was one of the most powerful and notorious gang leaders in Boston.”
Williams later married Johnson’s brother Paul, then in prison for murder. Their marriage was annulled before he was released, in mid 1997.
At that time, Williams lived on Walnut Park Street in Roxbury, within Pulido’s territory patrolling District E-13 — which had just reopened after being engulfed in scandal the year before.
Pulido's 1983 senior yearbook photo
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‘Echo plantation’
In 1996, the year Pulido began working in District E-13 as a rookie, a Boston Globe investigative report alleged that Area E detectives Kenneth Acerra and Walter “Mitty” Robinson had been stealing money and drugs during raids they ginned up by inventing informant sources. Both detectives served time. Another detective, John Brazil, testified that he learned the art of fraudulent search warrants from Acerra and Robinson, and resigned in 1999. Their boss, Leonard Marquardt, was reassigned to the identification unit amid a variety of allegations — which, at the time, was a routine administrative method of dealing with problem officers. They were all said to be part of the Area E “Corvette squad,” so-called for their shared automobile obsession, and rumored to be involved in a variety of corrupt arrangements.
This was just the latest scandal for Area E, but the worst since the “Tow Scam” of the late 1980s. That scandal centered on a Jamaica Plain auto shop, where (among other allegations) police would have cars towed — often for no reason — and held for days or weeks before the owners were notified, racking up huge storage fees. A BPD captain, a detective, and others pleaded guilty.
Area E — “Echo” in BPD radio parlance — was also well known for the racial divide within its ranks: it was dubbed “Echo Plantation.” Police relations with the public were strained, too. In the early ‘90s, civilians were fatally shot by police in Egleston Square, at Bromley-Heath, outside a Jamaica Plain store, and in Hyde Park; all were ruled justified.