Juice Monteiro is one of the best undercover cops in the city. Ask anybody who's worked with him - Boston PD, DEA, FBI, State Police - they'll all tell you.
He has a knack for names and faces. He can blend in with anybody, anywhere. And, after 12 years on the job, he never gets tired of the game, the chase, taking bad guys off the street.
And yet, for all his talents, Juice Monteiro has zero job security.
For him and the other 24 members of the Boston Housing Authority police force, there is no future, only uncertainty.
Every year, there's a mad scramble to find the money to pay for the police officers who patrol the city's housing developments.
Having built the projects, the federal government has over the last generation abandoned any sense of responsibility for the safety of those who live in them.
Since the mid-1990s, the feds have cut the BHA budget by $30 million, and the BHA police force has shrunk from 80 to 25 officers. The city has picked up the slack and the tab.
To their credit, Mayor Thomas M. Menino and the City Council have come up with various funding mechanisms to keep the BHA police afloat. Right now, fees from the Winthrop Square garage do it, and plans to sell the garage could secure funding for a year or more.
Holding bake sales to fix the parish hall is one thing. Last-minute begging to send a Pop Warner football team from Dorchester to the nationals in Florida is another.
But this is no way to run a police department that serves 60,000 people, including many of the city's poorest, most vulnerable residents.
Menino told me that as long as he is mayor, he will find the money for the BHA police.
But supplemental budgets are Band-Aids, temporary measures for things that need permanent, lasting solutions. The most obvious is to merge the BHA force with the Boston Police Department.
It's not exactly a novel idea. New York, Chicago, and other cities folded their housing authority forces into their police departments years ago. And BHA cops work hand-in-hand with the Boston police already.
But many BHA tenants, not to mention the mayor and Council President Maureen E. Feeney, who grew up in the Franklin Field project, fear that once you lose a dedicated force for the projects, there is no guarantee there will be dedicated patrols.
There is an understandable reticence at City Hall to let the feds shirk their responsibility. If the city assumes permanent responsibility for funding or absorbing the BHA police, it lets the feds off the hook. But you can only blame the feds for so much for so long.
The BHA force has become a farm team for other departments. In the last few years, BHA cops have decamped for the MBTA and State Police and departments in Quincy, Nahant, Mashpee, Tewksbury, and Milton, taking some serious institutional memory and experience with them.
Cops will tell you: If you can work the projects, you can work anywhere. It is a petri dish for community policing, where cops get to know the bad guys, but just as important, get to know the vast majority of the good guys as well.
Joe Kintigos has been a BHA cop for eight years. Not long ago he heard that Eddie Kilburn's mother died. Kilburn is one of those guys who is "known to the police," with a rap sheet longer than his arm.
But Kintigos went to pay his respects to Kilburn's mother, a longtime resident of the McCormack development in South Boston, a fact that didn't go unnoticed by Eddie Kilburn on the sidewalk outside the wake.
Not long after that, Kintigos got a call. It was Eddie Kilburn, and he wanted to turn himself in, because there was a warrant out for him for violating probation.
Criminologists call what Joe Kintigos did classic community policing.
When you're on the BHA police, it's called doing the right thing.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.
