Despite Butterfield’s optimism, Cow Harbor Park would become a living nightmare for the citizens of Northport in less than five years.
What the town of Huntington failed to consider was that Northport was completely unable to effectively patrol the new park, thanks to a statute preventing the village from making laws on property they did not own. To further complicate things, Huntington could not step in and offer any assistance, as they were legally prevented from policing any property outside the town border.
The result was that Cow Harbor Park became a veritable no-man’s-land for local law enforcement. As time went on, the park eventually found its place as the new haven for the booze-chugging, pot-smoking, and acid-dropping kids who felt they had outgrown Laces.
One night in December 1981, a young man walked into Cow Harbor Park clutching a curious item—a stillborn goat fetus stolen from a local farm. Homeless and hungry, the man dumped the fetus onto one of the stone chess tables, arranged several matchbooks around it, and lit the strange assortment on fire in a failed attempt to cook a meal. When the charred carcass was discovered the next morning, the village suspected the goat had been killed and burned by a demonic cult. For years, farm animals and small pets had been vanishing from the area, inspiring rumors regarding Satanic sacrifices, but because no remains had ever been found, the possibility of the animals simply running away couldn’t be ruled out. The burnt goat fetus in the gazebo, however, changed everything.
Soon after, Northport Police Chief Robert Howard received a misguided tip claiming the incident was possibly related to an organized group of a dozen or so teenage boys from East Northport. Howard’s informant said they were known by an unsettling name: the Knights of the Black Circle. The informant said the Knights were easy to spot, as most of them wore denim jackets with inverted pentagrams painted on the backs. While the group may not have been responsible for the burnt goat fetus, they did exist, having formed as an offshoot of a previous group of misfit kids.
“We were the absolute last of the hippies,” says Jonathan McCuller, a member of the group. “This was around 1977 or 1978. We were about peace, love, and harmony.”
Despite the group’s supposed peaceful nature, their presence made the residents of Northport and East Northport uneasy. They began calling the teens “Circus”—short for “Circus Freaks.”
“I guess it was because we were all a bunch of outcasts,” McCuller says.
With such a nickname, it wasn’t long before the rumor mill took off.
“I remember being out on Eatons Neck with this group of kids when I was nine or ten years old,” one Northport resident recalls. “We were walking through the woods, trying to find the swampy parts so we could look for turtles or frogs, or whatever. They were like, ‘If you hear anything, just freeze, because it could be the Circus Gang!’ I didn’t know what that was. They explained to me that it was this violent group of kids who went around kidnapping people’s pets and nailing them to trees. I never encountered them, but I was told to be afraid of them.”
Jonathan McCuller disputes such lurid tales.
“We were completely nonviolent,” he says, “but we had big masses. I mean, we would come into the park a hundred-fifty strong, but no one was coming to hurt somebody. Circus never had issues with the law, besides ‘The park’s closed, you gotta leave.’ That sort of thing. We never even carried weapons. It wasn’t about that. It was more peace and love. We listened to stuff like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. We were more like a family. Ninety percent of us came from broken homes, so we made our own family. Some of us didn’t have fathers, but we had each other. It helped us through some tough times.”
McCuller had an especially rough time growing up in East Northport. The son of a black father and a white mother, McCuller was often ridiculed in a community that was then—and still is today—more than 90 percent white. Some kids took to calling Jonathan and his siblings “the McNiggers.”
Toward the end of the 1970s, McCuller, who was in his early teens, began hanging out in Cow Harbor Park with the rest of the Circus.
“That’s where we sold our pot,” he says. “We would hang out behind the gazebo and put a couple of spotters up front and in the middle. We would literally take a pound of pot, and ten of us would roll two thousand joints out of a guitar case. When one of the spotters would whistle, we would shut the guitar case and start playing guitar. The cops never knew the difference.”
While selling pot out of Cow Harbor Park did earn the Circus kids some money, it also attracted attention that was even more undesirable than cops snooping around the gazebo. Rival dealers from neighboring towns soon descended onto Northport, jumping each member of the Circus one by one until they had stolen all their marijuana. This caused most of the Circus to dissipate.
One day McCuller and some close friends ventured into the woods to come up with a plan to end the beatings. Standing beside a makeshift table fashioned from a large wooden cable spool that had been painted black, McCuller looked to his buddies and said, “Look, this is what we’re gonna do—from now on we’re all in this together. We never go anywhere alone. We always go no less than four.”
Paul McBride, a friend of McCuller’s, agreed with the plan but felt it needed something more—something with a little imagery to instill fear in those who wished to harm them.
“Let’s make a brotherhood,” McBride said. “We’ll be like the Knights of the Round Table.” Pointing to the black cable spool he and his friends had gathered around, he declared, “This is our Round Table! We’ll call ourselves ‘The Knights of the Black Circle’!”
The group saw he was onto something.
“We called Paul ‘King’ as a reference to King Arthur,” McCuller recalls. “We all had names. My name in the Knights was ‘Lancelot.’ I was King’s number two. He painted all the jackets for us.”
The jackets became the highlight of a brotherhood that soon terrified their former tormentors. McBride took each Knight’s denim jacket and painted the back-side black, adding white pentagrams, along with other Satanic imagery that varied for each member.
“The colors of our jackets were demonic and that was to freak people out,” McCuller says. “It had nothing to do with Satan; we just did that to repulse people, which we accomplished. People were too scared to even approach us when we were wearing our painted jackets. Not only did we not get accosted, but business boomed.”
Despite McCuller insisting the Knights of the Black Circle never engaged in violence, others disagree.
The Northport police suspected the group of violently assaulting a teenager before throwing him from a car. To this day, some current and former Northport residents recall hearing lurid tales of the Knights torturing and even killing animals like goats and cats. While almost all maintain that they never personally witnessed the Knights hurting animals, some say they did see another occult-obsessed teenager do similar things: Ricky Kasso.
Chapter 11
NO ONE KNOWS THE EXACT moment that Ricky Kasso became obsessed with Satanism, but Dick Kasso believed this change occurred when his son found a book on the occult during an innocent visit to the Northport–East Northport Public Library.
“The really bizarre, really deviant behavior, started in the seventh grade,” Kasso later told the New York Post. “We learned that he was very deeply involved in Satan, along with a number of other boys. He would go to the library and read about witchcraft and devil worship.”
Ironically, only ten years before his son’s arrest for allegedly sacrificing a friend to Satan, Dick Kasso, then-president of the Cold Spring Harbor Teachers Association, had publicly spoken out in defense of the Cold Spring Harbor Central School District Board of Education after they allowed an occult expert to visit one of the high school’s English classes to discuss the history of witchcraft.
“Education without free inquiry is indoctrination rather than the pursuit of knowledge,” he told the Long-Islander in a published letter to the editor. “We join with
the Board of Education and the District Administration in the continuing defense of this vital principle.”
Books on the occult still adorn the Northport–East Northport Public Library’s shelves today, and it is certainly possible that Ricky spent his afternoons flipping through their pages. However, those who knew Ricky well say a moment like this would have been far from extraordinary.
“The books that were never available in the elementary school library were the books on witches and werewolves and all those,” Grant Koerner recalls. “You could never get those because they were always being checked out. For me, that was normal in fifth grade. You know, I read the Necronomicon too! I’m sure if I told someone that back then, it would have ended up in the National Enquirer, but it was nothing different than anyone else in the neighborhood. My next-door neighbors and I played Dungeons & Dragons. That’s the real irony: from the perspective of what was going on in the neighborhood, what Ricky was doing was really no different than what anybody else was. . . .”
No matter where Ricky first made his connection with Satan, by the fall of 1981, it was solidified. Friends remember him showing up in Cow Harbor Park after school, preaching about the devil. Most paid him no mind. At the time, several popular rock acts like Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden were using morbid imagery during their live shows and on their record sleeves, so a stoned teenager occasionally rambling about Lucifer didn’t surprise many Northport teenagers.
When Ricky first started hanging out in Cow Harbor Park—now dubbed “the New Park”—he tried fitting in by bringing his guitar along. Some of the older teens would sit in the gazebo they nicknamed “the roundhouse,” playing Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin songs on their acoustics. Like Ricky, these kids were outcasts themselves. Many were separated from their families and living in Merrie Schaller’s house on West Scudder Place. A kindhearted woman in her early thirties, Merrie took in local runaways, giving them a safe and stable place to stay while they pieced their lives back together. Some locals joked, “Some women collect stray cats; Merrie collects stray kids.” Ricky, however, never found himself fully integrated into the group, despite his efforts.
“Ricky messed around on the guitar a little bit, but nothing like our caliber,” Glen Wolf, who was one of the New Park kids, says. “I was a really good guitarist at the time.”
Ricky’s sister Wendy also recalls her brother’s limited musical ability.
“He just made stuff up on the guitar,” she says. “I never heard him play any other way.”
Ricky eventually sought other forms of attention. One day he walked into the roundhouse clutching a pocketknife and started carving something into one of the wooden beams. A few of the other teens walked over to see what he was doing. Ricky walked away, revealing what he had written—SATIN. Ricky’s poor spelling caused the kids to burst into laughter. Further adding to his frustration and alienation, some began poking fun at him for it.
“Ricky was an idiot,” Glen Wolf says. “He was saying all this Satan stuff, but we would tease him because he spelled ‘Satan’ wrong. We just thought he was trying to act out, or act tough, or whatever. He was just pretending to do stuff to have an audience; to get laid, maybe, or to make people look up to him, or fear him. You know—like a tyrant.”
For a while, Gary Lauwers, who had also started hanging out with the New Park guitar kids, tried to balance out Ricky’s dark graffiti by painting peace signs wherever he could. However, the hippie musicians soon tired of the “Satin” references piling up in the roundhouse. One day Glen Wolf approached Ricky.
“Look,” Glen told him, “I’m not the graffiti patrol, and we really don’t give a shit what you write, but it’s all going to come back on us. The cops are gonna see it and they’re gonna run us out of here, so why don’t you go carve something else up?”
Ricky merely laughed in Glen’s face and walked away.
He may have been playing the role of a rock ’n’ roll rebel without a care, but Ricky’s frustration over his growing social isolation soon manifested itself back at Northport High School. He was failing most of his classes and lashing out at anyone who he felt had crossed him. Matters were worsened during the winter when Jimmy Troiano, one of Ricky’s few friends at school, dropped out. Then, in March 1982, Ricky was suspended five times in less than a month for brawling with his classmates. The final straw came when he was arrested for swiping a checkbook from a teacher’s desk drawer.
In response, Dick and Lynn Kasso approached the Northport–East Northport Union Free School District’s Committee on the Handicapped. Their plea was simple—save Ricky’s scholastic career by declaring him disabled so he could attend a private school. The committee agreed to evaluate Ricky, and in April 1982 found him to be “emotionally handicapped.” The Kassos could now search for a school specially equipped to handle their son’s issues.
Dick and Lynn eventually found a private boarding school that seemed promising—the Camelot Campus of St. Francis Academy, just outside Lake Placid in upstate New York. High up among the Adirondack Mountains, three hundred miles away from Northport, Camelot specialized in educating students with a clear history of violence, substance abuse, and problems with authority. It seemed to be the perfect fit for Ricky. However, on the day of his admissions interview, Ricky ran away from home before Dick and Lynn could get him in the car. They would not see their son again for seventeen days. By the time he reappeared, Camelot had already decided not to accept Ricky for admission, telling his father, “We will only accept a child who is willing to give us a chance.”
For a short while, Ricky was allowed back in the house while Dick and Lynn searched for another school. Sometimes Jimmy Troiano would come over to hang out with Ricky in his bedroom. On most days, the two would chat while listening to cassette tapes, usually Who’s Next or an Ozzy album. Other times Ricky would show Jimmy songs he had been writing on his guitar. One such song dealt with his Satanic fantasies. Strumming the few simple chords he knew, Ricky would sing:
We were all up in Aztakea,
And along came the devil.
He pointed at me and said,
“You, my son, are a child of the beast . . .”
“A big part of Ricky’s life was Aztakea Woods,” Richard Shock, Ricky’s friend from Little League, recalls. “He used to tell me, ‘You’ve got to come up to Aztakea, man! You drop acid and trees start talking to you! They start waving, man!’ Aztakea wasn’t too far from the road, but it was vast. Ricky basically started living there. There were a lot of structures in there, so that’s where he would hang out and hide out.”
“Very deep in the woods, there was a foundation,” Johnny Hayward says. “The story was it was an old church. I don’t know if it really was or not; there was only a foundation left of whatever it was. The path into Aztakea was only about three feet wide. It went straight and then curved to the left. When you were at the foundation, you were deep enough into the woods where you could build a three- or four-foot fire without it being seen. Everyone used to go out there to drink and smoke and do drugs. It was a nice, safe place where the cops wouldn’t chase you.”
If the weather was too unpleasant to hang out in Aztakea, Ricky would invite Jimmy over to share a joint in his bedroom. As Jimmy started showing up more, Lynn Kasso began to feel uneasy about her occasional houseguest. In April, while she and Dick were trying to get the school district to evaluate Ricky, Jimmy Troiano was arrested in Northport for third-degree criminal trespassing. He would be arrested three more times over the next two months, each time for burglarizing homes in Huntington. The last of these three arrests led to a conviction, and Jimmy was sentenced to five years’ probation.
While this understandably made Lynn uncomfortable, she chose to remain quiet, hoping to keep her home peaceful. Her husband, however, was far from happy. Between Ricky inviting criminals into his home and arranging drug deals over the family telephone, Dick had finally had enough. He confronted Ricky and an argument ensued. What happene
d next would be remembered down Seaview Avenue for years to come.
“Victor Puccio and I were playing touch football in his backyard,” recalls Richard Schock. “We heard this big commotion. Dick Kasso was screaming like a maniac.”
Schock and Puccio ran three houses down to the Kasso’s backyard fence. Almost as soon as they arrived, they saw Dick throw Ricky through the screen door and onto the ground.
“I don’t want you around here anymore!” Dick screamed as he came outside. “Don’t come back! I don’t feel safe with you around here!”
Ricky quickly scrambled to his feet and ran off.
“Dick Kasso had no business being a father,” Dave Johnson says. “I put everything that happened to Ricky one hundred percent on his dad. I’ve said it for years. If Ricky missed football practice, his dad would be waiting for him with a broomstick, and beat the shit out of him when he came in. His dad was brutal. He was physically violent with Ricky on a regular basis. Me and Ricky would come in the house and Dick would say, ‘Dave, you need to go.’ Later, Ricky would show me the bruises and say, ‘Yeah, he whooped my ass. . . .’ He was a real jerkoff.”
“If he tried that today, he would be in jail,” Schock says. “Ricky and his father didn’t get along—I saw that with my own eyes—but I think Ricky’s sisters also may have been one of the issues between them. They were the real athletes of the family, and I think his father kind of dumped that on him because his daughters turned into the athletes that he wanted Ricky to be. What made Ricky into the person he became was his dad. . . .”
Chapter 12
FOR MOST OF NORTHPORT’S RESIDENTS, the first snow of the year means the end of fishing, sailing, and the rest of the fun to be had in the marina. For Johnny Hayward and Gary Lauwers, however, this meant business. Beginning in early December 1981, Johnny and Gary would both drop whatever they were doing at the first sight of snow and race down to the harbor to meet each other. There, the two would watch as hundreds of people moored their boats to the docks in anticipation of the harbor freezing. At dusk, armed with flashlights and backpacks, Johnny and Gary made their move.
The Acid King Page 6
