“You can’t be trusted!” the older boy scolded.
Randy reluctantly agreed and gave it to him. Once Gordon’s van pulled away, Randy never saw “Joe” again.
This, however, would not be the last time a group of Northport teenagers gathered to view rotting human remains out of some misguided sense of morbid curiosity. Next time, it would be one of their own.
Chapter 19
THE PARALLELS BETWEEN RICKY’S AND Gary’s lives continued through the end of 1983 and the beginning of 1984. Ricky was still homeless when winter arrived, and he soon began sleeping in an abandoned building inside the Axinn & Sons lumberyard, just as Gary had months before. He braved the cold nights alone, surviving on white bread and cheap bologna—the only food he could afford. At one point, he dragged an old discarded couch into the building to sleep on, using his prized leather biker jacket to keep warm. When he couldn’t sleep there any longer, Ricky brought the couch up to Aztakea Woods.
Aztakea wasn’t any warmer than the other places Ricky had been sleeping, but it offered a relative degree of security. The land was private property, as it belonged to Northport resident and former New York state senator Bernard C. Smith, so the police couldn’t legally enter without a warrant. Even when the cops occasionally ignored this law, they were easily evaded.
“The cops could never catch us in Aztakea,” Richard Schock recalls. “We could run like deer, and we knew places to hide. A friend and I hid up a tree once. You think a cop is gonna look up a tree? There we were, forty feet up in the air, quiet as mice, just looking down at them—like that fuckin’ Predator alien.”
Ricky survived in Aztakea by keeping the couch close to a campfire as he slept. One night, however, a bad winter storm blew through, soaking the area. Ricky’s firewood supply was now useless. Stuck in the forest with no other options, he set the couch on fire and slept on the cold, wet ground. The next day he left Aztakea and returned to the patch of woods behind the Schock residence on Grove Street.
While walking his dogs one evening, Harry Schock saw the distant light of a campfire in his woods. After letting the dogs back inside, Schock went in search of the source. He wasn’t surprised when he found Ricky trying to sleep beneath a grove of rhododendron trees. Schock invited Ricky back into his home, and again erred on the side of caution by staying up all night.
The next morning Ricky awoke with a harsh cough that alarmed the Schock family. Harry immediately dialed the Kasso home. Again, Dick answered.
“Hey, Dick, it’s Harry Schock,” he said. “You need to come down here and get your kid. He’s sick.”
“Harry, I’m not coming to get him,” a groggy Dick Kasso told him. “He is not welcome here.”
“I don’t want to hear your bullshit,” Schock said. “The kid is sick. He’s hacking his guts up. Now, don’t fuck around—get your ass down here and get him to a hospital, or I’m calling an ambulance.”
“Look, Harry,” Dick said, audibly annoyed. “You just woke me and my wife up, and—”
“I don’t give a fuck about you or your wife!” Schock interrupted. He was now late for work and tired of Dick Kasso’s tough-love games. “I care about your kid. Just get your ass to my house, get him into your car, and get him down to Huntington Hospital. He’s sick.”
Dick again hung up on Harry Schock, leaving his neighbor to solve his son’s problems. Before the Schocks could intervene any further, Ricky thanked them and left. He decided to walk downtown to find a friend to crash with, stopping first at the Place. Walking through the front door, Ricky saw Tony Ruggi and asked, “Is it okay if I hang out in here? I’m waiting for some friends to get home. If not, I can wait outside.”
Ruggi said it was fine, and the two sat down to chat over coffee. Ricky told Ruggi everything: his homelessness, lack of direction, and inability to repair his relationship with his family.
After discussing these issues at length, Ricky said he was ready to get his life together. He was tired of living in the woods, sick of numbing himself with pot, booze, and hallucinogens, and wanted a future.
“I want to go back to Northport High,” he told Ruggi. “I want to graduate, get a job, a car, and my own apartment. Maybe a girlfriend to watch TV with after work, too.”
Ruggi was inspired by this sudden burst of motivation coming from Ricky, and asked if he wanted the Place to reach out to his parents in the hopes of making peace. Ricky said yes, and Tony placed a call to Dick Kasso. After a very tense conversation where Ruggi related Ricky’s goals to his father, Dick finally agreed to let Ricky come back home under the condition that he cut his hair, wear “decent” clothes, and stop cursing in the house. Ricky agreed and left the Place that day in January 1984, giving Tony Ruggi and Suzi Strakhov hope for the boy.
Once Ricky returned home, his parents immediately noticed his cough and brought him to see a doctor. He was diagnosed with a bronchial infection, almost certainly the result of sleeping outside in the winter, and prescribed medication. While Ricky recovered, Dick approached Northport High School, asking if his son could be readmitted. Dick hoped his clout as a teacher would sway the decision in his favor, but much to his embarrassment, his pleas fell on deaf ears. Northport High School had not forgotten or forgiven Ricky’s prior violent behavior or theft and refused to have him back.
Dick swallowed his pride and used some of his connections to get Ricky enrolled in the Washington Learning Center in nearby Deer Park. Initially things went well, until Ricky left early one day to hang with friends. When his teachers found out, they suspended him. As always, a fight erupted in the Kasso home. Ricky argued that he had merely left early that day and had not actually skipped school, but it was to no avail. Frustrated with his inability to get through to his infuriated parents, Ricky went upstairs to his room and packed a small bag of belongings. Walking out the front door, he shouted “Fuck this!” and again returned to life on the streets.
He would never attend school again.
Desperate for someone to talk to, Ricky walked downtown to vent his frustrations to Tony Ruggi.
“Why didn’t you come to us first?” Ruggi asked. “We might have been able to intervene.”
“I know,” Ricky replied. “I fucked up, Tony.”
“I can give your father a call, if you’d like,” Ruggi offered.
“No,” Ricky said. “No one can reason with my dad. He doesn’t care about me at all. He just wants me out of the house. Would it be okay if I left my things here overnight?”
“Of course,” Ruggi said.
Ricky thanked Ruggi for his help and got up to leave. On his way out, he saw a friend who was hard to miss. His long, flowing hair and strong, angular face had earned him the nickname “Lion.” No one bothered to call him by his real name. Lion had just gotten out of a family counseling session with his mother and stepfather. The two chatted for a moment, with Ricky slightly stretching the truth by saying he had been “kicked out” of his house. After shooting the breeze a little while longer, Ricky and Lion walked next door and caught a movie. While sitting in the theater, Ricky pulled a small paper packet out of his pocket and looked at his friend.
“You gotta try this dust I got, man. It’s fantastic. . . .”
Chapter 20
MUCH LIKE HIS FASCINATION WITH the occult, no one is exactly sure when Ricky Kasso became hooked on angel dust. Some say it was Jimmy Troiano who got the Acid King to switch from LSD to PCP sometime in 1983, while others maintain that it was a friend from nearby Kings Park. Whoever is correct, one fact remains true—by January 1984, Ricky wasn’t just hooked on the drug, but he was also taking very dangerous trips into places like the South Bronx to buy large quantities to sell.
Phencyclidine—also called “PCP” and “angel dust” on the street—was first discovered in 1956 by Dr. Victor H. Maddox, a chemist for the Michigan-based Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company, while researching synthetic painkillers. While Maddox’s discovery was purely accidental, it was not without proposed scientific merit. Within a year,
phencyclidine was being tested as a surgical anesthetic. It was eventually approved for use and marketed under the name “Sernyl.” However, problems soon arose. Patients began experiencing delirium, hallucinations, and other dissociative effects after being administered the anesthetic intravenously. In 1965 the drug was discontinued, and by 1967, it was strictly limited to use during veterinary surgery.
That same year, during the so-called Summer of Love, phencyclidine hit the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where it was immediately embraced by the hippie community due to the drug’s mind-altering effects. Phencyclidine was now being sold on the streets in capsules called “PeaCe Pills,” and later as “angel dust” when offered in its pure form, a white crystalline powder. It would be another decade before the United States government took notice and declared PCP an illegal Schedule II controlled substance. As is often the case, the legal classification did little to curb recreational use.
PCP may not have caught on with the counterculture of the late 1960s in the same way marijuana and LSD had, but by 1984, the drug was making a strong comeback. For Ricky, selling PCP was quickly becoming a significant source of income. The residents of Northport and Kings Park rarely, if ever, had access to the drug, leading to sizeable curiosity and demand. Ricky and a small group of friends took advantage of this, traveling into the city to buy their stock. He had been making similar trips to buy purple microdots during the past three years, and by this time, he had become a seasoned pro.
In early 1984 the South Bronx resembled a bombed-out war zone more than a habitable community. Twenty years earlier, a combination of white residents leaving the borough for cushy suburbs like Northport, steadily decreasing property values, and the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which destroyed entire neighborhoods and uprooted thousands of people, set off a chain reaction that completely gutted the South Bronx. Ricky and his friends, however, didn’t mind driving into an area like this to score. In later years, many Northport residents projected the collective sins of the local youth onto Ricky, portraying him as the village’s sole teenage drug peddler, but he was merely one of the many aimless Suffolk County kids selling hallucinogens for pocket cash.
“These guys were heavily into dope,” Richard Schock says. “Those neighborhoods were death traps. Let’s be honest—if you’re white, eyeballs are going to be clicking the second you walk into that neighborhood for two reasons: one, you’re looking to buy; and two, they know you’re not living there. They’re going to try and rip you off, if they can. They’ll either give you rat poison or just kill you and take your money. You really had to be desperate crawling in there.”
Desperate or not, Ricky always made it safely back to Suffolk County, where he could unload. While Ricky was starting this new venture, Gary Lauwers was finally making a little money of his own.
Earlier that winter, he, Johnny Hayward, and their mutual friend Mark Florimonte found work washing dishes at the Australian Country Inn & Gardens on Fort Salonga Road. The three had a great time working at the restaurant, often blasting music to sing along with before and after the dinner rush. During the week, the crew usually worked until eleven p.m., allowing Johnny and Mark to get a full night’s rest before school. On weekends, however, the three usually didn’t get out until after four a.m., and they often sat outside drinking until the sun came up.
While the Australian Country Inn & Gardens was providing Gary with a steady paycheck, he still failed to curb some of his old habits.
“Gary and I used to steal cases of Foster’s Lager,” Johnny Hayward says. “The restaurant didn’t take inventory at all. We took lots of cases of Foster’s.”
One night Johnny and Gary took things a step further when they grabbed two kegs of beer and pushed them out the window above the dishwashing station. Below was a table the two had set up in the hopes of catching the kegs. Instead they bounced right off the table and rolled clear across Fort Salonga Road. Watching out the window, Johnny and Gary couldn’t help but laugh.
Sometimes Gary’s sister, Nicole, would pick him up from work and give him a ride home. She hoped Gary would eventually quit the job and go back to school, but when her brother wasn’t stealing cases of beer or breaking into parked cars, he was hanging out with Ricky Kasso. The two hadn’t been close in recent years, but once Ricky became a big-time drug dealer in Northport, Gary started tagging along with his old schoolmate more often, sometimes dropping acid with him in Aztakea.
Soon Gary began joining Ricky on other adventures. As Ricky got more and more into dust, he started spending his evenings in cemeteries, particularly the Crabmeadow Burying Ground off Waterside Avenue. Inside the woods that now make up the Henry Ingraham Nature Preserve, a graveyard resides on a small hill bordered on all sides by large pine trees. For years, local teenagers referred to it as “the Indian cemetery” due to the Native American settlement that had occupied the area centuries before. Despite its nickname, the graveyard is not an “ancient Indian burial ground,” but the final resting place of more than 150 Long Island residents interred there between 1738 and 1892.
As 1983 came to an end, Ricky began leading friends like Gary Lauwers and Rich Barton onto the hill, where they would smoke PCP, take purple microdots, and listen to him discuss Satanism. Ricky’s words, coupled with the eerie surroundings, provided a special thrill to his cohorts. Sometimes Ricky would bring a boom box, sit next to a grave, and record himself chanting, “Satan . . . Satan . . . Satan . . .” To everyone’s shock and surprise, the tapes, when played back, seemed to contain a series of unrecognizable and otherworldly voices in the background.
Ricky and his friends soon became convinced the devil himself had possessed these cassette tapes.
“It got dark after he started doing all the angel dust,” Johnny Hayward says. “Dust makes you fucking crazy. That’s when you lose yourself. If you eat ten hits of mescaline, and then you smoke ten bags of dust, you are done. If you can even get up to walk, you are going to walk like a zombie with a big ol’ shit in its pants. Your arms are probably going to float up in the air all by themselves, and you’re going to have to remember to put them down. LSD, mushrooms, or any other hallucinogenics, have to go with your mood. You don’t want to do anything like that when you’re really depressed because it’s going to make it worse. If you smoke a joint of angel dust and read The Satanic Bible, it will amplify the feelings you presently have. You only want to do that shit when life is good—and I think you could call this a pretty dark time. . . .”
Gary Lauwers also started reading The Satanic Bible around this time, though most of his friends insist he only did so to fit in with people like Ricky. On a couple occasions when Gary accompanied Ricky to the Crabmeadow Burying Ground, Ricky suggested digging up a body. The first few times, Ricky’s friends said no, and the subject was changed.
However, one chilly night in March 1984, they all said yes.
Grabbing a shovel he had hidden behind a tree, Ricky started digging into the grave of Ruth Harriet Scudder, who had died nearly one hundred and seventy years before at the age of twenty-three. Scudder’s grave sat on the back side of the hill, just out of view of anyone who might wander into the cemetery. Gary, along with Rich Barton, Albert Quinones, and their friend J. P., all watched as Ricky hurled heaps of cold dirt onto the ground. The four stood pensively, waiting for Ricky’s shovel to make a loud thud as it hit the lid of a coffin—or perhaps the shrill crack of it slicing into bone.
Surprisingly, none came.
Ricky dug seven feet into Scudder’s grave without finding any hint of prior occupation. Tired and disappointed, he gave up and the group left.
In later years, people often confused Ricky’s motives with Randy Guethler’s reason for stealing parts of Joseph Morrell’s body—money. The truth was far more sinister. One day Ricky and his friend Richard Schock were hanging out in the woods behind Grove Street. Usually, their discussions focused on cars or music, with Ricky being particularly fascinated with the mystery of
Jim Morrison’s missing Shelby GT500 Mustang. However, on this afternoon in early April, the conversation quickly turned dark.
“I’m trying to get a skull,” Ricky said, out of the blue. “Do you know where I can get a skull?”
“How the fuck would I know where to get a skull, Ricky?” Richard replied, angered by this ridiculous question.
Ricky was oblivious to Richard’s contempt.
“We went to the Crabmeadow Burying Ground,” he continued. “We dug, and we dug, and we dug, but we didn’t find shit!”
“Ricky, those graves are from the 1740s,” Richard replied. “Those skulls probably decayed a long time ago. Bones rot too, ya know!”
“I’m just gonna go try a mausoleum,” Ricky said, recalling Randy’s and Gordon’s efforts. “Pagan Pat says we gotta get a skull so we can go to the Amityville Horror house.”
Nearly ten years earlier, during the early morning hours of November 13, 1974, Ronald “Butch” DeFeo Jr. took a rifle and systematically murdered his parents, Ronald Sr. and Louise, along with his four siblings, Dawn, Allison, Marc, and John Matthew, while they slept inside their Amityville home. DeFeo was later arrested and charged with six counts of second-degree murder. He was found guilty one year later and sentenced to life in prison.
Twenty-eight days after Ronald Jr.’s conviction, George and Kathleen Lutz moved into the former DeFeo home at 112 Ocean Avenue with their three children. The family later claimed they were terrorized by supernatural forces within the house, eventually fleeing after only four weeks spent there.
Two years later, in September 1977, Jay Anson’s book The Amityville Horror was published, bringing the Lutz story to a national audience. Suddenly the small Long Island village of fewer than nine thousand residents was catapulted to stardom. The book was an instant bestseller, leading to a hit Hollywood movie that had, by 1984, birthed two sequels. For most in Suffolk County, the whole saga was a blight on the community, leading to an unwelcome horde of reporters, thrill seekers, and filmmakers.
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