The Acid King

by Jesse P. Pollack

  Wallace had one person in mind for this assignment; twenty-six-year-old wunderkind David Breskin. In the past year, Breskin had made a name for himself at Rolling Stone as the first journalist in many years to get famous jazz musician Miles Davis to sit down for an interview. More importantly, however, Breskin had just finished a piece about the recent wave of teenage suicides sweeping America. The young writer had proven to Wallace he could he handle a tough assignment, but also approach a community shaken by tragedy and make its citizens comfortable enough to talk on the record.

  These were the qualities Wallace needed for the Northport story.

  When Wallace telephoned Breskin, asking if he would be interested in traveling to Long Island to cover the case for a long-form article, he certainly found the offer tempting. He too had been following the sensational newspaper coverage and smelled bullshit. At the same time, however, Breskin was worried the assignment might pigeonhole him as the “teen death guy.” He had just finished his suicide article, which already had been a tough subject for him to report on, as he was still haunted by his father taking his own life a few years earlier.

  In the end, the prospect of writing about such an interesting case for a much beloved publication won him over, and Breskin agreed to go to Northport. Rolling Stone set Breskin up with a press pass and an expense account to cover transportation, food, supplies, and lodging.

  By now it was obvious the Kassos were not going to allow a public memorial service to be held for their son, so ten of Ricky’s friends who weren’t afraid to openly mourn the most despised teenager in the country decided to hold their own gathering. Clad in AC/DC shirts, they quietly left their Northport and Kings Park homes and walked down to the New Park. There, they clung to one another as they wept and carved remembrances into the wooden benches nearby. One girl, a fourteen-year-old friend of Ricky’s named Denise, noticed the word Satan written on one of the benches. She tearfully grabbed a blue marker from her pocket and crossed it out, replacing it with I love you, Ricky.

  Another friend approached and added, Good luck, Jimmy.

  The next morning David Breskin picked up a rental car for his trip to Northport. He then drove back to his apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, packed up his Sony Pressman tape recorder, a sack of fresh Sony cassette tapes, several spiral notebooks, and a bag of clothes. Breskin was careful to select his wardrobe for this assignment. Dress shirts, jackets, and ties for interviewing police, parents, and lawyers; and ratty jeans, concert shirts, and Converse Chuck Taylor high-tops for the crucial act of talking to the teenagers who had known Ricky and Gary. With his long, curly hair and boyish looks, Breskin felt he could easily pass for “one of them,” given the proper attire. He loaded up his rental car and headed east on I-495 toward Long Island.

  Chapter 40

  DAVID BRESKIN SAT ALONE IN his rented room at the Chalet Inn & Suites in Centerport, clutching the telephone’s receiver in his hand. He stared at the open phone book in front of him, debating whether to dial that phone number again. Circled in pencil was the listing for the Lauwers family. He had already dialed the number four times but hung up before it even rang.

  How do you casually speak to the parents of a boy who was so brutally murdered? he wondered. Still, this was the job he had been sent to do, so Breskin toughened up. On the fifth try, he finally called the Lauwers home. His anxiety was temporarily alleviated when Gary’s brother, Michael, answered the phone instead of his parents. Michael was polite but brief, telling Breskin that his family wasn’t granting any further interviews. Breskin understood and thanked Michael before hanging up.

  The young writer set his notebook down and turned on the television. As they had for the last two nights, the three major networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—were all airing coverage of the case, along with the local New York networks. One man being interviewed caught Breskin’s attention: Dennis McBee. McBee was a youth worker with the Youth Development Agency of Northport/East Northport, and Breskin was struck by his thoughtful answers in the face of a veritable media circus. He looked up the YDA’s number in the white pages and decided to give McBee a call when he woke up.

  The next morning, after showering and grabbing a quick breakfast, Breskin called McBee at work. McBee agreed to an interview, hoping Rolling Stone’s popularity with young adults would help bring the true story of what happened to a national audience. Breskin threw on his “professional outfit”—a suit jacket, slacks, dress shirt, and tie—and drove over to meet McBee at the Youth Development Agency on Diane Court in East Northport.

  When Breskin parked his car, he activated his Sony Pressman recorder and spoke into the microphone, marking the first tape.

  “The tenth of July, 1984. ‘Knights of the Black Circle.’ Long Island. Day One.”

  After being led upstairs, Breskin sat across from McBee and said, “So, tell me about the Knights of the Black Circle.”

  “Well,” McBee replied, “soon after I was hired here about two and a half years ago, rumors started that this group had organized, and they were basically kids who were going through some rough times. Minor crimes; breaking and entering here and there, public drunkenness—things like that. They were high school students, many of them very heavily into tripping. They would get together and have a big bonfire. Out of that, apparently, a few animal sacrifice incidents occurred, with a fringe group somehow connected.”

  “Did the fringe group have another name?” Breskin asked.

  “Not that I ever heard,” McBee replied. “It was very difficult to get information on this from the kids. They talk about who was dealing dope a lot easier than they talk about the Knights. The Knights did their best to sort of project this badass image and they were very successful at it. This fringe group started to get a little more bizarre, and the Knights died out. Ricky Kasso was part of this fringe group. He was a very disturbed kid—using dust an awful lot, from what I hear. Rumor has it he was one of the bigger suppliers of drugs at the high school, and this past spring, he was arrested for attempting to dig up a grave.”

  Breskin pulled the previous day’s issue of Newsday from his bag and hurriedly flipped through it until he found a tiny correction notice on page four.

  “But I just read it was another guy, Randall Guethler, who apparently dug up the hand and the skull, and not Ricky,” Breskin said.

  “Well, no,” McBee replied, embarrassed that Northport had seen two similar teenage grave-disturbing incidents in less than six months. “Ricky was trying to dig up a grave, but was unsuccessful. While the police were investigating that incident, they found that a mausoleum had been broken into a few months earlier, and a skull and a hand had been taken. That’s where Randy’s name came in.”

  “Were Kasso and Guethler friends?” Breskin asked.

  “Yes,” McBee said. “The story was they were using these things in various rituals. I don’t see them as a true Satanic cult. The symbolism they used were the symbols that all of us know about Satanism. They weren’t deep, dark symbols that true Satanists are aware of. That’s kind of irrelevant, though. They thought they were Satanists, and I think that’s enough.”

  Breskin agreed.

  “If you believe it, it’s real,” he said. “It’s sort of like Satanism lite.”

  “Yeah,” McBee replied. “And a lot of it was rebellion in terms of them wanting to freak adults out and scare society.”

  “Did you know about these rituals in the park?” Breskin asked. “Had you seen anything yourself?”

  “I had never seen anything myself,” McBee admitted. “Going back a bit, a goat was burned in the park. Before that, various dogs or cats had been mutilated. There were a lot of people whose pet cats had disappeared.”

  “This happened in Indianapolis, too,” Breskin said, recalling a recent news story. “In a big way. Hundreds of dogs and cats.”

  “I see animal mutilation as an early warning sign that something’s wrong,” McBee opined.

  “Were Kasso or Troiano involv
ed in animal mutilation?” Breskin asked, trying to connect the dots.

  “Word has it that Kasso was definitely involved in it,” McBee replied, “but nobody wants to talk. I made several attempts to talk to Ricky up at the high school, but all he had to hear was that I worked for a social service agency and he was gone. If you hang out in the smoking area at the high school, the kids think you’re either a pusher or a narc. In most cases, I’ve been pretty successful. But the group that Ricky hung out with? There’s just no breaking through that crowd.”

  “What about Kasso and Troiano living on the street or in a car?” Breskin asked.

  “For a nice upper-middle-class suburban community,” McBee replied, “we have quite a few kids who live out on the streets. Throwaways. Some as young as fourteen are on the streets, or they move in with a friend for a little while. Kids who may come from the nicest of families, but they’ve still been thrown away. They’ve been cast aside as much as the family garbage is every night. They don’t fit into the pattern, and therefore no one wants them around.”

  “In a community of seven thousand five hundred people, how many kids, would you say?” Breskin asked. “Ten? Fifteen?”

  “I know at least a dozen,” McBee said.

  “That’s a lot,” Breskin said. He was beginning to see a pattern of teenage nihilism, driven—at least in part—by a feeling of low self-worth emanating from their homes. Breskin suspected this was the root of Ricky’s issues. He had already read a few newspaper articles hinting at the possibility.

  “Did you read what the Kasso family’s reaction was when the detective called?” he asked McBee. “The detective said, ‘There’s no need for you to come down to Long Island. I’ll call you back once he’s arraigned.’ And they took his advice! Their son had just been accused of murder!”

  “I can tell you that, from what I hear,” McBee offered, “long before this happened, someone who is renting their house asked them about their son. They said they didn’t have one. I heard this through somebody who knows someone at the real estate agency who handled it.”

  “Are the Kassos still upstate, or have they come back?” Breskin asked.

  “Not that I know of,” McBee said dryly.

  Breskin couldn’t believe his ears.

  “They haven’t come back?” he asked. “So, there’s been no funeral for him?”

  “No,” McBee replied. “It says something about the family. I don’t care what the kid’s done—it’s their son and he’s dead.”

  Breskin shook his head in disbelief.

  “Do you know much about what happened at this ‘ceremony,’ other than what’s already been reported in the papers?” Breskin asked. “Were there really a dozen people there chanting ‘I love you, Satan’?”

  “That’s basically what I’ve been hearing,” McBee replied. “Word has it there were as many as twelve people there. Other kids say there were only two. I’m waiting to see what comes out of the grand jury hearing this week.”

  “Did Lauwers go up there willingly?” Breskin asked.

  “From what I hear, he was lured into the woods,” McBee replied. “Rumor has it they planned the murder that afternoon. There have also been rumors that an older person was involved in this. Supposedly, one of Northport’s older and less desirable characters, who had moved away from the area and moved back in, was in charge of the cult—but no one will give me a name. No one will give me anything on this. There were rumors about a guy in his thirties who wore a Satanic belt buckle and looked like a street character hanging around Northport Village, but he’s nowhere to be seen recently. It’s disturbing that there were people who knew somebody was brutally murdered—tortured to death—and nobody told anyone.”

  “It does make me wonder what they say about TV and how people don’t know what’s real and what’s not,” Breskin said.

  “The cops tried to say this was all to blame on rock videos,” McBee replied dismissively. “You can’t blame rock culture as a whole. John Lennon is part of rock culture, and I can’t imagine John Lennon encouraging these things.”

  “Well, ‘Helter Skelter’ goes back to Manson,” Breskin joked.

  “Christianity caused the Inquisition, so I guess you’re right,” McBee laughed.

  “What about Ricky’s suicide?” Breskin asked. “Did that shock people?”

  “Quite honestly, a lot of kids were happy to hear it happened,” McBee replied. “It was like, ‘At least we don’t have to worry about Ricky Kasso on the streets again.’ On the other end, we have to deal with another element that’s trying to make Gary into this sweet, innocent baby.”

  “ ‘Baby’?” Breskin asked incredulously. “Who talks like that?”

  “Some people who knew him,” McBee replied. “They’re making him out to be this sweet, innocent kid who never did anything wrong in his life and was brutally murdered for no reason.”

  “Was there a viewing for Lauwers?” Breskin asked.

  “Today,” McBee replied. “Two o’clock.”

  “Two o’clock?” Breskin checked his watch, wondering if he could make it in time. It was now 1:11.

  “It’s down at the Nolan Funeral Home on the corner of Church and Main,” McBee offered. “I’m going to try and get out of here early so I can buzz down there just in case anything crazy happens.”

  “I want to talk to these kids,” Breskin said hurriedly. “None of the news coverage ever comes from the kids. If I’m going to present this differently, I think there should be more kids in the story and fewer authority figures saying, ‘What a great town we have!’ That means I need to get in touch with people you think would be worth talking to.”

  After mulling it over for a moment, McBee decided to help Breskin.

  “I would suggest talking to Chief Howard first,” he said. “He knows the families. He knows the kids.”

  “What about the mayor?” Breskin asked. “Is he in the same building?”

  “Well,” McBee said, “he runs the funeral parlor where the wake is this afternoon.”

  The tone of the conversation suddenly shifted. This strange little detail added a new level of absurdity to the situation.

  “The mayor runs the funeral parlor?”

  McBee nodded.

  Breskin exhaled loudly. The idea of the local undertaker being the mayor of Satantown, USA—“where evil dwells”—was like something out of a cheap paperback.

  McBee chuckled.

  “Small-town America at its best, right?” he said sardonically. “In terms of kids, there are two avenues. One: I would certainly welcome you to hang out downstairs at any time and feel free to talk to kids. The other place I would suggest is down at Cow Harbor Park. During the late afternoon and early evening, the gazebo down there is a gathering spot for kids.”

  Breskin wasn’t too sure about hanging around a youth agency or a known drug-peddling spot for a scoop. It made him feel more like a predator than a journalist.

  “Maybe the best thing for me to do is just hang out with you,” he suggested.

  “That would be fine,” McBee replied. “I don’t have any problems with that.”

  McBee shook Breskin’s hand and saw him outside. He wouldn’t be able to join Breskin on his trip into the village, but one of the YDA’s teenage volunteers, Mercedes McGrory, offered to ride with Breskin to Northport and give him directions. Mercedes and her brother, Mike, lived at Merrie Schaller’s house, and she offered to introduce him to a few people who had known Gary and Ricky.

  “I think the press has just blown it up so much,” Mercedes told Breskin as she sat inside his rental car. “The Knights of the Black Circle were involved in Satanic rituals, but it was nothing organized, and Ricky and Jimmy had nothing to do with the Knights.”

  “But didn’t Ricky and Jimmy use the name?” he asked.

  “No,” she insisted. “That’s the thing; the first couple articles in the paper said it was just some kids who were involved in a Satanic cult. Then, a couple days later, the ar
ticles said, ‘Kids in connection with the Knights of the Black Circle . . .’ Then, the following day, they said they were members of the Knights of the Black Circle. That’s the way things have become twisted around. It’s just so frustrating that it’s being blown out of proportion. . . .”

  When Breskin pulled into downtown Northport, he half expected to see a hellish landscape, ripe for murderous teenagers like Ricky Kasso to sprout out of the ground, ready to attack. Instead he was greeted by your typical picturesque seaside village, complete with rows of mom-and-pop shops lining Main Street. Most of its citizens were trying to go about their day, avoiding the throngs of reporters and cameramen all racing down to the New Park. Someone had tipped off Newsday about a few local teenagers trying to clean up the Satanic graffiti on the wood forest playground, and word quickly got out to other agencies.

  As Breskin parked his rental car, he noticed the swarm of journalists crowding around two teenage boys, Brian Higgins and Tom Sullivan. Brian and Tom, who had both known Ricky and Gary, had gone down to the New Park equipped with sandpaper and paint, determined to destroy the graffiti the Acid King had left behind. Most of their friends were happy to join in. For them, it was an easy way to show solidarity with the Lauwers family, along with the villagers whose lives were being torn apart by an invading press.

  For a few select others, however, Brian and Tom were merely placing a Band-Aid over a horrible truth no one could deny.

  One of Ricky’s friends walked past the park and said, “They’re scratching away his life. . . .”

  Breskin decided to skip Gary’s first viewing and walked up to Brian just as another reporter finished up interviewing him.

  “Satin,” the shirtless teenager said, pointing to the spray paint he was sanding away from a wooden beam. “S-A-T-I-N. It was in a couple of other places too.”

  “Is that because he didn’t know how to spell ‘Satan’?” Breskin asked.

  “Exactly,” Brian replied, wiping the sweat from his brow. “He wasn’t smart.”

  Glen Wolf, who had earlier been introduced to Breskin by Mercedes McGrory, approached the two.