The Acid King

by Jesse P. Pollack

  Breskin still couldn’t grasp why so many teenagers in this little village were going out of their way to experience such horrors.

  “Was there something Ricky wanted that he couldn’t get to with drugs?” Breskin asked.

  “I think he was trying to get in touch with the devil,” the younger boy said. “About three months ago, me, Ivy, and Kasso drove up to this cemetery. Kasso smoked bag after bag after bag of dust and started chanting, trying to get someone to talk to him. He was talking about digging up a grave. Nothing happened, so after a few hours, we just left.”

  “You must have liked him a lot to do that with him,” Breskin said.

  “He was a drug friend,” the younger boy insisted. “That’s all it was.”

  “So, you didn’t have an attitude to help or save him?” Breskin asked.

  “I talked to him about it,” the younger boy replied, “but I couldn’t stop him if that’s what he wanted to do. I told him, ‘Hey, if you do too many drugs you’re going to be dead soon,’ and he said, ‘That’s what I want.’ ”

  Glen nodded.

  “Gotta go sometime,” he recalled Ricky saying.

  “Right before all this whole cult shit started, Ricky and this other dude were in my car,” the older boy added, “and they were like, ‘We’re trying to get this cult going. Going to the library to read up on some books. We want your mother to be the leader of it.’ I’m not gonna go into this because my mother has some sort of shit you’re not gonna believe even if I try to explain it to you.”

  “After the atomic bomb, I’ll believe anything,” Breskin reassured him.

  The older boy paused.

  “She has these powers . . . ,” he told Breskin.

  “She raises tables,” the younger boy added. “Telekinesis.”

  “Yeah, he’s seen it,” the older boy said. “Ricky said, ‘Ask her if she wants to be the head of it. I want somebody who has some kind of power to talk to people.’ We’ve talked to dead people. We’ve talked to Jim Morrison through a table.”

  Suddenly a crow swooped down, screeching as it passed the grave. The boys shared a collective shudder, each of them simultaneously recalling Ricky’s confession.

  “That’s a sign!” Breskin joked, trying to cut the tension.

  “I think it’s funny that when Ricky died, it was raining, lightning, and thundering,” the younger boy said.

  “All of a sudden, my door slammed open,” the older boy told Breskin. “It was shut and locked tight, and it slammed open and banged against the wall. It was two a.m. ’Cause indirectly, we were the ones that got him started in this whole thing. It was just his way of coming to my house, saying, ‘Hey, man, look at this shit,’ you know? Also, somebody was murdered in my room many years before we moved in.”

  The older boy wasn’t the only friend of Ricky’s to experience paranormal activity in the wake of his suicide. After Ricky’s friend Ronnie learned of his death, he drove out to the end of Franklin Street, shined his headlights toward Aztakea, and shouted, “Ricky, if you’re out there, give me a sign!” Ronnie’s headlights suddenly burned out—and never worked again.

  “You should ask the table!” the young boy jokingly suggested.

  “I don’t wanna ask that shit,” the older boy replied.

  “What did your mother think of Ricky?” Breskin asked.

  “Oh, she hated him,” the older boy said. “She doesn’t like any of my friends. Ricky said, ‘Let’s form this cult,’ but I said, ‘Nah, I’m not getting into this shit.’ ”

  Before Breskin could reply, a storm cloud appeared overhead, blocking out the sun.

  “We’re gonna get rained on,” Glen said.

  “Yeah,” the older boy replied. “We’re gonna split.”

  “Well, look,” Breskin said, “I know it’s a corny sentiment, but take care of yourselves?”

  “Yeah, we will,” the younger boy chuckled.

  “We’ll try!” the older boy said, walking off into a sea of trees.

  As Breskin walked away from the murder scene, he pulled out his notebook. Haunted by the image of the dark stain where Gary Lauwers was left to rot, he jotted down a potential title for the article: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Spot in the Woods,” an homage to the Wallace Stevens poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” His article needed to be a reminder of the real-life horror surrounding the murder of Gary Lauwers—not the crap made up by the cops and the newspapers—and this reminder needed to be the very first thing readers saw.

  Only then could the world truly appreciate just how tragic and unnecessary this all really was.

  Chapter 44

  LONG ISLAND ATTORNEY ERIC NAIBURG first found out about the “Northport Satan case” while flipping through the Sunday, July 8, edition of the New York Times. By now Ricky was dead, but Jimmy was still alive, being kept under twenty-four-hour observation in the Suffolk County jail. Naiburg saw no mention of a lawyer for the accused murderer and decided to seize this opportunity.

  On Monday morning Naiburg walked into the Suffolk County Courthouse in Riverhead and asked a judge he was friendly with if Jimmy had been arraigned yet. The judge replied that he had not, so Naiburg grabbed a piece of paper and wrote, If Troiano needs an assigned attorney, I’m here and available, and handed it to the clerk, who agreed to give it to Judge Gerard D’Emilio, who would be presiding over the upcoming grand jury hearings.

  Later that week, on July 11, the grand jury ruled that there was enough evidence to try Jimmy for the second-degree murder of Gary Lauwers. At the end of the hearing, Judge D’Emilio turned to Jimmy and said, “You need a lawyer—somebody very experienced. I see Mr. Naiburg is in the courtroom. Mr. Naiburg, do you accept this assignment?” Naiburg said yes. Jimmy and his family agreed to the arrangement, and with that, Naiburg secured one of the most controversial cases of his career.

  Once David Breskin found out that Jimmy had finally acquired a lawyer, he called Naiburg at his Hauppauge office and asked for an interview. The forty-two-year-old attorney believed that continued national coverage of the murder through Rolling Stone could be advantageous to his case, and agreed.

  When Breskin was shown into Naiburg’s office, he found a sophisticated, intelligent lawyer, dressed to the nines in a three-piece suit, and clean-shaven, with his curly brown hair trimmed neatly around his ears. If looks were all that mattered, Jimmy’s upcoming trial might have resulted in a draw. Naiburg seemed the perfect opponent to William Keahon, the impeccably dressed chief of the Major Offense Bureau inside the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, who had recently been assigned as the case’s prosecutor.

  “So, other than this case being an interesting one, why take it on?” Breskin asked.

  “No other reason but that,” Naiburg replied honestly.

  “What did Troiano say in his confession?” Breskin asked.

  “I haven’t seen it,” Naiburg admitted. “I can’t talk about the confession until I find out what the police wrote. Defendants don’t write their own confessions; police write them for them. Defendants just sign them.”

  “Was it taped?” Breskin asked.

  “Are you kidding?!” Naiburg scoffed. “It’s too difficult, apparently. We’re only talking about the Suffolk County Police Department, who have millions and millions of dollars at their disposal. They can’t afford a Sony like that!”

  Naiburg pointed to Breskin’s tape recorder.

  “No confession is ever taped. Never.”

  “Why don’t they use tape?” Breskin asked.

  “Ask the police officers,” Naiburg said. “See what kinds of answers you’re gonna get. Queens County videotapes their confessions. Suffolk wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “Have you seen the medical examiner’s report?” Breskin asked.

  “Not yet,” Naiburg replied, “but I don’t know how much information they’re going to get from a body that decomposed. From my understanding, there were no maggots left when they exhumed the body,
and that’s an indication they’ve already done their work. It takes about four generations of maggots to decompose a body, and there were none left at that point.”

  “Is the autopsy report available to the public?” Breskin asked, hoping to get a look at it. He had a sneaking suspicion that the police were exaggerating the aspects of Gary’s murder, particularly the alleged removal of his eyes. “I imagine there would be photos.”

  “They always take pictures,” Naiburg said, skipping the first half of Breskin’s question. “They take pictures, they draw diagrams. They take the defendant down to the scene and tell him, ‘Point to this, point to that,’ and then they give the photos to a jury and say, ‘While he was pointing, he was telling us he did it.’ ”

  “Did they take your client and do that?” Breskin asked, unaware that Jimmy had been photographed at the scene while in custody.

  “Mm-hmm,” Naiburg replied, nodding intently. “When he was first arrested. The police spent twelve hours with them before they notified their parents, who would have stopped them from talking, I’m sure. An attorney would have been contacted, so why do it, right? They’re homicide detectives—they have a case to build. . . .”

  Chapter 45

  ON SATURDAY, JULY 14, BRESKIN caught a break. Thanks to half a week spent gaining trust in Northport, he finally secured an interview with one of the original cofounders and leaders of the Knights of the Black Circle: Paul McBride, aka “King.” Paul asked Breskin to meet him at one of the small baseball fields on Kew Avenue in East Northport, only a block over from the YDA.

  When Breskin arrived, he found Paul, a short young man with long brown hair, waiting for him under a large tree in the southwest corner of the northernmost field. Sitting next to him was Chrissy, one of Gary’s ex-girlfriends. Breskin said hello and asked if she minded being interviewed for the story as well. She said she didn’t, but asked to be called “Baker” in the article, which Breskin agreed to.

  “So, tell me about the beginning of the Knights of the Black Circle,” Breskin said as he sat down in the shade.

  “There’s a lot I can’t tell you,” Paul replied. “We have jackets with colors on the back, so we look like a gang, but we’re not. It’s a group of people who have a belief in a certain thing, but I can’t tell you about it. It’s a secret. I can tell you one thing, though—we did not do sacrifices. We never hurt nobody at all.”

  “What about Ricky and Jimmy?” Breskin asked.

  “Troiano and Kasso were never in the Knights,” Paul replied. “One guy in the Knights knew Kasso a long time ago when he was straight, but dropped him when he started getting fucked up. The papers are saying Kasso was the leader of the Knights. That’s bullshit!”

  “But Ricky wanted to be in the group, didn’t he?” Breskin pressed. “I heard that he was sort of a fringe member, but the group didn’t take him.”

  “He never asked,” Paul insisted. “I met the guy two times for a total of seven minutes altogether, and he was already really fucked up.”

  “I knew him before he was doing dust and all that,” Chrissy said. “He really wasn’t that bad of a guy, you know?”

  “He wasn’t,” Paul agreed, “but he fucked up.”

  “When the dust started coming into town and everybody started doing it,” Chrissy continued, “he and Vinny Ivy and those guys used to go down to the graveyard and hang out. All Vinny Ivy talked about was the devil. They’d bring a tape recorder along with them and tape themselves tripping on acid and mesc. They said the devil possessed the tape and that there were all these different voices and stuff on the tape. Vinny Ivy said he went to a priest about it and the priest said everything could have been true.”

  “Have you ever tried dust?” Breskin asked.

  “Once,” Chrissy replied. “You’re not the same person when you try it. You feel like somebody’s standing next to you. Maybe when Ricky was on dust, the person standing next to him was the devil.”

  “What’s the difference between what you’re involved in and what they were involved in?” Breskin asked.

  “We’re not out to hurt anybody,” Chrissy insisted. “We’re just out to have a good time and party with our friends.”

  “You can hang out with friends and not call yourselves anything,” Breskin said, challenging the innocence of her explanation. “Why the name?”

  “It makes us more united,” Paul said. “We’re like a family. We don’t have families, so we have to stick together.”

  “Do you have a mom and a dad?” Breskin asked.

  “I have my mom,” Paul replied.

  “And you don’t think of her as your family?” Breskin prodded.

  “Well, yeah, of course,” Paul said. “She’s my mom, but she’s always at work. I never see her no more.”

  “You have any brothers or sisters?” Breskin asked.

  “Brothers,” Paul replied curtly.

  “So, you have something of a family,” Breskin said.

  “That ain’t no family,” Paul replied dismissively. “Nobody talks to nobody.”

  “Who’s left in the group?” Breskin asked. “Who are the other guys?”

  “They’re all lords,” Paul replied. “I’m the King. There’s Lord Merlin. Lord Algol. If you read up, Algol is a star in the sky. It’s called the ‘Demon Star.’ It’s a big giant star with two small stars around it. When the small ones meet, the big one turns black and you can’t see it, so that’s why they call it the Demon Star. We got Lord Nigel and Lord Sigil. That name came out of a book.”

  “What sort of books did you read?” Breskin asked.

  “If you want to read a good book, read Life Forces by Louis Stewart,” Paul said. “It talks about yoga, meditation, white magic, black magic—anything you want to know. Good book.”

  “Would you describe what you do as ‘devil worship’?” Breskin asked.

  “Not what people consider,” Paul replied cryptically.

  “Well, why don’t you tell me what it really is, though?” Breskin said, becoming frustrated. “You see, I keep trying to find out what it really is as opposed to all the bullshit that’s in the papers, and no one wants to tell me.”

  “The image that’s going around is that we sacrifice animals, and now humans,” Paul replied. “That’s bullshit. Like I said, we have our own beliefs. This is our religion and nobody’s going to stop us. We don’t harm nobody, so they have no right to stop us.”

  “Someone told me your group fucked around with cats,” Breskin said.

  Paul and Chrissy laughed.

  “Merlin never liked cats,” Chrissy replied. “He would chase ’em and stuff to scare the shit out of ’em.”

  “I never hurt a cat,” Paul insisted. “I love cats. Not as much as dogs, though. I love dogs.”

  “Yeah, I’m a dog person, myself,” Breskin said.

  Paul suddenly lit up.

  “Oh!” He said. “Do you like Labrador retrievers?”

  “Yeah, I love those,” Breskin replied. “My brother has one.”

  Paul smiled. If there was anything he truly loved in the world, it was his black Labrador retriever.

  “Do you believe in an afterlife?” Breskin asked, curious to see if the Knights’ leader held any belief in the supernatural.

  “I think whatever you truly believe is going to happen when you die is what’s going to happen to you,” Paul replied.

  “What do you think it’s going to be for you?” Breskin asked.

  “For me,” Paul replied, “it’s gonna be like this really classic Playboy cartoon from 1966 that had a group of people sitting around a pool. Girls and guys are drinking, and there’s a guy sittin’ there dressed up in a tuxedo—has the horns on and all, like a devil—and he’s saying, ‘You didn’t actually think hell would be that bad, did ya?’ Something close to that.”

  “So, that’s what you think it’s going to be when you die?” Breskin asked, surprised by the corniness of Paul’s response.

  “No,” Paul said w
ith a laugh. “I like that cartoon, though.”

  Breskin sensed he was being messed with, but forged on.

  “Why was Ricky the way he was?” he asked. “What was he looking for that he didn’t find? I mean, everyone’s looking for something.”

  “Maybe he found it,” Paul replied nonchalantly.

  “What I heard is he wanted to be the devil’s right-hand man,” Chrissy added. “I heard he was going to chase Gary’s soul. He said he would kill himself in jail. Everybody knew that. Some God-loving person probably would have killed him in jail, so he probably just figured he would kill himself so that he could go to Hell and be with the devil.”

  “King, what are some of the most important songs to the Knights?” Breskin asked. So much noise had been made in the press about rock music’s role in Gary’s murder, and Breskin wanted to know what the Knights actually listened to.

  “One of my favorite songs is ‘Time Has Come Today’ by the Chambers Brothers,” Paul replied, surprising Breskin. “I was listening to that today. Also, ‘Earache My Eye’ by Cheech & Chong.”

  Another strange surprise. Breskin was expecting heavy metal. Instead he got a psychedelic soul single from the mid-sixties and a stoner comedy record.

  “We’re just out to have fun, you know?” Chrissy insisted. “We’re not really concerned with what people say about us, we just want to set the record straight so that nobody starts coming after us.”

  “Maybe one night you should come see what we do,” Paul teased.

  “I’d like to see what you do!” Breskin said, losing his cool. He was tired of games. These kids were being blamed for an incredibly gruesome murder on the front page of nearly every national newspaper, and it all seemed to be some big joke to them. “I’ve been asking, but you won’t tell me what you do!”

  “I told you,” Paul said calmly. “We just mainly hang out and have a good time any way we can.”

  “It’s really been hard to have a good time this last week or so, though,” Chrissy added.

  “I’m sure,” Breskin said, defeated. He knew he wasn’t getting the definitive answers he had hoped for. “Well, is that it?” he asked.