The Acid King

by Jesse P. Pollack

  “My dad tried intervening between Ricky and his father during our Little League games,” says Harry’s son, Richard Schock, who also played for the Northport Mets with Ricky. “This guy used to scream and degrade his kid. My dad would have to say to Dick, ‘Hey, calm down! It’s just a game! The kids are here to have fun!’ Dick wanted Ricky to be the next Willie Mays or Johnny Unitas. The man had a screw loose.”

  Watching these conflicts left a lasting impression on the other boys on the team. One such boy was a short, fair-haired classmate of Ricky’s whose life—and death—would become forever linked to his own.

  His name was Gary Lauwers.

  Chapter 5

  “WHERE’S GARY?”

  Nicole Lauwers was used to this question.

  On April 30, 1967, her mother Yvonne had given birth to her third and final child, a little boy, in Huntington Hospital. Nicole badly wanted her youngest brother to be named Christopher, but Yvonne decided to call him Gary instead. As a consolation prize, they used Nicole’s suggestion for his middle name.

  Nicole adored her baby brother, Gary, despite their fourteen-year age difference. If she had a movie date downtown, she would bring him along. One might expect teenage boys to resent this kind of “third wheel” situation, but Nicole’s dates never objected, always asking where the little blond toddler was if he didn’t show up with his sister. When the weather was nice, and Nicole didn’t have any plans, she would take Gary downtown to play in the park or buy handfuls of candy at the local sweet shop.

  For Gary, having Nicole around was almost like having a second mother, and he loved every minute of it.

  He came to rely on his sister as a source of positivity in his life as he grew older. His parents were Belgian immigrants and he sometimes failed to connect with them or his older brother, Michael. When Gary started attending school, he quickly discovered that his classmates weren’t going to fawn over him the way his sister and her friends did. His father worked hard at a Manhattan bank to provide his children with nice clothes to wear, and thus, Gary often arrived at school wearing classy turtleneck sweaters and a blazer. The boys clad in sports tees and flannel shirts were not impressed. They soon targeted Gary, shouting “Faggot!” as he walked down the halls of Ocean Avenue Elementary. Nicole recalls Ricky Kasso, whom Gary had met during his second year at Ocean Avenue, being one of these boys. However, others who knew them maintain the two were friendly during these years.

  Gary’s father did his best to alleviate matters by letting his son join the Cub Scouts, accompanying him when his pack traveled upstate. Herbert Lauwers hoped that getting away from the village for some time spent camping and fishing would help Gary forget about the boys terrorizing him at school. This seemed to help for a while, but as soon as Gary entered puberty, his problems worsened. While he never grew to be particularly tall or athletic, Gary possessed other traits that several of his female classmates found attractive. His mop of golden blond hair set him apart from the other boys, while the charming smile highlighting his freckled face made him easily approachable. Once Gary’s tormentors noticed the girls flocking his way, they doubled down on their bullying, often punching and shoving him in the hallway.

  “This was a much more brutal time to go to school,” says Richard Schock. “Teachers used to actually encourage fistfights. If you had a problem with a classmate, your teachers—not just the coaches—would say, ‘Well, go out on the field and fuckin’ duke it out!’ I remember one time I got into a fight in front of Northport Junior High School with a kid and we were knockin’ the shit out of each other. It was brutal. The teachers were all rooting and betting on who would win.”

  One such teacher was a mathematics instructor named Arthur Worm, whom students like Ricky Kasso particularly despised. A World War II veteran with a buzz cut and gruff voice to match, Worm took a literal hands-on approach to teaching. If he caught one of his students sleeping in class, he would grab their head and bang it on the desk. This, he told his class, was discipline.

  Gary’s older brother, Michael, had experienced similar problems at Northport Junior High School nearly a decade before. Michael’s problems eventually faded away, but Gary’s troubles seemed to be a permanent curse. His friends recall him constantly trying to fit in, but never quite achieving this. Many felt he was trying too hard, and, as a result, was picked on even harder. Gary tried to compensate through his ever-present sense of humor. He would crack jokes, make up silly songs, or do funny voices.

  Unfortunately, the bullies weren’t laughing.

  “He was like one of those yappy little dogs,” Beth Brewer, a former classmate of Gary’s, says. “You’d want to tell him, ‘Oh, just stop talking, and everyone will stop being mean to you!’ ”

  Frustrated and helpless, Gary sought an alternate way of coping. One day he noticed some of the other middle school outcasts passing a joint back and forth at the loading docks behind the nearby Ground Round restaurant. With nothing to lose—as far as he was concerned—Gary joined them, and asked for a drag.

  Matthew Carpenter, a friend of Gary’s and Ricky’s, understands why Gary turned to drugs.

  “Being an outcast in Northport wasn’t very cool,” he says, “so I turned to drugs and alcohol. Suddenly I had instant friends.”

  It was not long before Gary Lauwers began joining his own instant friends at the loading docks every morning before school, numbing himself to the looming misery in a cloud of marijuana smoke.

  Chapter 6

  IF DRUGS WERE TO BLAME for the horror that eventually befell Northport, the turning point in Ricky Kasso’s life came one day in the fall of 1977. Ricky, then a ten-year-old fifth grader, was offered a joint by a friend’s older brother. Ricky’s first encounter with drugs had a profound effect on him. With just a few quick puffs, his world changed. The jokes his friends told were funnier, the music he played sounded cooler—his food even seemed to taste better.

  For a while, Ricky’s pot smoking remained an occasional indulgence. After all, how much privacy to smoke could a ten-year-old have? This all changed, however, when Ricky turned twelve. By then, he had found classmates who were also smoking marijuana. As always, Ricky would leave early for school, but no longer for the early morning football games he used to love. Instead he was meeting his friends at the loading docks so they could get high before class.

  Smoking pot was now an everyday routine.

  Ricky soon became curious about trying other substances. Most of his friends were more than happy smoking marijuana, but Ricky was craving something different—something stronger. By seventh grade, he was ready to take his drug use to the next level. For him, this meant LSD and the small purple tablets street kids called “microdots.” Ricky and his friends mistakenly thought the tablets were mescaline, a natural hallucinogenic chemical found in the peyote cactus, but the microdots were actually low-grade LSD mixed with PCP and sometimes strychnine, a very toxic alkaloid. No one recalls when or where Ricky Kasso tripped on these for the first time, but by 1979, he was swallowing hits of acid and handfuls of purple microdots like candy.

  One day Ricky walked into his junior high school art class high on purple microdots. Taking his usual seat next to Matthew Carpenter, he grabbed a sheet of paper and began quietly sketching a dragon. Matthew looked over at Ricky’s creation and broke the ice.

  “Whatcha drawing?” he asked.

  “A dragon,” Ricky replied.

  “Cool, man,” Matthew said.

  “It’s moving,” Ricky added nonchalantly.

  “What’s moving?” Matthew asked, visibly confused.

  “The dragon,” Ricky replied. “It’s moving.”

  Matthew turned his head to see Ricky’s dragon, still as a statue.

  “It’s coming to life,” the boy insisted.

  “Ricky, are you on something?” Matthew asked.

  “Yeah,” he replied.

  “What are you on?”

  “Purple microdot.”

  Matthew could on
ly smirk. He had dabbled in light drug use himself—mostly by joining Ricky at the loading docks to smoke a joint—but he had never taken hallucinogens, let alone in class. That was a special kind of risky. Truth be told, Matthew thought it was kind of cool. During lunch, the two would often walk across the football field to the loading docks, smoke pot, walk back, and listen to the music teachers play Beatles records.

  “We had a sit-out one time,” Matthew recalls fondly. “Could you imagine a junior high sit-out today?”

  As is the case with many drug users with limited resources, Ricky soon began stealing to support his habit. That same year, he broke into Northport’s St. Philip Neri Roman Catholic Church and stole the cash that had been collected during the previous Sunday’s service. Adding a strange element to the theft, Ricky also inexplicably took a box of communion wafers with him as he fled the church.

  Once he realized no one was onto him, Ricky started bragging about the theft to his friends at school. Some who were tired of being dragged to mass every Sunday were enchanted by this. Others were left impressed by Ricky not getting caught. The next school year, Ricky decided to take petty crime to the next level by breaking into a Northport home with five other friends. In the winter of 1980, the group chose the house of a schoolmate they knew would be on vacation with his family.

  “There was a newspaper back then called the Northport Journal,” retired Northport Police Officer Gene Roemer recalls. “We used to call it the ‘Criminal’s Best Friend’ because they would announce when locals would be going on vacation and how long they’d be gone for.”

  Unfortunately for Ricky and his friends, whatever luck he’d had at St. Philip Neri had since evaporated. After helping themselves to the family’s booze and some silver, they were caught, arrested, and charged with burglary. When Dick and Lynn were notified, they reacted somewhat calmly to the news. Dick, as it happened, did not have much of a moral leg to stand on. When he was a twenty-one-year-old senior at Colgate University, he and two friends were arrested for stealing wheels, hubcaps, and tires from parked cars in Oneonta, New York. Decades later, he figured Ricky was just “sowing a few wild oats,” as he later told a reporter. After speaking with the police, Dick and Lynn went upstairs to search Ricky’s bedroom for any items that might have been taken from anywhere else he might have burglarized.

  Instead they found a bong.

  The two distressed parents sought immediate drug counseling for their son. Dick and Lynn approached the Place, a nonprofit organization on Main Street, which had been formed in the wake of tragedy. In 1968 two teenagers had been killed in a car wreck while high on marijuana. Shaken by the incident, the Northport Village Council held a community meeting, which led concerned resident Joan Ayer to create Concepts for Narcotics Prevention, Inc., in the hope of combating the area’s drug problem. Shortly after, Northport’s First Presbyterian Church leased the empty clergy home next door to house the new agency.

  Early on, Concepts turned the home into an active “drop-in” center, and local kids began showing up in droves. With little to do in the village after school, Concepts offered a safe place for Northport’s teenagers to socialize, play games, listen to records, have something to eat, or talk privately with a counselor in an upstairs office. This warm and welcoming environment became popular, with more and more kids stopping into “the place downtown” every day. Soon, it became known simply as “the Place.”

  The nickname stuck.

  It was in one of the Place’s upstairs offices that Ricky and his mother found themselves sitting across from Tom Fazio, one of the agency’s counselors. Alerted by the thirteen-year-old’s demeanor, Fazio suspected that Ricky had arrived high on marijuana.

  “It doesn’t seem like you’re trying to get off drugs, or even want to,” Fazio told him.

  “You’re right,” Ricky replied. “I like what I’m doing.”

  After walking out of this disastrous session, Ricky never attended another meeting with Fazio. However, Dick and Lynn started attending weekly meetings at the Place with a focus on helping parents cope with troubled children. They eventually found a psychiatrist for their son, but little hope was offered. After one visit, Ricky returned to his mother’s car and boldly declared, “You just threw away another seventy-five bucks. This counselor’s a jerk, but if you want me to, I’ll play the game.”

  After four more visits, the psychiatrist dismissed Ricky from his practice, telling his parents that he was “uncooperative” and deliberately “sabotaging the sessions.” Desperation began to creep in for Lynn Kasso. Before her very eyes, her son—her own firstborn child—was vanishing, and there seemed to be little hope of reaching him.

  As the days wore on, it became impossible for Dick and Lynn to have any kind of a positive relationship with Ricky. Today, no one can agree on whether he was thrown out or ran away, but either way, by Christmas 1980, Ricky Kasso was no longer living at home. Cold and hungry with nowhere else to go, he hitchhiked nearly two hundred and thirty miles from Northport to the little red cabin up in Argyle.

  Along with him was a new friend—another troubled teenager named Jimmy Troiano.

  Chapter 7

  “I ALWAYS SAW THE BETTER-LOOKING kids getting adopted while I was passed over,” Jimmy Troiano once told an acquaintance.

  Memories like these are some of his earliest.

  Placed in an upstate New York orphanage shortly after his birth on December 10, 1965, Jimmy wouldn’t be adopted until he was nearly five years old. The couple who decided to bring young Jimmy into their lives were Vincent Troiano, a forty-six-year-old Manhattan art director, and his wife, Mary. Twelve years her husband’s junior, Mary Troiano worked as a registered nurse in the psychiatric ward at Huntington Hospital.

  Jimmy’s problems were immediately apparent. There was the incident on the playground where his face became horribly scarred, and Jimmy’s behavior continued to be increasingly erratic after that. His grades at Dickinson Avenue Elementary School soon tanked due to him being a slow learner and refusing to do his homework. When he could not get the positive attention that he sought, Jimmy lashed out, settling for negative.

  “He would always be the kid with the ‘I’m going to get you before you get me’ mentality,” Beth Brewer, who grew up in the same neighborhood as the Troianos, recalls. “It was like, ‘If you’re not going to like me, you’re going to be scared of me,’ or something. He was always a bit of an odd kid. He was a loner—definitely didn’t have a lot of friends. I always felt kind of bad for him. One day, you’d talk to him and he was the sweetest kid. The next, you’d turn around thinking he’s nuts. There were obvious mental health issues there. He wasn’t a particularly big kid, but he was a strong kid. I remember these guys were doing construction at the school and they were picking on Jimmy because of the scars on his face. He picked up a rock and threw it down at them while they were steam-cleaning cesspools, and they beat the shit out of him. Jimmy was just sort of a poor lost soul—even from the beginning. He was just one of those kids that didn’t fit in. . . .”

  Sometime during elementary school, Jimmy began wandering out of his home at 2 Barry Drive in East Northport and into the living rooms and kitchens of his neighbors. Back at the orphanage, if Jimmy ever needed something to eat or drink, he could just leave his bedroom and grab some food from the kitchen. At first Jimmy didn’t realize what he was doing was wrong. For him, it was merely an extension of how things worked upstate. If he was hungry for something that wasn’t in Vincent and Mary’s refrigerator, he would simply walk over to a neighbor’s home and help himself to whatever they had.

  The Troianos’ neighbors eventually began to discover Jimmy in their living rooms and kitchens. Understanding his background, they chose to leave the police out of it, opting to call his parents instead. That was, at least, until more than just food started going missing from their homes. Jimmy Troiano, like a lot of his friends in the village, had moved up to burglaries. He now had money to buy drugs from the kids at the
loading docks.

  When Jimmy wasn’t breaking into local homes or smoking pot with friends, he was back at school, brawling with his classmates. Whereas Gary bent over backward trying to get his enemies to like him, Jimmy couldn’t be bothered. If someone gave him hell, he gave it right back to them.

  “Jimmy Troiano was psychotic,” Richard Schock recalls. “He used to throw firecrackers at people. I was always a pretty tough kid, but I never bothered anyone or picked on anybody. One day Jimmy and I were arguing about something at the top of the stairs in junior high school. He grabbed me around the waist and tried to throw me down the stairwell. Two of my friends grabbed him and stopped him. Once I got loose, we ended up having a big fight. Troiano was a tough motherfucker. Don’t let me kid you—that kid would fight until he was hamburger.”

  Disturbed by their son’s behavior in and outside of school, the Troianos followed the same route as the Kassos by taking Jimmy to the Place. Mary Troiano had become acquainted with Tony Ruggi, the organization’s senior counselor, while he was completing his internship in the psychiatric ward of Huntington Hospital, where she worked. While Ruggi had developed a rapport with local kids—many of whom affectionately called him “the guy with the ponytail”—he quickly realized Jimmy Troiano was not your average troubled child.

  “Jimmy concerned me because, to put it simply, he had a problem seeing the difference between right and wrong,” Ruggi recalls. “He was pleasant enough, but when it came to talking about making mistakes, he just saw them as things he did, and didn’t understand why his parents would get upset over it.”

  Ruggi advised Vincent and Mary to seek further psychological testing for their son. “After that,” Ruggi says, “Jimmy stopped seeing me, and I don’t know if the parents followed up with anything.”

  Hoping to provide a positive outlet for his brute strength, those around Jimmy encouraged him to try out for the Northport Junior High football and wrestling teams. He made the cut for both. It was on these teams that Jimmy first met a seventh grader named Ricky Kasso—the boy who would forever alter the course of his life.