The Acid King

by Jesse P. Pollack

  “From that point on he talked freely to both Suzi and me,” Ruggi recalls. “This is just a guess on my part, but because of difficulties he had with his mother and father, he may have seen Suzi and me as some sort of surrogate parents. Not only would he come to talk when he was having problems, but he would also stop in to tell us when he did well in school or if something went well at home.”

  As Ricky began to confide in Tony and Suzi more and more, he felt comfortable enough to discuss his ongoing drug abuse. On most days, Ricky would sit with Tony or Suzi in the living room or one of the upstairs counseling rooms, casually talking about the pot and acid he was regularly taking and selling. Like any conscientious therapist would, Tony told Ricky he was engaging in very dangerous behavior.

  “Listen, Ricky,” he once said. “Simply put, the drugs are not good for you.”

  Ricky brushed off Ruggi’s concern.

  “I know they’re bad for me,” he replied, “but they make me feel good.”

  “What about the long-term damage they could be doing to you?” Ruggi pressed.

  “Look,” Ricky said, “I know I’m not going to live past twenty, so I’m just going to have fun while I’m here.”

  The problems in the Kasso home soon returned. Ricky had recently been attending nearby Commack High School’s special section for troubled students, but he soon started cutting classes. The school eventually expelled him for his repeated absences. As always, once word of this got back to Dick Kasso, tempers flared. Dick demanded that Ricky start taking his education seriously. After all, this was the second school he and Lynn had to approach after their son was expelled from Northport High. Ricky, however, remained belligerent.

  “You know, Dad,” Ricky fumed, “you expect me to be perfect just because you’re a teacher and a coach!”

  Dick was not falling for his son’s sob story.

  “No, I don’t,” he countered, “I expect you to pass.”

  Dick agreed to look yet again for another school that would accept his son, but he was not without demands. He told Ricky he needed to cut his hair and stop wearing ratty jeans and concert tees. Ricky refused. Enraged, Dick grabbed a pair of scissors from a kitchen drawer and chased his son throughout the house. Ricky ran out the front door and his father followed behind, pursuing his son down Seaview Avenue. However, the forty-four-year-old football coach was no match for his six-foot-tall son’s long legs. Winded, Dick gave up and watched Ricky flee into the woods behind Grove Street. Still fuming, he returned home, grabbed a pile of Ricky’s clothes, cut them into shreds, and tossed the remains into the street while his neighbors watched.

  Time passed and things eventually cooled down. Ricky returned home—this time with a pocketknife he had purchased at a Main Street store called the Midway. The knife was cheap, a Pakistani knockoff of the Buck 110 hunting knife, sporting a shiny black plastic handle. The four-inch-long blade bore the word FLASHER in gold letters. The knife was typical of the items sold at the Midway: cheap, tacky, and containing an element of danger—though this had not always been the case. When Ricky was a child, the Midway was a nondescript stationery store that sold school supplies, candy, and comic books. However, as Ricky and his peers grew older, the Midway turned into a full-fledged head shop, selling bongs, knives, rolling papers, and other drug paraphernalia.

  This ruffled more than a few feathers in upper-middle-class Northport.

  Many citizens tried to get the store shut down. When it became clear that operating a head shop wasn’t enough to get it booted from the village, residents hoped to penalize the owners of the Midway by complaining about the trash piling up behind the store. The concerned parties cited Northport’s “Unsightly Building and Lands” law at village council meetings, but it was of little use. In the end, no matter how hard its detractors tried, the Midway would remain in Northport for decades to come.

  While Ricky had no real need for his newly bought weapon, he made little effort to hide it from his family once he returned home. This, coupled with antagonistic behavior like loudly playing his self-composed songs about Satan, left Ricky’s parents annoyed and fearful. At their wits’ end, Dick and Lynn approached the Northport Village Police Department, asking for help getting Ricky committed to a rehabilitation facility. They told Chief Robert Howard about their son’s drug use, his obsession with the devil, and the threats he had supposedly made toward his sisters—though Wendy Kasso disputes the latter.

  “He never threatened me,” she insists. “He hated my sisters and they hated him, but as far as I know, if he threatened them, it was sibling-rivalry-type shit.”

  Rivalry or no rivalry, Chief Howard agreed to help the Kassos, and on March 22, 1983, Ricky was involuntarily committed to the South Oaks Hospital in Amityville. South Oaks, formerly known as the Amityville Asylum, specialized in mental health care, along with substance abuse problems—all at a rate of three hundred and twenty dollars per day. Using their health insurance and life savings, the Kassos were able to afford this treatment, and hoped it would be the answer to their prayers for Ricky’s well-being.

  Chapter 14

  WHILE RICKY KASSO WAS SLOWLY detoxing in South Oaks, Gary Lauwers was doubling down on the habits that eventually led to his murder.

  Sometime in 1983 Gary decided to break into his friend Barbara’s house. There, he stole over four thousand dollars in cash. Desperate for affection and approval, Gary grabbed two friends, Joe and Danny, and asked if they wanted to go buy some motorcycles. Surprised by the offer, the two agreed. Gary called a cab, and the three headed down to the nearest place that sold Honda mini-bikes. Once there, Gary bribed the taxi driver to come inside the store with him and pretend he was their father. In the end, the ruse worked, and Gary paid two thousand dollars of the stolen money for three dirt bikes. He gave Joe and Danny one each, and kept the last for himself. The trio smiled as they stuffed the bikes into the back of the taxi before driving away.

  Later Gary bought a three-hundred-dollar boom box and a pretty gold chain that he planned to give to his ex-girlfriend Chrissy. The two had recently broken up, but Gary hoped this shimmering token of affection would once again win her heart. Unfortunately for him, Chrissy wasn’t impressed and turned him down. Heartbroken, he threw the brand-new boom box to the ground, kicking it in frustration. Leaving the broken pieces behind, Gary walked away defeated, and headed to his old hangout—Laces Roller Rink.

  On the way there, Gary ran into another friend and handed him five hundred dollars, saying, “Here; have fun tonight. . . .”

  When he got to Laces, Gary dug into his pocket, pulled out another thousand dollars, and tossed the wad into the air. He stood back and smiled as the bills floated into the hands of the surprised skaters below.

  Gary had good reason for wanting to butter up his peers. Recently a Northport teenager named Albert Quinones had taken a dislike to him.

  “Albert would beat the shit out of Gary because Albert was an asshole who liked to beat people up,” says Johnny Hayward. “He was a pretty tough guy back then. He was like the featherweight boxing champion of Long Island, or some crap like that, and he liked to start fights.”

  One day, while Johnny and his friend Mike were walking on “the Path,” a wooded dirt road between Northport’s First Presbyterian Church and the Place, Albert showed up, saying he was “going to go kick Gary’s ass.” Johnny warned Albert not to lay a finger on his best friend or he would get his own ass kicked. Angered by this, Albert lunged at Johnny and the two began to brawl. They soon rolled all the way down the hill, punching each other as they passed through a patch of rosebushes, before Mike broke up the scuffle.

  From that day on, whenever Albert Quinones and Johnny Hayward saw each other, they fought. While Johnny’s intentions were honorable, he could only protect his best friend for so long—and from so many people. The Northport Village Police Department eventually caught wind of Gary’s burglary habit and arrested him. None of the officers cared about Gary trying to be Northport’s
own Robin Hood.

  Another person Gary couldn’t be protected from was his own father. Cut from a similar cloth as Dick Kasso, Herbert Lauwers was shocked by his son’s burglary arrest. After all, he had come from next to nothing, working his way up from modest Antwerp shipping clerk to respectable Manhattan banker—and he had not worked this hard for his son to become a common criminal.

  “My dad was European-strict, even with me,” recalls Gary’s sister, Nicole Lauwers-Law. “We tried get out of the house before Dad got home. Otherwise, we were not going anywhere. He commuted into the city, so he usually didn’t get home from work until around seven thirty p.m. So, I would have dinner before he came home and go to Long Beach Island.”

  As for Gary, he and his father rarely saw each other, but when they did, there was never any heavy conflict. This all changed when Gary was arrested. Herbert was personally insulted by his son’s actions and didn’t shy away from voicing his displeasure.

  One night Gary had his friend Colm Clark over to the house. While the two were leaving to hang out downtown, Herbert Lauwers made a snide remark to his son. Infuriated at being embarrassed in front of a friend, Gary began screaming at his father. The argument quickly escalated, and punches were thrown. Gary broke free and raced out to the driveway, grabbed a rock, and pelted it through the back window of the family station wagon before storming off.

  After this, Gary avoided going home for two weeks. At first he slept in doorways or in an abandoned building inside the Axinn & Sons lumberyard, before his friend, Scott Travia, let him sleep in the back seat of his Ford Fairlane. Gary finally caught a break when he ran into his friend Corey Quinn. Gary and Corey had met while hanging out at Laces in April and had since enjoyed a flirtatious friendship. However, when the two crossed paths on this day, Corey found a sullen Gary. This was an unfamiliar sight. She had not known him for long, but the Gary she saw was always upbeat. If he knew anyone around him to be depressed, Gary would walk over with a smile, telling them to “Be butch!” Yet here was Gary Lauwers, tired and broken.

  When Gary told Corey that he was living in a friend’s car, she felt compelled to help him out in some way. While she couldn’t invite him to stay in her house—her mother would never approve, as Corey was only twelve years old—she did have one solution. In her backyard was an old chicken coop that had been converted into a clubhouse for Corey and her friends. It was no Ritz-Carlton—or even Motel 6—but it did have a couch Gary could sleep on. He took Corey up on her offer and spent several nights there.

  Eventually, Gary reconnected with his family and decided to return home. When he did, his parents asked that he go to therapy with them and his siblings. They feared if he continued down the path he was on, Gary would end up like the undesirable street kids who were influencing him—the “dirtbags,” as locals referred to them. Gary agreed, and the Lauwers family started going to counseling once a week. During the sessions, Gary chalked up his recent behavior to the problems he was having with some of his peers.

  “Gary had trouble with people picking on him and getting angry over it,” Nicole Lauwers-Law recalls. “He was not an aggressive person. Gary tried to be tough, but he really wasn’t. I think the issues he had stemmed from these friends.”

  Some nights after therapy, Gary would go visit Johnny Hayward at an ice cream parlor in Huntington where he worked. Serving cold desserts five nights a week drastically cut into his social life, but it paid enough to buy pot, purple microdots, or whatever else he wanted. When Gary would stop by, Johnny would invite him down to the parlor’s cellar to get high by sucking nitrous oxide gas out of whipped cream cans. The dangerous process, known as “Whip-Its,” gave Gary and Johnny a brief sense of light-headed euphoria, coupled with the sensation of floating. “We’d sit down there and suck the nitrous oxide out of all the canisters,” Hayward recalls. “I mean, like, two hundred of ’em. We’d talk funny and goof off. It was wild times.”

  While it may be true that Gary’s friends influenced some of his poor decisions, they were, at the end of the day, the only friends he had.

  Chapter 15

  RICKY KASSO’S TIME IN SOUTH Oaks was tumultuous. A week into his stay, he celebrated his sixteenth birthday with zero fanfare. Later, he tried to hang himself with a sweater in the shower. He was discovered unconscious, but alive, and cut down. Doctors who evaluated Ricky afterward felt he had done it for attention and did not sincerely wish to die. They diagnosed him as a manic depressive and he was prescribed Lithium, a mood stabilizer. To top it off, Ricky ran away at least five times during the eleven weeks he was a patient. On each occasion, he was found by Suffolk County police officers and returned to the rehabilitation center.

  During one such escape, Ricky fled to a nearby store and stole a box of hair dye before venturing into the woods behind Dickinson Avenue Elementary School. There, with the help of Dave Johnson, Ricky dyed his wavy brown locks a bright shade of blond, hoping to throw the cops off his trail. Afterward, he bumped into Beth Brewer, his former schoolmate, at the East Northport train station.

  “What’s going on, Ricky?” Beth asked as she approached him.

  A very jittery Ricky replied that his parents had put him in a hospital against his will, and that he had recently broken out.

  “No way are they gonna lock me up,” he insisted. “I’m not crazy.”

  “I never said you were crazy,” she replied, “but maybe you need help with drugs.”

  This remark set Ricky off. Rapidly seesawing between drug-free South Oaks and the acid-filled streets of Northport had left him paranoid and hostile.

  “I do not!” he screamed.

  Ricky moved closer to Beth with every syllable. She kept her cool and deescalated the situation by speaking calmly to him before he got onto his train.

  Later that week, despite his L’Oréal disguise, Ricky was again picked up by Suffolk County police officers and returned to South Oaks. Desperate to leave the facility once and for all, Ricky decided on another tactic—simply telling his doctors what they wanted to hear. He approached his therapy sessions relaxed, calmly insisting he would return to school and that he no longer worshipped the devil.

  The ruse worked, and Ricky was formally released from South Oaks during the last week of May 1983. He returned home, and for a while, things were quiet. Lynn dyed Ricky’s hair back to brown and bought him new clothes. However, Ricky soon found life at home just as restricting as the hospital. Dick and Lynn had once again asked him to cut his hair and wear respectable clothes, and they gave him a strict curfew—nine p.m.

  Resentful of these rules, Ricky decided to take his frustrations out on his mother one day in early June. While Lynn was preoccupied with housework, Ricky snuck into the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of ketchup, and darted back up to his room. When he heard Lynn walking nearby, he smeared some of the condiment onto his wrists and stood at the top of the stairwell, hollering, “Mom! Mom!” Lynn rushed past Wendy, who was walking out of the bathroom near the stairwell, and stood at the bottom of the steps. Before she could ask what was wrong, Ricky held up his arms, both dripping with crimson gore, and boasted, “Look what I did!” Lynn screamed in horror. Ricky laughed and licked his wrists.

  “It’s ketchup!” he cackled.

  Tired of her son’s antics, Lynn threw Ricky’s clothes onto the front lawn and told him to get out of her house. He made no effort to change her mind, and again walked away to a life on the streets of Northport.

  That same spring, Gary Lauwers dropped out of Northport High, shortly after his sixteenth birthday.

  “He had a few classes that he enjoyed, like photography,” Nicole Lauwers-Law recalls, “but he didn’t want to go back to school. My parents weren’t happy that he dropped out, but they didn’t give him a hard time.”

  Gary tried to gain sympathy from his parents by telling them he’d dropped out because of kids bullying him. However, those closest to Gary dispute this.

  “He just wanted to hang out and get fucked up more,”
Johnny Hayward insists. “Everyone knew Gary was my best friend. I would have known if there were issues between him and others. I beat up everyone who messed with us.”

  Gary’s friends also recall Ricky Kasso reconnecting with Jimmy Troiano around this time, and the two renting a small apartment together on Cherry Street. Most of their time inside the small dwelling was spent smoking pot, but friends would later claim that séances with a Ouija board were conducted, with Gary Lauwers occasionally stopping by.

  Another resident of Cherry Street was nine-year-old Brendan Brown. One warm day in June, Brown and a friend decided to grab their BMX bicycles and head to a nearby park. As Brown coasted down his parents’ driveway and onto the street, he saw three older kids—Ricky, Jimmy, and a girlfriend—walking in his direction. He turned his head for a moment, thinking little of the trio headed his way. Suddenly Brown heard his friend shout “Holy shit!” as Ricky, Jimmy, and the girl started racing toward them. Terrified, the two turned their bikes around and headed back up Brown’s driveway.

  “I think they were probably going to steal our bikes,” Brown says today. “I had seen Kasso around, but this was the first time I had interacted with him. I didn’t know he was the ‘Acid King’ or any of that stuff—he was just an older high school kid who was scary.”

  Ricky’s days of messing with kids on Cherry Street would be short-lived. Soon after, Jimmy was arrested for violating his probation when he and a friend drove down to Florida to pick up more drugs. He was brought back to Long Island and sentenced to one year in the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office Correctional Facility in Riverhead. With his best friend now in jail, Ricky’s life lost direction. He gave up on the apartment and left before the second month’s rent was due.

  One afternoon in the middle of June, Ricky walked over to the Midway with a pocketful of dope money and decided to get his ear pierced. There, he a met a pretty, young brunette—Gary’s friend Corey Quinn. The two immediately hit it off, casually flirting despite Corey being nearly four years Ricky’s junior. Behind Ricky’s confident exterior, however, Corey could see a sadness lingering under the surface. At one point, a mutual friend told her that Ricky was homeless, just like Gary had been a couple months before. While she felt sorry for him, Corey didn’t immediately offer Ricky a place to stay in her clubhouse. After all, the two had only just met.