The Acid King

by Jesse P. Pollack

  “He was hanging out with Kasso the night he stole the angel dust,” Colm added. “Kasso beat him up and gave him, like, two weeks to pay.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Dan insisted. “It wasn’t as bad as the time Gary beat up Muxie.”

  “Yeah,” Colm agreed. “Truthfully, by that time, I didn’t even want to hang out with him. It was a stupid thing that he did. So many people were looking for him. He owed other people money too. Gary would tell you just about anything just to get what he wanted, sometimes.”

  Dan nodded and took another sip of his beer.

  “Gary would do things for the moment,” he said. “He wouldn’t think about what was gonna happen to him the next day. He’d totally fuck somebody over and not think about the consequences of it. Sometimes he stole money from his parents. He’d get eighty dollars and go out and buy a twenty-five-dollar bong and spend the rest on weed and smoke it all that night.”

  “Didn’t Gary pull a BB gun on someone?” Breskin asked.

  “Yeah,” Colm replied. “I was there when that happened.”

  Dan shook his head in frustration.

  “Those were the kinds of stupid things Gary did that made you not want to him hang out with him!” he exclaimed.

  “Didn’t he take a butane torch and burn the kid who reported him for doing that?” Breskin asked.

  “No,” Colm replied. “I was there when that happened. That was this kid, Mike Muxie. It was his BB pistol. Gary and this other kid, Steve, in just a total spur-of-the-moment thing, decided to gang up on him.”

  “We all hung out with Muxie and we were just starting to get sick of him,” Dan added.

  Breskin’s eyes darted to his rearview mirror as he heard a car pull up behind him. He watched the blue-and-white Ford LTD roll to a stop and its driver’s-side door open. A uniformed Suffolk County Police officer exited.

  “Here’s a cop,” Breskin said.

  “Oh, great . . . ,” Dan said, setting his bottle down between his feet.

  “We’re not doing anything wrong, are we?” Breskin asked, trying to remain calm. “We’re not driving anywhere.”

  Breskin shut off his tape recorder as the officer approached the driver’s-side window. Breskin rolled it down, handing the officer his license and registration. The officer didn’t mince words. He had been patrolling the area and saw the three of them sipping from bottles while sitting in Breskin’s rental car. He shined his flashlight into the back seat and found the beer. After Breskin thoroughly explained himself, the officer declined to arrest him, instead issuing a ticket for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” before returning to his vehicle.

  “So, why did Gary start with the drugs?” Breskin asked as he switched his tape recorder back on. “What sort of need did that fulfill in him?”

  “To feel accepted?” Dan guessed.

  “It wasn’t striking out against his parents,” Colm insisted, “because the only time his parents started getting pissed at him was when he started doing drugs and dropped out of school and stuff. I think. I’m not really totally sure what his parents thought of him.”

  “He was just always like that,” Dan said. “Since he was a little kid. He was always the kid that started the little forest fires. Stuff like that. He’s the kid that climbed up the tree very high.”

  “Knock over garbage cans,” Colm added. “Something like that.”

  “Drugs just seemed to be the natural course for him to take,” Dan admitted.

  “Was Gary different stoned than when he was straight?” Breskin asked.

  “Sometimes,” Dan replied. “He would get stoned and get really into it. He’d start doing funny things.”

  “Gary was just kind of like a personality, you know?” Colm recalled. “Like an entertainer. The things he’d do, like making up rap songs.”

  “If you want to hear the way Gary was,” Dan said, “you should hear this tape we made down at the Path. On the tape is pretty much the way he was.”

  “I’d love to hear that,” Breskin said. He looked at the dashboard clock. It was midnight. He looked at his interviewees, already stressed from their brush with the law, and said, “Why don’t we just end there. . . .”

  * * *

  When Breskin later returned to the Rolling Stone offices in Manhattan to update his editors on the progress of the story, he showed the ticket he’d received in the Foodtown parking lot to Jann Wenner, the magazine’s cofounder and publisher.

  “ ‘Contributing to the delinquency of a minor’?” Wenner read with a smirk. “Man, we’ve been doing that since we started publishing!”

  In the end, Wenner agreed to pay the young reporter’s ticket.

  After all, Hunter S. Thompson’s business expenses were far more unusual.

  Chapter 52

  ON MONDAY, JULY 23, DAVID Breskin left his hotel room and drove over to the Suffolk County Police headquarters, thirty miles away in Yaphank. He had an afternoon appointment with Detective Lieutenant Robert Dunn of the homicide division and was eager to take him to task for the wild claims he’d made to a rabid press. Once he arrived, Breskin was shown into Dunn’s small office. Outside the door, a small plaque reading THOU SHALT NOT KILL hung from the wall. Inside the office, however, Breskin noticed a second plaque bearing a quote from Shakespeare’s Henry VI: THE FIRST THING WE DO, LET’S KILL ALL THE LAWYERS. Breskin chuckled as he took a seat across from Dunn’s desk and switched on his Sony Pressman.

  “So, what about you telling the papers about ‘a whole group of Satanic worshippers,’ and all that?” Breskin asked, cutting to the question he most wanted answers to.

  “I think ‘group’ is a proper word,” Dunn replied, calmly trying to defend his sensational remarks. “After listening to these boys talk, there certainly were strong ritualistic overtones. There’s no question about that, in my mind. It came right from their very mouths. The methodology involved, the taking of parts of clothing, the locks of hair, making him say he loved Satan, the utterings of incantations of some sort.”

  “But this is coming from Kasso and Troiano,” Breskin countered, “both of whom were taking hallucinogens daily. Couldn’t they have just been giving you a load of crap?”

  “Well, how can I comment about that?” Dunn asked, becoming visibly frustrated. “In my opinion, as a reasonably experienced investigator, they were telling the truth.”

  “What about the connection you made between this and rock videos?” Breskin asked, adding, “Off the record, I can’t stand heavy metal music.”

  “Some of it I find good, really,” Dunn told a surprised Breskin. “I think Rush is excellent. I think their early records are quite good.”

  Breskin couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the situation. Sitting before him was the detective lieutenant who had, just days before, told the New York Post that rock music videos were partly to blame for the murder of Gary Lauwers—and now here he was, professing his love for Canadian rock gods Rush.

  “I don’t want to limit it to rock videos, though,” Dunn continued. “That statement was made as the result of the community saying, ‘How could this happen in Northport?’ Not ‘How could this happen?’ I don’t have MTV, but from time to time, I’ve had to turn away from some of the films on NBC or ABC that we allow to come into our homes. I mean, people see violent death and they have no sense of pain, anguish, or motive. Somebody just opens a shower curtain, and some guy comes out and chops them to pieces with a hatchet. ‘How can this happen?’ Well, what did you watch on television last night? You have to wonder about their naïveté.”

  “What about the prison psychiatrist not putting Kasso on a suicide watch?” Breskin asked. “Don’t you think a kid who had committed the sort of murder he had, and went on with life for two weeks—and bragged about it—seems like a suicide risk?”

  “No, not necessarily,” Dunn said. “Do you feel that harkens a suicidal tendency?”

  “Definitely,” a stone-faced Breskin replied.

&nb
sp; Dunn paused, sensing a challenge from the young journalist.

  “Based on what?” he asked incredulously.

  “Based on three months of studying teen suicide,” Breskin replied without missing a beat.

  Dunn backed down and sighed.

  “I wish I was aware of the same body of knowledge,” he said. “I’ve had inmates who have killed six people, and you might say the state of their depression would be awesome, but they were not suicidal.”

  “Well, the interesting thing is suicide doesn’t always come out of intense depression,” Breskin clarified. “Often before the suicide, a suicidal person seems very calm, very cool, very in charge—because they’ve already decided. A lot of people commit suicide on the way up.”

  “I truly wish we were able to see that,” Dunn said. “It was an accidental human error. It was a matter of the psychiatrist’s evaluation of Kasso. There was some discussion in the newspapers having to do with Kasso’s potential suicidal tendencies. We were not made aware of them. I understand Mrs. Kasso agrees that she did not make us aware of that, despite what the papers say. Had she done so, we would have made a sincere effort to notify those who were responsible for his care.”

  Notification or not, there was still a significant issue with the Suffolk County Correctional Facility’s monitoring of Ricky. While he was not on an around-the-clock suicide watch, he was still supposed to be checked in on every thirty minutes. What the press and the public did not know was that the jail had failed to do even that. Several national publications quoted Sergeant Ronald Brooks, a Suffolk County sheriff’s spokesman, as saying Corrections Officer Ronald Horton had checked in on Ricky at twelve thirty a.m.—thirty minutes before the suicide—and that he “appeared to be sleeping normally.”

  None of this was true.

  The inmate check logs for the night of Ricky’s suicide clearly showed no one had checked on him for quite a while before he was found hanging in his cell. Even though this fact was easily traceable, the powers that be decided to cover it up and hope for the best.

  “What was his demeanor like when you questioned him?” Breskin continued.

  “I’d say calm to a shocking degree,” Dunn replied. “It was like when I dealt with DeFeo in the Amityville case. I found Kasso’s behavior somewhat odd—rationalizing what he did. I think the four or five of us were all looking at one another, saying, ‘How can kids—human beings—be that cruel to a person they did grass with, or whatever else?’ I mean, a kid they dealt with, talked about their girlfriends with, and about what kind of a car they’d like to have, and how come they never went to college, and why their mothers didn’t understand them. I think we were in a state of shock, just as the public was. We’re hardened to looking at and smelling these things, but there does come a point where we’re just as shocked as anybody else, and maybe a little bit more shocked. I had veteran detectives tell me that was the cruelest death they had seen. The boy died a cruel death.”

  As Breskin finished jotting down his notes, his mind turned to rumors that some of the street kids had told him. The idea of more people than the established four being in Aztakea that night was beginning to bother him. What if the daily papers were right about ten to fourteen teenagers watching Gary’s murder? Not a Satanic cult, of course, but the usual gang of suburban kids who all showed up for what was advertised as your typical Northport beatdown, but instead were subjected to a brutal killing. After all, these kids had already proven they could keep their mouths shut if they needed to. Not a single person who had been brought to Aztakea by Ricky and Jimmy to view Gary’s remains had the courage to call the police or tell a parent. It took the bravery of one girl with secondhand knowledge to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.

  “Are you damn sure there were only four people up there?” Breskin finally asked.

  “No, I’m not,” Dunn replied to Breskin’s surprise. “I’m definitely not sure.”

  Chapter 53

  “CAN YOU TELL ME, IN whatever length or brevity you wish, where your involvement in these events began?” Breskin asked, holding the phone to his ear.

  On the other end was Dr. Richard Dackow, the thirty-eight-year-old prison psychiatrist who had evaluated Ricky and Jimmy once they got to Riverhead.

  “When Kasso came in around two o’clock,” Dackow replied, “he was interviewed by two different officers who described him as calm, relaxed, and well-oriented. Someone told me about the article in the newspaper around three o’clock and I quickly scanned it. I thought they might have some problems. I saw them both in the holding pen area. I spoke to them for about five minutes each. I was very much concerned about Troiano. I could see there was a significant deterioration in him from the last time I saw him. He was angry about being in this situation and was feeling very hopeless about it. I ordered that he be put in sick bay. Now, we get around ten thousand admissions a year and maybe we’ll place a hundred of those in sick bay, because that’s only a four-cell area. That’s the only place where we have constant observation in the facility.”

  “I understand the jail has an outstanding reputation for suicide prevention,” Breskin said.

  “In my eleven years of working at this facility,” Dackow replied, “this was the first time I’ve ever had a client commit suicide. After I spoke with him, Kasso was assigned to administrative segregation. That has double the coverage of a normal housing area and the checks are twice as frequent. He was assigned there because my impression of him was that he was very calm and very cool. He wasn’t frightened. He expressed no remorse over the killing.”

  “I would assume that, in the jail, ‘good riddance’ was the sentiment largely felt,” Breskin said.

  “Actually, a lot of the people I know down there were really upset about it,” Dackow countered. “One fellow asked to be moved to a different cell. He wanted to be away from it.”

  “Was Troiano kept in that sick bay cell?” Breskin asked.

  “He’s still there,” Dackow replied. “I don’t foresee him ever moving out of that area.”

  “Have you had the opportunity to talk with him since Kasso’s death?” Breskin asked.

  “I’ve briefly spoken with him once since then,” Dackow replied, “only because I was down in the area to talk to someone else the day after. His only concern was how it would affect his case. There was no expression of remorse or anything like that. I asked him if Ricky told him he had planned to commit suicide, and he said Ricky told him that if it looked like he was going to do a lot of time, he might do it. However, one hypothesis is that he killed himself by mistake.”

  “How would that have happened?” Breskin asked, setting his pen down to pay very close attention.

  “He had a rather negative type of charge,” Dackow replied.

  “That’s the understatement of the year,” Breskin chuckled.

  “He was probably a rather unsympathetic character in the eyes of his fellow inmates,” Dackow continued. “All of the prisoners in administrative segregation are accused of crimes that if they wore them around their neck, they would be in real jeopardy—not just in jail, but if they went to a PTA meeting and told you what they had done. Primarily child molesters, sexual abusers, murderers. Not a group that should be too eligible for casting stones. One way you can gain sympathy is to make a suicide gesture. There are some things that tend to corroborate that. I understand the suicide gesture he had made at South Oaks was pretty much like that. He had also used suicide gestures to manipulate his parents with the ketchup on his wrists. I understand from one of the other inmates that he had heard a thump just as the officer was making the rounds. Four or five minutes after he heard the thump that he assumed was Kasso, the officers had him down and were applying CPR. Because of the locking devices, that’s about how long it takes. He may have, in fact, been trying a suicide gesture anticipating that he’d be rescued and didn’t plan it particularly well.”

  This revelation stunned Breskin. What if Dackow was right? What if, despite
all his tough-guy talk over the past few years about killing himself if he was ever arrested, Ricky actually had no intention of dying? This added a whole new layer of tragedy to an already horrific story. He thanked Dackow for his time, turned off his tape recorder, and began packing his bags for home. There, he would begin the long and arduous process of transcribing the thirty-seven hours of interview tapes he had spent the last three weeks recording. With those transcripts in hand, Breskin would have the foundation for the most dramatic and controversial story he would write as a journalist.

  Chapter 54

  BY THE END OF JULY 1984, most of the daily newspapers had abandoned the Ricky Kasso case. Within a week of discovering Gary’s remains, the Northport Village Police Department had issued a gag order, forbidding its officers from giving any further comments to the press, with the Suffolk County Police Department soon following suit. This sudden lack of new information, coupled with the heinous massacre of twenty-one people inside a San Ysidro, California, McDonald’s on July 18, caused most news outlets to move on.

  A few publications, however, refused to let go of the story.

  On July 31 the National Enquirer ran their “investigation” of the killing. Surprisingly, Ricky did not make the front cover, losing out to Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Lawford, and a tease for the Enquirer’s thrilling exposé about people who had fallen in love with their telephones. Somewhat less shockingly, the tabloid milked the Satanic element of Gary’s murder for everything it had and made up even more lurid claims to pad out its pages. The article reported local children supposedly being doused with gasoline by Satanists who threatened to burn them alive, along with choice quotes from Chief Howard, Detective Lieutenant Dunn, and Dick Kasso—all pilfered from the pages of Newsday, the Daily News, and the Post. In an even stranger turn, the Enquirer’s spread featured a heroic tale in which Northport’s mayor, Peter Nolan, was quoted as rescuing a puppy who had been buried in the sand by cult members.