MEMORIES OF TERROR - (and NY Math: 3,000 years = 19 years)
Ken (NY)
Memories of Terror
3 of 5 men convicted in 1982 crime spree are up for parole
by Oscar Corral
Staff Writer
Before all the customers were forced to strip, before the two men were
shot, before the young waitress was raped, there was only silence.
The buzz of conversation in the Seacrest Diner Restaurant in Old
Westbury in the early-morning hours of May 29, 1982, had suddenly been
swallowed up. No forks clanked on plates of bacon and eggs, no orders
rang out from waitresses to cooks. Just eerie stillness.
Five young men weighed down with pistols, shotguns and blackjacks
commanded all the attention. Some of them were smiling and laughing.
"They looked like they were having fun," said cook Michael Laganas.
The next 45 minutes marked the depraved crescendo of a night of
plunder and savagery. That night, Long Islanders lost any lingering
illusions they may have clung to that they could hide safely from
crime behind their sprawling lawns or in the bright lights of their
neighborhood diners. It was simply, the judge who tried the case said,
"the most violent and obscene crime spree in the history of Nassau
County."
"People still need to be reminded of this as one of those pure acts of
evil," said former Nassau police supervisor John Nolan, who was one of
the lead investigators in the case.
Nineteen years later, three of the men responsible -- Michael
Williams, 41, his brother, Robert Williams, 38, and Bruce Garrison, 40
-- are up for parole from state prisons. The brothers appear before
the parole board this week; Garrison, next month. Even if their
requests are denied, the law requires that they be released next year.
The looming parole hearings of the convicts has triggered a
letter-writing campaign by some of the victims and Nassau District
Attorney Denis Dillon to delay their releases as long as possible.
Dillon, who successfully lobbied to stiffen sentencing laws after the
incident, wants to further alter laws so that future convicts must
serve more time for multiple crimes.
"I don't think they should ever get out," Laganas said. "I don't think
a single person has forgiven them."
The idea for the rampage was hatched on a Friday evening in an East
New York park where Garrison, the Williams brothers, James Martin and
Robert Samuels -- all from Brooklyn -- sometimes played basketball.
All five of the men were high school dropouts, and all except Robert
Williams, a stock clerk, were unemployed. All of them had committed
crimes in the past.
They decided they wanted to "go to Babylon to get paid." They didn't
literally mean the town in southwestern Suffolk, Nolan said.
"They were coming out to the suburbs, the land of milk and honey," he
said.
First, the gang beat and robbed a group of men playing cards in a
Flatbush parking garage and stole a late-model Cadillac for their trek
to Long Island. They cruised east on the Northern State Parkway and
exited at Manetto Hill Road shortly after midnight.
The gang was intending to rob a diner, but, while looking for one,
they saw cars parked outside the home of Janet and Thomas Reilly Sr.
in Plainview and figured they would "take down the house," as they
later told police.
The Reillys' 20-year-old son, Thomas Jr., was home from college and
was giving a party for some of his former classmates from Kennedy High
School. The 20 or so youths were in the basement, telling jokes and
watching "Saturday Night Live" on television when the men entered the
house. Garrison led his friends into the basement and yelled, "Get
down and strip," witnesses would later recall. At first, the
party-goers thought someone was playing a joke. The Brooklyn men beat
the ones who refused to take off their clothes.
One of the gunmen went upstairs and nudged Thomas Reilly Sr. in the
ribs with a shotgun to wake him up. In the Reillys' first interview
last week, Janet Reilly recalled how she led one of the gunmen --
Garrison, she thinks -- through her home in search of things to steal
and people to subdue.
"I thought I had built some sort of rapport with him," she said. "What
they did was something that we have to live with every day."
They marched the people upstairs in groups of three. Then they took
the women to another room and sexually abused and raped several of
them. The male victims felt powerless to help, witnesses later
recalled.
Before leaving, the robbers stood over the men lying on the living
room floor and urinated on some of them. After stealing $8,000 in
cash, jewelry and electronic goods, the gang emptied the trunk of
their stolen Cadillac,tossing out a coat and several other items to
make room for their loot.
The night of terror had just begun. Ten miles away, the gang exited
the Northern State Parkway at Glen Cove Road, saw the Seacrest Diner
and decided it would make an easy score.
It was a busy night on Memorial Day weekend, and the place was
bustling at about 1 a.m. Laganas, the cook, was sitting at the counter
drinking coffee on a break. Diner owner Nick Bouloukos was cutting
fruit in the kitchen. Then, suddenly, the place went dead quiet as
four heavily armed men walked in through the front door. A fifth man
went in through the back, all of them barking out orders for people to
get down.
Grace Modica, who was working at the diner with her husband, Anthony,
and their daughter, Veronica, remembers her husband grabbing her by
the hand so they wouldn't be separated and leading her to the room
with the other victims.
About 80 patrons were herded to a side room and ordered to the ground
as the five gunmen took command of the diner. The robbers began
collecting jewelry and cash from customers, beating some along the
way.
When the marauders asked for the manager, Bouloukos raised his head
from the floor and was pistol-whipped. Bouloukos still bears the scar
on his face where his cheekbone was shattered. "I thought they just
wanted to rob us," Bouloukos said. "But it was much more than that."
Holding a shotgun, Robert Williams climbed onto a table and ordered
everyone who had been ushered inside the room to strip naked. Those
who refused were beaten. The Modicas said they didn't hesitate.
"When someone is standing on a table with guns, you'll just do what
they say," said Grace Modica, 60, who now lives in Fort Lauderdale
with her retired husband. "You just don't have a choice. But it's
something we didn't really think about. We were all in the same boat.
I can see it happening like it was yesterday."
Soon, piles of clothes cluttered the aisles, and men and women were
covering themselves with their arms and hands.
Once nude, patrons were forced to simulate sexual intercourse on the
floor in front of everyone. If they resisted, they were beaten or
pistol-whipped. The gang took a young waitress to a back room and
raped her.
"They were animals," Laganas said. "I could hear her screaming, but
then they told her to shut up... No one screamed because they were
scared. There was nothing anybody could do. I thought I might be
dead."
After raping the woman and stealing all they could, the gang opened
fire on the crowd, striking two men, and left the diner laughing.
Bouloukos called police, and a sense of embarrassment and shock swept
over the people inside, remembers Anthony Modica, 63.
"What's really funny is that if you go to a nude beach, people will
gawk, but in that situation, nobody looked at anybody," he said last
week. "But as soon as they left, vanity took over. Women were grabbing
for their skirts, men for their pants."
Nolan remembers arriving at the scene shortly after and standing
stunned at the entrance of the diner.
"I was standing there for 30 seconds going, ‘What did I walk into?'"
Nolan recalled. "The aftermath of the crime was all there. I looked
around and saw nothing but clothes, underwear, female stockings,
bandages, blood. The kind of stuff you'd see at a plane crash."
Investigators got a break in the case the next day. The coat the gang
had tossed out of the Cadillac trunk at the Reilly house had the name
of the car's owner written on a piece of paper in a pocket, enabling
detectives to immediately link the suspects to Brooklyn.
Three of the robbers -- Michael Williams, Martin and Samuel -- were
captured in Brooklyn the next day after a shootout when police tried
to arrest them. Robert Williams fled to Georgia but at the urging of
his father turned himself in to police. Garrison's mother also
persuaded her son to surrender. Their families could not be reached
for comment for this story.
Police recovered a picture the men took of themselves after their
spree. It shows them smiling, brandishing guns, and a pile of cash.
The five pleaded guilty in November 1982 to an 817-count indictment
charging them with several attempted murders, the robberies of more
than 120 people and numerous assaults and rapes. Each received
sentences of more than 3,000 years. Samuels and Martin were later
linked to a homicide in another case and were given longer sentences.
The imminent release of three of the gunmen has sent shivers through
some of their victims and has once again raised questions about
sentencing limits. Samuels and Martin, who were eventually found
guilty in an unrelated murder, will most likely spend the rest of
their lives in prison. But the victims who were interviewed for this
story say all five men are equally evil.
"They should let them out when they're 70, not now," said Bouloukos,
60, who still runs the Seacrest. "It's going to be frightening down
the road."
In an effort to postpone for one last year the parole of the three men
who are eligible, Dillon, the Nassau district attorney, has
spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to the parole board and is
planning to propose state legislation that would increase the amount
of time convicts can serve for concurrent prison sentences.
In 1983, a year after the incident, Dillon convinced state lawmakers
to raise the cap on prison time for people convicted of more than one
Class B felony from 15 to 30 years to 25 to 50 years. Dillon now wants
the cap removed.
"While nineteen years have passed since these crimes occurred, the
victims are still left to deal with the memories of these defendants'
nightmarish conduct," Dillon wrote in his letter to the parole board.
"Time has not dissipated the revulsion felt by residents of Nassau
County toward these defendants' brutal, dehumanizing and violent
assault on the victims' physical and psychological well being. No
sentence could ever adequately compensate the victims for the
indignity and the pain they suffered."
The Reillys said they wrote letters to the parole board asking it to
deny early release to the Williams brothers and Garrison. They worry
that the men, bitter at having spent so much time in prison, may be a
threat to them in the future.
"They should never get out," Thomas Reilly said. "I wouldn't want it
to happen to anyone else." Even as they fight to keep their tormentors
in prison, many of the victims have tried to move beyond the night of
May 29, 1982.
After Bouloukos got out of the hospital, he remodeled the diner. His
clientele dwindled because of bad publicity following the crime, but
Bouloukos refused to lay off any of his staff. Nolan said empty diners
were the norm in the weeks following the crime, as people refrained
from eating out. Bouloukos has since installed security cameras and
panic buttons. Nolan calls Bouloukos a survivor and a symbol of
courage for not closing his doors.
If the felons are released from prison, Bouloukos says his doors will
remain open.
"To leave is not the answer," he said. "I'm going to continue going
on. You're not going to let yourself down."
Despite the horrors of that night, the Reillys said they never let it
haunt them.
"It made us more appreciative of how close you are to your maker,"
said Thomas Reilly, who still lives at the Plainview home with his
wife. "It gave us more faith. There had to be someone there looking
over us."
Janet Reilly said family members leaned on each other in the aftermath
of the attack.
"We had a lot of communication in our family," she said. "We were able
to talk about it. We talked about it until we were tired of talking
about it. We never internalized it."
For Anthony Modica, the night at the Seacrest was the most terrifying
he had ever had, but he never let it affect his family or their
attitudes about life. The Modicas moved to Fort Lauderdale in 1986 for
a fresh start.
"When I walked out of the diner that night, I had my life," Modica
said. "I had my daughter by one hand and my wife by the other, and we
were very thankful. It's been put behind me. It's just a bad memory."
http://www.newsday.com/news/daily/lidine19.htm
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So that is how justice is done here in liberal land. Rob and
beat a group of men - total of 19 years in prison.
Then go and rape, sexually abuse, assault and rob innocent
people in a family house party - total of 19 years in prison.
Then go and rob, rape, sexually abuse, assault, urinate on and
shoot innocent people in a diner - total of 19 years in prison.
That's 120 victims, 817 crimes - total of 19 years in prison.
I figure that to be one year in prison for every 43 crimes or 3 1/2
months per felony.
Ken (NY)
--
Vice Chairman,
Department Of Redundancy Department
____________________________________
http://www.danielfaulkner.com/
for the truth about Mumia Abu-Jamal
No trees were harmed to bring you
this e-Presentation...