Five Newark Boys

CHAPTER 1

The kitchen stove is attached to a kerosene heater in the living room of the second floor, three-bedroom cold water flat. Nine-year-old Carlo’s ongoing household job is to carry the five-gallon container of kerosene up from the basement to the apartment.

On his way back to the basement Carlo stops on the first-floor landing to watch and listen to the

pushcart vendors go up and down the cobblestone street. One is the ragman with his sad and lonely chant… “Rags, rags.” Another man will sharpen your knives and other utensils. Others hawk a variety of items. There’s the bleach man, who will refill your old bottle or rent you a new one for use in the laundry. And the umbrella repair man who’ll recondition your favorite umbrella right there on the spot. “Tripo, Tripo, Tripo,” sings the tripe man as his little wagon comes slowly down the street, selling sweetbreads and organ meats for delicacy dishes.

Open horse-drawn wagons with fruit and vegetables clip-clop down the street, their drivers singing out their special and unique songs to bring loyal customers to their doors. More men in horse-drawn covered wagons deliver milk and bakery goods door to door. Many of the residents in this area live in public housing. Vast sections consist of wooden tenements.

Carlo grew up, like other neighborhood kids, never knowing that there was any significant money problem in the world. Carlo didn’t notice when his dad sold the family’s old Ford Model T to pay bills because things at his Pop’s shoe repair shop had become worse. They are poor. That’s all he and the other kids know.

In the summer, the kids follow the horse-drawn ice wagons and grab small pieces of chipped ice that’s refreshing on a hot summer day. They play stickball and kick-the-can in vacant lots or at the city park. They make slingshots and play guns out of wood scraps and old rubber inner tubes. On hot days some of the fire hydrants were open, and the kids play and cool off in the pools made by the spray, nicknamed Italian swimming pools. They build bonfires to bake the potatoes they steal as they run past the front of the local grocery store. In the wintertime, they sled and skate at the city park. Some of the poorer kids hop slow-moving railroad coal cars and toss out small chunks of coal that they pick up later in tin buckets to help keep the old coal stove at home burning.

“Frankie, Frankie!” the young Carlo Cardoni yells as he runs to greet his buddy who’s standing with short, chubby Vinnie De Luca and Frankie’s older brother, Phil Fasino, in front of little Mike’s brown-shingled apartment house. Mike Mancuso is shirtless and standing on the small front porch. He’s a skinny, sickly-looking little guy.

“Hey, Mike, put on your baggy shirt today; we’ll get some pears at Seven Oaks on the way home from the park!” Frankie yells to him.

Seven Oaks is a wealthy neighborhood with large stately homes and plush manicured yards graced by fruit-bearing apple and pear trees. The boys often go there and fill their shirts with juicy yellow pears or red apples. They can easily carry four pounds of pears or apples in their baggy shirts. Their mothers never need to buy fruit, and they don’t discourage the boys from doing this. Neither do the people who live at Seven Oaks. Times are bad, and nobody cares about a few stolen apples or pears.

Mike puts on a baggy shirt and the boys run barefoot off to the local city park, about half a mile from their homes. Bare feet are standard during the summer months; Sundays the boys wear shoes. They play around at the old dirt park for a couple of hours and then decide to swipe some pears and go on home. They stop at Seven Oaks and fill their shirts with as many pears as they can carry. Everything’s going well. The dogs at Seven Oaks don’t bother them, and the two big Irish policemen in the patrol car just laugh at them when they deny picking pears, their shirts bulging with dozens of lumps.

The boys start down the street to where they live, skipping, running and having fun. As they pass a wooded area about five hundred yards from their homes, four teenage boys step out from behind tall bushes in a wooded lot and surround them. The boys are sixteen and seventeen years old.

“Where you kids going?” asks a kid in a blue plaid shirt.

“We’re just going home,” Carlo answers.

“You guys got any money?” a stocky boy asks.

Being the older of the young boys, Phil pipes up: “We don’t have any money, and if we did, we wouldn’t give it to you!”

A tall, red-haired boy slaps Phil across the head. “You little bastard, I’m going to teach you some manners.”

The boy grabs Phil by the back of his collar. Phil takes a swing at him but misses. The boy strikes Phil in the face, bloodying his nose, and then pushes him toward the wooded lot. Phil stumbles and falls to the ground. He looks up at the kid with the red hair who glares down at him. Phil notices his strange eyes; one’s brown, but the other is half brown and half blue.

A lanky kid in a Yankees tee shirt shoves Carlo to the ground next to Phil. The other boys push Vinnie, Frankie, and Mike into the woods next to Carlo and Phil.

“Empty your pockets. Let’s see what you’ve got,” demands the stocky kid with a crew cut.

“We ain’t got nothing,” says Mike.

The red-haired kid grabs Mike by the hair. “Shut up, pipsqueak.”

Mike struggles and pulls away. He starts to run, pears falling out of his baggy shirt and bouncing on the ground. The red-haired boy grabs him again and slaps him hard across the face. Frankie, Carlo, and Vinnie move to help Mike but held by the other teenagers. Mike tries to hit the boy, but the big kid wallops him with his fist. Little Mike’s knocked back into the trunk of a tree, banging his head, and falls head-first to the ground and into a pile of rocks.

He doesn’t move. The boys look down at Mike. He’s bleeding from a cut on his head, and blood’s coming out his ears. His body jerks for a few seconds and then is still. The stocky boy stares down at Mike and then looks up at his buddy with a frightened look on his face. The red-haired kid leans down and touches the motionless Mike.

“Oh, shit, now we’ve done it. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

The four teenagers take off, running. Carlo and Frankie go over to Mike. Phil rips off his shirt, pears falling to the ground, and wraps it around Mike’s head. Blood immediately soaks the faded blue shirt. They realize Mike’s severely hurt.

As Vinnie’s house is the closest, they send him to get help. He runs home as fast as his short legs will carry him. He tells his

mom what’s happened, and she calls the police. Shortly afterward, the boys hear the wailing of sirens as a police car, and an ambulance arrives about the same time. The boys are distraught. They silently watch as the paramedics attend to little Mike. They see one of the paramedics shake his head “no.” It’s evident that their little friend is dead.

The boys are crying as the ambulance takes Mike’s body away. Sniffling, the four kids stare blankly at each other. Frankie and Carlo try to console each other by vowing always to stick together and never let anybody do something like this to them again. At the police station, they spend time answering questions and studying pictures of suspects, but they can’t identify any of the older boys.

The police never find the four kids responsible for little Mike’s death. It’s Carlo first taste of justice gone wrong.