used them to kill someone. He explained,
Richard planned to use a knife for this particular job. He very much enjoyed, he says, killing with a knife because it was so personal; you had to be close to the victim. He liked to see life leave the eyes of those he killed; especially a rapist. This would be…fun.
The Castaway was a sprawling three-story condo complex on Collins Avenue, near 163rd Street, on both the ocean side of Collins and the street side. Richard checked into a hotel near the place, had a nice lunch, and drove to the parking lot, looking for the mark’s car. It wasn’t there. Richard quickly found out there were two shifts, 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., then 4:00 P.M. to midnight. It was now the middle of the winter, 1974, and the parking lot was full. He would have to be careful, he knew, about being seen taking the mark.
He left, returned at 3:30 P.M., and waited. He didn’t have to wait long, for the mark soon pulled into the lot and parked, not a care in the world, singing to himself. He drove a beat-up red Chevy. The license plate matched. Richard smiled when he saw the guy, a tall, skinny Latin with a thick, greasy head of black hair combed straight back. Richard quickly saw how the job should be done and soon left.
Now it was only a matter of time.
At eleven thirty that night Richard was back in the parking lot of the Castaway. Just across the street was a hangout for young people called Nebas, and a huge crowd of kids were mingling. Richard parked his van as close to the mark’s car as possible, got out of it, walked to the red Chevy, gave it a flat, then calmly returned to the van. This was a tried and proven method Richard would use many times over. He already knew where he’d take the mark once he snatched him—a desolate stand of palms about a half an hour north of the hotel, right by the ocean.
Near midnight, the mark came bopping over to his car. He spotted the flat, cursed out loud, and opened his trunk. As he bent to pull the spare out, Richard stole up behind him and put the .38 in his lower back.
“My friend, I need you to come with me,” he said, his voice faraway and detached, as if it were coming from a machine, a telephone recording. Richard let him see the gun now, took his skinny arm and marched him to the van, put him inside, handcuffed him, put a sock in his mouth, and taped his mouth shut with heavy-duty gray duct tape. Richard calmly got behind the wheel and pulled out of the lot. The whole thing took less than two minutes. As Richard drove north on Collins, he talked to the mark.
“My friend,” he said, “I want you to know that I’ve been sent by friends of the girl you beat up and raped.”
With that the mark began to moan and flop around like a fish suddenly out of water.
“If you don’t stop making a fuss, I’m going to hurt you.”
The mark became still, silent. What was so unsettling about what Richard said was not so much the words. It was the cold, detached way he said them, each word like the cut of a jagged knife.
“So, my friend, I want you to know that you have to suffer before I kill you. They paid me well for that, but truth is I’d gladly do this for free. I want you to know that.”
“Hmm! Hmm!” the mark mumbled, panic-stricken.
“If you believe in God, my friend, you better start praying because you’ve reached the end of the line. The train is going to soon stop and it’s time to get off.”
Richard was purposely tormenting the mark, letting the caustic words be the last words he heard in this life.
“Did you really think you could do such a thing and go about your business like nothing happened? Well, my friend, you picked the wrong girl this time.”
Richard turned right, shut off the lights, and made his way onto a rough road that went all the way down to the beach. There was a nearly full moon in a velvet black sky. The moonlight, white and clean and lovely, reflected off the calm sea, laying a glistening lunar highway on the still surface of the water. Richard stopped, sat, and listened. All was quiet and still. No sound but the gentle lapping of small waves on the fine white sand of the beach.
Richard put on blue plastic gloves, pulled the rapist from the van, dragged him to a wide, particularly curved palm, and tied him to the tree with yellow nylon rope. Now the mark was in a frenzied panic. Richard showed him the gleaming curved blade, the moonlight reflecting ominously on the razor-sharp steel.
“So, my friend, let’s get started.”
And with that Richard roughly pulled down the mark’s pants, took tight hold of both his testicles, and pulled so hard he literally tore them off the mark—
White-hot pain exploded where his testicles had just been. His eyes burst open. Richard showed him his balls.
“How’s that feel?” he asked, smiling. “My friend.”
Richard gave time for the shock to wear off a bit and for the pain to set in.
“Nice night, isn’t it?” he asked. “Look at the moon, how pretty.”
Now he used the knife; he grabbed hold of the mark’s penis—“This is what got you in all the trouble, you don’t need it anymore”—and easily cut it off. He showed it to the rapist as blood gushed from the sudden fleshy stump Richard had created. He went back to the van and put the severed member in a Ziploc sandwich bag he’d brought for this purpose.
He returned to the mark, ripped all his clothes off him, and began slowly slicing away fillets of flesh—kind of like pieces of skirt steak, making sure to show him the pieces he was methodically taking away, smiling as he worked.
The mark was soon a monstrous sight, terrible to see in the pale silver light of the Miami moon. Richard again returned to the van. He had brought along a large container of fine kosher salt and he now poured the salt all over the exposed flesh. The salt would bring, Richard knew, a whole new symphony of pain. He gave time for the salt to work.
Now Richard forced the blade into the mark’s lower abdomen and slowly pulled it up with his superhuman strength. The mark’s guts spilled forth and were suddenly just hanging there like a nervous cluster of blue-red snakes.
Richard cut him free, put a life preserver on him, grabbed his ankle, and dragged him down to the water’s edge, talking as he went: “My friend, I know the tide’s going out now, I checked, and you’re going out with it. I put the life vest on you because I don’t want you to drown. I’ll bet you my last dollar that the sharks’ll find you in no time. I hear there are big nasty tiger sharks here.” And with that Richard swung him up and around and tossed him into the water and watched him drift out. Then he turned and went back to the van, retrieved what he had cut from the mark, threw it all in the water, and returned to his hotel, where he had a nice sandwich—his favorite, turkey and mayo on rye—and slept like a baby. Richard always slept particularly well after a good piece of work.
In the morning, after a leisurely breakfast and a nice walk, Richard started back home, calm, relaxed, listening to country music as he went. He had very much enjoyed this job and wondered how long it had been before the sharks found the rapist. He knew they prowled the shoreline at night and was sure it hadn’t taken long at all.
As Richard was going through South Carolina, a van with a rebel flag in the window pulled up alongside him. There were three guys in it. They began to taunt Richard, called him a “nigger lover,” gave him the finger. Of all the people in the world to pick on, they chose the wrong guy. Richard told them to fuck off, to get lost. They again gave him the finger, all serious faced, as if they had bad intentions, wanted to hurt him. He pulled ahead of them, spotted a rest stop off the highway, and drove into it. They too pulled into the rest stop. Richard retrieved his gun from under the seat. The three of them got out of the van. One of them had some kind of club. Richard got out of his van and without so much as one word shot all three of them dead, got back in his van, and pulled away. In less than ten hours he had killed four people without a second thought, other than to wonder how long it took for the sharks to find the rapist; he was proud of his work, his imaginative ingenuity, the justice he had served up. When the police found the three dead men at the rest stop, there was little they could do with no tangible link—witnesses, clues, tire marks—to these bodies and the person responsible for the three homicides.
Back in Brooklyn, Richard went to see DeMeo. He met him at the Gemini Lounge, told him what he had done,
