The Manhattan weather was oppressive and steamy, and the night heat shrouded the slum tenements like a great wool blanket. In an unlit concrete playground in the peaceful but teeming Clinton district slum in Hell's Kitchen on the West Side, seven boys and two girls lazed quietly on concrete benches. It was past midnight.
Out from the shadows came half a dozen teen-age youngsters. "Where's Frenchy?" demanded one. Nobody knew, although some were aware that cocky Frenchy Cordero, from downtown, had recently been chased out of the neighborhood after he tried to sell marijuana to a Clinton woman. The intruders withdrew. Scared, the Clinton kids decided to hurry on home. But as they started to go, the invaders appeared again.
This time there were at least 13 of them, all Puerto Rican. and led by a kid in a Dracula-like costume—nurse's cape, buckled shoes. He carried a knife. Another leader held an umbrella. With a splintering crash, one of the toughs smashed a Clinton boy with a bottle. Another shouted: "No gringos leave the park!" Wildly, the Clinton kids ran for an exit, but the gang caught up with most of them. Anthony Krzesinski, 16, fell wounded in the chest and groin. Bobby Young, 16, stabbed in the back, dropped to the ground. Five other boys staggered about, badly cut up. The gang fled.
A Clinton boy dragged Bobby Young across the street to a flat, where Bobby fell dead. "Skinny" Krzesinski staggered and crawled to another nearby building, knocked on a door, reached up to the girl who answered the knock, gripped her wrist tightly, and died.
Twisted Trail. Within hours, the city, long inured to the rumbles of the Sinners, the Assassins, and other juvenile gangs, was raging with anger over the latest outbreak of wanton murder; since January, New York teen-age gang warfare had accounted for eight senseless killings and scores of beatings and knifings." Flanked by reporters, the police fanned out to follow the twisted trail left by "Cape Man," "Umbrella Man" and their pals.
In The Bronx, the cops found the two leaders rummaging for food in a garbage can. The knife-wielding Cape Man was a soft-faced tough named Salvador Agron. just turned 16. His mother and stepfather, a part-time Pentecostal minister of a storefront church, had sent the boy to live in, Harlem with a 17-year-old married sister whose husband had deserted her. Young Agron had been in scrapes with the police before. Umbrella Man was a surly 17-year-old named Antonio Hernandez, whose stepmother and father (a hotel worker) live in a filthy Harlem flat. He had left home weeks before to roam the streets and prey on homosexuals and hopheads who wander through the slum areas.
Both were hanging around the corner of 72nd and Broadway with a bunch of Puerto Rican toughs when the word was passed that white kids in the Clinton area had been beating up Puerto Ricans in the Clinton section (when in fact both whites and Puerto Ricans had been living together there in comparative peace). It was all the excuse they needed for a rumble. The victims in the Clinton playground knew neither their attackers nor the reasons for the attack.