Sleepers

The bartender clicked off the Knicks game.

The two waitresses slipped into the kitchen.

Sean Nokes, thirty-seven, was a security guard with a gambling problem. He was two months behind on his rent and his wife was threatening to leave him and take their daughter home to her mother. He had not fared well since his years at Wilkinson, moving from job to job, small town to small town. He was hoping he had finally turned the corner, working a Manhattan job that paid decent money. He had come to Hell's Kitchen to pay off a debt and stopped into the pub for di

'Too bad you ordered the meat loaf,' Tommy said. 'The brisket's real good here. Only you'll never know it.'

'You were scared little pricks,' Nokes said. 'Both of you. All of you. Scared shitless. I tried to make you tough, make you hard. But it was a waste of time.'

'I had you all wrong, then,' Tommy said. 'All this time, I just figured you liked fuckin' and beatin' up little boys.'

'You are go

'After you,' John said.

The first bullet came out the back of Nokes' head, the second went through his right eye and the third creased his temple. Nokes rested with his head back and his hands spread, mouth twisted into an almost comical grimace. Tommy stepped out of the booth and walked over to Nokes' side. He put a bullet into each of his legs and one into each hand. John stood his ground and pumped three slugs into Nokes' chest, waiting for the body jerks to stop each time before pulling the trigger again.

The bartender closed his eyes until the gunfire stopped.

The young couple fell to the ground, hovering for cover under their table.

The couple in the first booth sat frozen with fear, staring at one another, still holding their knives and forks.

The two businessmen never turned their heads. One of them, the pretzels in his hand crushed to crumbs, had wet his pants.

The two waitresses stayed in the kitchen, shivering near the grill, the cook by their side.

The old man in the corner had his head on the bar and slept through the shooting.

John and Tommy put the guns back in their holsters, took one final look at Sean Nokes and turned to leave the pub.

'Hey, Jerry,' Tommy called over. 'Be a pal, would ya'?'

'Name it,' the bartender said, his eyes now open, trying not to look over at the fresh body in the back booth.

'Make those brisket sandwiches to go,' Tommy said.

TWO

It had been eleven years since my friends and I had been released from the Wilkinson Home for Boys.

In all those years, we had never once spoken to each other about our time there. We remained caring friends, but the friendship had altered as we traveled down our separate paths. Still, we were friends. By the time of Nokes' murder, the friendship had become less intimate, but no less intense.

Michael Sullivan, twenty-eight, had moved out of Hell's Kitchen shortly after being released from Wilkinson. Never again would he have a problem with the law. Father Bobby called in a handful of chits to get Michael accepted at a solid Catholic high school in Queens, where Michael was sent to live with his mother's sister and her accountant husband. He continued to date Carol Martinez, twenty-seven, until the middle of his sophomore year, when the distance and their evolving personalities finally conspired to cool their longing. But he continued to see his Hell's Kitchen cohorts as often as he could, unwilling to give up the friendship, needing to be with us as much as we needed to be with him.

Michael graduated with honors from high school and moved on to a local university. Then, after a hot and fruitless summer working as a waiter at a Catskills resort, he decided to enroll in a Manhattan law school.

At the time of Nokes' shooting, Michael was rounding out his first six months as a New York City assistant district attorney.

We tried to share a meal once a week, the bond between us difficult to sever. When we were together, often joined by Carol, Michael still held sway over the group. He was always our leader and still the toughest of the group. Only now, his strength was of a different part, not physical and violent like that of John and Tommy, but carried quietly within. The months at Wilkinson had changed Michael in many ways, but they could not strip him of his drive. If anything, the horrors he endured gave a focus to his life, a target toward which he could aim.

He worked out at a gym, two hours every morning, a strenuous mix of aerobics and weights. He didn't smoke and he drank only with di

Michael kept his world private.

He had an apartment in Queens that few were permitted to see. He dated frequently, but never seriously. His loves were kept to a minimum – the Yankees, foreign movies, Louis L'Amour westerns, the silent halls of museums. In a loud city, Michael Sullivan was a quiet stranger, a man with secrets he had no desire to share.

He walked the streets of Hell's Kitchen only occasionally, and then only to visit Father Bobby, who by now had risen to principal of our former grammar school. He loved his work and buried himself in studying ways the law could be maneuvered.

'There are a thousand different crimes that someone can commit,' he said to me shortly before the shooting. 'And there are more than a thousand ways to get him out of any one of them.'

John and Tommy had both stayed in Hell's Kitchen, finished grammar school then attended a technical junior high, close to the neighborhood, for less than the required two years. In that time, they continued to do odd jobs for King Be

They never recovered from the abuse of Wilkinson. In our time there, Michael and I realized that we weren't anywhere near as tough as we had thought. John and Tommy, however, came away with an entirely different frame of mind. They would let no one touch them again, let no one near enough to cause them any harm. They would achieve their goal in the most effective way they knew – through fear. It was a lesson they learned at the Wilkinson Home for Boys.

By the mid-seventies, John and Tommy had helped found the West Side Boys, farming the initial five-member group out as enforcers, thugs for hire. As the gang grew, they progressed to more lethal and lucrative action, including moving counterfeit cash and buying and selling large amounts of cocaine. They also took on contract murders. Their specialty – dismembering their victims' bodies and disposing the pieces throughout the area -evoked fear in even their closest associates.

When they killed, they got rid of everything except for the hands.

Those they kept in freezers in a select number of Hell's Kitchen refrigerators, preserved to provide finger prints on the guns used by the gang. It was a tactic that made it virtually impossible for the police to pin the crew to any one murder. When prints were checked, the patterns led back to men who were already dead.

Along the way, both John and Tommy got hooked on cocaine and began to drink heavily. They remained best friends and lived in the same West 47th Street tenement, two floors apart. They were respectful toward King Be