Sleepers

They still joked with Fat Mancho, played stickball in front of his candy store and helped his bookie operation rake in thousands a week, their powerful support insuring that no one dared back down from a phone-in bet.

I saw them as often as I could and when we got together, it was easy for me to forget what they had become and only remember who they were. We went to ball games together, took long Sunday morning walks down by the piers and helped Father Bobby with the basket collections at mass. I seldom asked them about their business and they always teased me about mine.

Like Michael, I moved out of Hell's Kitchen soon after my release from Wilkinson. Father Bobby also pulled some strings for me: I was admitted to a first-rate Catholic high school for boys in the Bronx. By my late teens, I was taking night courses at St. John's University in Queens, working a nowhere day job in a Wall Street bank and wrestling with a fresh set of demons – the discovery that my father was a convicted murderer who had served nearly seven years for killing his first wife. I divided my time between a bed in my parents' Bronx apartment and a two-room basement sublet in Babylon, Long Island.

One summer afternoon in 1973, I was reading an early edition of the New York Post on my lunch hour, sitting on a bench in front of a noisy and crowded outdoor fountain, half a ham sandwich by my side. There, under the heat of a New York sun, I read a Pete Hamill column about former Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew. By the time I got to the last paragraph, I knew I wanted to work on a newspaper.

It would take three years before I would land a job as a copy boy for the New York Daily News, working the midnight-to-eight shift, sharpening pencils, making coffee runs and driving drunken editors home after a night on the prowl. By the time of Nokes' death, I had worked my way up to the clerical department, typing movie schedules for the next day's editions.

It was easy work, leaving me with plenty of free time and most of it was spent in Hell's Kitchen. I still liked the feel of the neighborhood, no matter how much it had changed. I still felt safe there.

I had coffee twice a week with King Be

I bought sodas from Fat Mancho every time I passed his store. He ran enough businesses from that front to fill a mall and was easily spotted in his loud shirts, sprayed with colorful birds and palm trees, which his older sister sent over from Puerto Rico. Every time he saw me he cursed. We had known each other for more than twenty years and I remained one of the few people he fully trusted.

On weekends, I would drive down and endure two-hour one-on-one basketball games against Father Bobby more than twenty years older than me and still two steps faster. We all were aging, but Father Bobby always looked young, his body trim, his face relaxed. Whatever problems he had, he handled beneath the silent cover of prayer.

On occasion, I would have di

Carol was passionate about her work and quiet about her life, living alone in a third-floor walk-up not far from where we had gone to school. She dated infrequently and never anyone from outside the neighborhood. Though I never asked, I knew she still held strong feelings for Michael. I also knew that when that relationship ended she had been with John during his more sober periods.

She always had a special affection for John, could always see the boy he once had been. Whenever we went out as a group, Carol would walk between Michael and John, grasping their arms, at ease and in step between the lawyer and the killer.

These were my friends.

We accepted each other for what we were, few questions asked, no demands made. We had been through too much to try to force change on one another. We had been through enough to know that the path taken is not always the ideal road. It is simply the one that seems right at the moment.

Wilkinson had touched us all.

It had turned Tommy and John into hardened criminals, determined not to let anyone have power over them again. It had made me and Michael realize that while an honest life may not offer much excitement, it pays its dividends in freedom.

It cost Father Bobby countless hours in prayer, searching for answers to questions he feared asking.

It made Fat Mancho a harder man, watching young boys come out stone killers, stripped of their feelings, robbed of all that was sweet.

Wilkinson even touched King Be

None of us could let go of the others. We all drifted together, always wondering when the moment would arrive that would force us to deal with the past. Maybe that moment would never come. Maybe we could keep it all buried. But then John and Tommy and luck walked in on Sean Nokes halfway through a meat loaf di

THREE

Michael sat across from me, quietly mixing sour cream into his baked potato. We were at a corner table at the Old Homestead, a steak house across from the meat market in downtown Manhattan. It was late on a Thursday, two weeks after Nokes was killed in the Shamrock Pub.

The second I read about the shooting, I knew who had pulled the triggers. I was as afraid for Tommy and John as I was proud of them. They had done what I would never have had the courage to do. They had faced the evil of our past and eliminated it from sight. Though Nokes' death did nothing to relieve our anguish, I was still glad he was dead. I was even happier when I learned that Nokes not only knew why he died, but at whose hands.

John and Tommy did not remain fugitives for long.

They were arrested within seventy-two hours of the shooting, finger-printed, booked and charged with second-degree murder. Police had four eyewitnesses willing to testify – the older couple in the first booth and the two businessmen sitting at the bar. All four were outsiders; strangers to Hell's Kitchen. The restaurant's other patrons, as well as its workers, stayed true to the code of the neighborhood: they saw nothing and they said nothing.

John and Tommy were held without bail.

The two hired a West Side attorney named Da

'Have you gone to visit them yet?' Michael asked, cutting into his steak. It was the first time either of us had talked about the shooting since di