Every lunch hour at De La Salle Institute, an all-boys Catholic high school on the Near South Side, a group of students known as the Armour Boys plant themselves at the same rectangular-shaped table.
The teens–whose name comes from the Armour Square Park area they call their turf–trade jokes and raucous laughter and hurl insults at other students. It is a scene that has become as predictable a part of the lunchroom milieu as leftover food and spilled drinks.
Just a few weeks ago, though, some members of the group became targets of an investigation into something that went far beyond lunchroom antics: the brutal beating of Lenard Clark, a 13-year-old African-American whose plight helped motivate President Clinton to make racism a major focus of his second term.
On the surface, the Clark case seems like an ideal incident for the nation to examine as the White House renews attention on a problem that has plagued America for decades.
But a detailed look at the forces that created the collision on a warm spring night of six of the Armour Boys and Clark show that the president and his aides face a tough and demanding task.
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In the wake of indictments against three of the Armour Boys, the portrait emerging of what happened that night shows that racism is part of a volatile mix of factors that is hard to pin down and perhaps even harder to govern.
Even those who witnessed the Armour Boys in action at school and in their tough-talk rule of Armour Square Park don’t agree on exactly how they regarded those outside the clique:
Was anyone smaller or weaker an object of disdain or hatred? Or was it blacks alone? Would another youth who invaded their territory also have been in danger on a night that the Armour Boys were drinking and looking toward a rowdy night of partying?
A reconstruction of the events leading up to the attack– pieced together from interviews with sources close to this case, along with scores of people who know the victims and the suspects– suggest that the crime was not calculated, as many hate crimes are, but largely the result of happenstance, however viciously carried out.
Whether government can design programs to ensure that such incidents don’t happen is among myriad questions–along with whether Clark will fully recover from the beating–that will take years to answer.
The attack
Toting a half-emptied 12-pack of Heineken beer and a deep-seated feeling of territoriality in Armour Square Park, the two teenagers strode east on 33rd Street just after dark.
From the other direction, walking briskly alongside the park, came a buddy from De La Salle Institute. His beige Jeep Cherokee was parked at the corner of 33rd Street and Princeton Avenue, ready to take the Armour Boys to a west suburban college party.
But the trip would be delayed.
Clark and his friend Clevan Nicholson, also 13, along with a baby-faced Hispanic teen, were enjoying what remained of a warm day. Suddenly, they found themselves sandwiched between the pair of teens with the beer and the short, wiry teen coming from the Cherokee.
Clark and Nicholson, both African-American, were on their bicycles with their Latino friend walking at their side. “We were going nowhere,” Nicholson said. “We were just out riding around.”
Nicholson remembers the teen from the Cherokee ordering them off their bikes. He remembers being surrounded. He remembers being scared.
Some details of the attack are still being sorted out. But one thing is clear:
Whoever beat Clark did so with an uncommon fury. When police found him, Clark, lanky and slight, was unconscious on the sidewalk in front of a white-painted brick house.
By then, the people who police believe carried out the attack were in the Jeep on their way to the party.
`A lot of fear’
At the Armour Boys’ table at De La Salle, one boy always sits at the head of the table–Frank Caruso, the owner of the beige Jeep Cherokee. The others wait on him.
“They get him ice cream and food, whatever he wants. . . . He’d say, `Go get me a pop’ and they’d bring him a pop,” said an African-American student. “He would act like Don Corleone or something.”
Caruso, 18, who lives on West 25th Place, is a junior at De La Salle and the son of Frank Caruso, a top official with the health and welfare fund of the Laborers Union.
De La Salle students say Caruso; Victor Jasas, a 17-year-old junior; and an 18-year-old football player were part of a group of Armour Boys who also formed a gantlet every morning in the hallway outside the school’s second-floor library and dared anyone to cross it.
Jasas, who lives in the 3700 block of South Normal Avenue, is the son of a tool-and-die engineer and is an aspiring carpenter and contractor.
The football player, who told police he witnessed the attack on Clark, is described as an average student who lives in a run-down apartment building in Bridgeport.
“He has a bright future ahead of him,” said the boy’s older brother. “He’s just got a bunch of jerks for friends.”
The Armour Boys’ harassment didn’t end at the schoolhouse door. Their primary turf is Armour Square Park, just north of Comiskey Park, where they play basketball, drink beer, listen to rap music and challenge those they don’t know or don’t like.
“They got a lot of fear over a lot of people,” said a De La Salle junior.
Though the group’s origins are unclear, it has been around for years–and it’s clear who belongs and who doesn’t. The Armour Boys consist of about two dozen De La Salle students, recent graduates and Bridgeport-area youths.
A portrait of the Armour Boys as a group of young toughs emerged from interviews with more than two dozen De La Salle students and teachers and other area youths. Several of the youths, primarly African-Americans and Latinos, said that they or their friends had direct and sometimes violent run-ins with the group. But several white youths also said they had fought with the Armour Boys, indicating that the attacks were motivated as much by territory as race.
Still, there were a number of De La Salle students and other area residents who said that they liked the Armour Boys and denied that the group participated in malicious or racial attacks. None of the six Armour Boys allegedly present during the attack on Clark has a criminal record.
The Armour Boys guard a specific turf and have their own insignia–an arch topped by the words “BRIDGEPORT.” As modern street gangs go, they would seem pretty tame.
But the Armour Boys are in some ways direct descendants of Chicago’s original street gangs–groups of white ethnics who banded together to protect their neighborhoods from outsiders and blacks.
The group at Armour Square Park often included Michael Kwidzinski, 19, a carpenter and a 1996 De La Salle graduate. Kwidzinski played football and volleyball in high school and lives with his mother, a disabled grandmother and two siblings in the 400 block of West 37th Street.
“My son is not a thug,” said his mother, Eleanor. “He’s a good kid with a big heart.”
Kwidzinski said that her son has hung out at the park with the same group–including Caruso and Jasas–since grade school.
“Bridgeport is a tight-knit community,” she said. “Everybody knows everybody else. My child is hanging around and going to school with the kids of people I went to school with. It has nothing to do with color or race.”
Indeed, several De La Salle students disputed that the Armour Boys targeted minorities. “In school, they were cool with everybody,” said one 1996 De La Salle graduate, a Hispanic youth who asked to remain anonymous. “There was never any trouble.”
The victims
Clark and Nicholson were “coolin’ it.”
It was midafternoon on March 21, and they were sunk in chairs in the front room of Clark’s 12th-floor apartment of the Stateway Gardens housing complex, playing video games to the accompaniment of the pounding rap of Tupac Shakur.
But the temperature outside was 70, and the two 13-year-olds couldn’t resist heading out into one of Chicago’s first gorgeous days after a long winter chill.
The pair grabbed their bikes and headed down the building’s poorly lit stairwell, 13 steps to each floor, bouncing their bicycles all the way.
“I was wearing shorts and my Filas (sneakers). It was hot out,” remembered Nicholson, a short, stout boy. Clark was dressed in a blue Nike T-shirt, blue jeans and his favorite Nike sneakers–clothes given him as a reward for good behavior by his mother, Wanda McMurray.
On their way out, they bumped into Clark’s best friend, Hakim Williams, 14, who asked if he could borrow Clark’s bike.
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“Hakim rode around for a little while, and Lenard said, `Give me back my bike,’ ” Nicholson recalled. Clark got angry when he saw that some of the air had gone out of the front tire.
“There’s something about you,” Clark snapped at Williams. “Every time you get on my bike, the air goes out.”
Clark and Nicholson headed toward Bridgeport–a largely white, working-class neighborhood of red brick bungalows that still holds a fearsome reputation among its black neighbors–where they could put air in their tires “for free.”
Riding slowly north along Federal Street, carefully negotiating potholes, they could see a littered railroad embankment to their left and, in the distance, the lights and upper deck of Comiskey Park. To their right, a dozen small children played in a huge rusted garbage bin and teenagers strained as they shot hoops at Stateway’s outdoor basketball court.
They turned west on 35th Street and went under a railway viaduct and over the Dan Ryan Expressway before heading down a slight grade and past the ballpark. A minute later, the two boys were filling their tires with air at a pump near Wallace and 35th Streets.
As they hopped back on their bikes, Clark and Nicholson spotted a chubby, curly haired 18-year-old Hispanic and his two younger cousins tossing a football on the concrete playground at McClellan Elementary School.
“We said, `Can we play?’ and they said, `Yeah,’ ” Nicholson recalled.
After playing touch football for two hours, the five then decided they wanted to hang out around Comiskey. But the two younger Hispanics said they had to check in first with their parents, who live in a basement apartment near 34th and Wallace Streets.
“They wanted to go out and play some more, but I told them it was too late,” said the father of the two Hispanic boys, recalling that it was about 8 p.m.
The 18-year-old, though, accompanied Clark and Nicholson as they headed back on 35th Street, through a tunnel, and then north on Shields Avenue to 33rd Street.
`They jumped on us’
It was 8:20 p.m. when the kids from Stateway and their Hispanic friend were confronted by the three whites on 33rd Street.
Police, prosecutors and defense attorneys won’t publicly say what happened. Nicholson said he and Clark were ordered off their bicycles by Caruso, who initiated the attack.
“One came from the east and two came from the west,” Nicholson said. “They jumped on us.”
Caruso punched him in the head “and knocked me off my bike,” Nicholson said.
Then, according to several sources familiar with the case, either Jasas or Kwidzinski told Caruso, “Don’t hit him, he’s too little.”
Caruso snapped back, “—- this nigger,” Nicholson recalled.
Nicholson said one attacker punched Clark so hard his head slammed into a brown brick wall. Then, Nicholson said, “Lenard got up and ran.”
Though they haven’t been charged and might not have taken part in the attack, at least three other Armour Boys were at the scene, according to law enforcement sources. That group included the 18-year-old De La Salle football player and a 23-year-old convicted sex offender and robber, both of whom would later implicate Caruso, Jasas and Kwidzinski.
In the light of a neon Old Style sign outside Jimbo’s Lounge, Clark ran east on 33rd Street to Princeton Avenue, where he turned north.
Meanwhile, Nicholson said he fled south on Shields, looking back once to see Clark being chased east on 33rd toward Princeton. Whether Clark was beaten again at this point is unclear. The 18-year-old Hispanic picked up both boys’ bikes and fled. One of the Armour Boys hurled a bottle at the Hispanic youth, striking him in the arm.
Nicholson kept running until he reached the 35th Street “L” station above the Dan Ryan Expressway.
“I waited for Lenard,” recalled Nicholson. “He never came. I went home.” Clark may not have been able to escape the Armour Boys because he had been hit by a car three weeks earlier and still walked with a limp, friends said.
Alerted by a 911 call from an Armour Square resident, police found Clark only minutes after the attack. He was unconscious on a sidewalk on Princeton, about 30 yards from Jimbo’s.
The aftermath
Immediately after the attack, Caruso, Jasas and Kwidzinski and several other Armour Boys headed out to a dance at Triton College in River Grove, one of the suspects later told police.
Campus police said everything was going smoothly until about 11:45 p.m., when a fight erupted among several partygoers, including some of the Armour Boys.
After police shut the party down, the Armour Boys piled into Caruso’s Jeep and headed back to the Bridgeport area, where they split up at about 12:30 p.m., one of the suspects told authorities.
By this time, Chicago police were scouring the neighborhood for those responsible in Clark’s beating. At about 2:45 a.m. March 22, police stopped Kwidzinski, the 23-year-old felon and a youth walking near 31st Street and Princeton.
But police only took the 23-year-old into custody because he had an outstanding felony warrant. Police brought in the De La Salle football player hours later. He allegedly told them he wanted to cooperate so he wouldn’t jeopardize an appointment to West Point–a claim that turned out to be bogus.
Soon after, detectives had the names of the three Armour Boys who allegedly attacked Clark. Kwidzinski, his hair still wet after a shower, was the first suspect hauled into Wentworth Area police headquarters at about noon. Jasas and Caruso were brought in within hours.
Of the six Armour Boys present during the attack, all but Caruso have given statements to police about what happened, according to sources close to the investigation. Some of the statements are contradictory.
Jasas and Kwidzinski, for instance, have incriminated the others but not themselves in the assault, sources said.
But in statements to the police and a grand jury, the 23-year-old and 18-year-old football player identified Jasas, Caruso and Kwidzinski as the attackers. The two witnesses also said they heard the three bragging about it afterward.
Nicholson picked Caruso out of a police lineup. The 18-year-old Hispanic youth also picked two of the suspects out of a lineup, authorities said.
Caruso, Jasas and Kwidzinski were indicted Wednesday for attempted murder, aggravated battery and hate crimes. The three suspects are free on bond awaiting a trial. If convicted, they could each be sent to prison for a decade or longer.
Lawrence O’Reilly, a Cook County prosecutor, said the case against the three suspects is strong. But lawyers representing the three say that they don’t believe anyone actually saw the beating and that many of the other Armour Boys are just trying to save their own skins.
Since the attack, Jasas and Kwidzinski have received death threats, according to their attorneys. Clark continues his convalescence from massive head injuries at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and is expected to require months of intensive therapy and years of special schooling.
Nicholson is back in 7th-grade classes at Raymond Elementary School. He has begun counseling to deal with the anguish caused by the event.
“Clevan’s been having headaches, dreams,” said Ann Nicholson, the boy’s mother.
Sometimes, Nicholson gets up in the middle of the night and paces his room. When his mother asks him why he can’t sleep, he says he’s worrying about his friend Lenard.