THE yahoos were out in force in Howard Beach yesterday – putting on a pageant of dopiness in support of Nicholas Minucci, who was arrested for attacking a black man with a baseball bat.
On Cross Bay Boulevard, there was David Perrotto, born mere months before the first Howard Beach attack, driving around with a sign on the back of his car reading, “Free Fat Nick.”
And plenty of other yahoos were honking in support.
“It wasn’t a racial attack,” said Perrotto, who knows Minucci, 19, and believes he must have been provoked to fracture Glenn Moore’s skull and hurl racial epithets at him.
Perrotto, who was surrounded by an all-white group of friends, added, “If we went to Brooklyn and walked around, we’d get jumped immediately.”
In other words, “Brooklyn” equals “black” to Perrotto. And “black” equals “violent.”
But it’s not a racial thing in Howard Beach, you understand.
And a half a world away, in the safety of distant England, the father of one of the men arrested in the 1986 Howard Beach attack was quick to also say the new incident wasn’t racial in nature.
“Not every fight between blacks and whites has to do with racism,” said John Lester, the father of Jon Lester, who was convicted in the death of Michael Griffith, a black man whose car broke down in Howard Beach on Dec. 19, 1986.
Jon Lester now lives in the northwest of England. His father said he’s doing well, having earned two degrees while in prison.
But John is still angry his son was branded a racist just for being part of the bat-wielding gang that chased Griffith onto the Belt Parkway, where a passing auto struck and killed him.
“Jonathan is still very bitter about what happened to him,” his father said. “He is not a racist. It was just a neighborhood thing.”
And then John moved from his son to the new case of a black man beaten up by a bat-wielding mob of whites in Howard Beach. And try as he might, he couldn’t hide the racial tension that spans the decades.
The more he talked, the more it was clear that you could take the man out of Howard Beach, but you can’t take Howard Beach out of the man.
“Howard Beach is all white, there’s lots of Italians living there and lots of Mafia,” he said. “It is not a place where black people would go innocently. It sounds like they were up to no good.”
True, it wasn’t an innocent trip into Howard Beach for Glenn Moore and his pals the other night. His avarice for automobiles was plain.
Moore was arrested in 2003 for allegedly stealing a car and spent time in jail after pleading to possessing a stolen ride.
And his pals are little better – they ran and hid out when their buddy was being pummeled mercilessly in a fit of racial furor.
But just as it’s tough to paint Moore as a completely innocent victim, it’s impossible to swallow Minucci’s claim that Moore tried to rob him.
After all, Lester’s dad – the guy who said that neither Howard Beach incident was racial – even admitted “there has always been tension between black and whites” in Howard Beach.
Deanna Jordan, a black woman who says she tries to come to Howard Beach as infrequently as possible, agrees with that. She knows that everything in this world is racial, from a bat-wielding white mob to the look that a supermarket clerk gives some of his customers and not others.
“This is a good neighborhood as long as you do your business and leave them alone,” said Jordan, using the euphemism “them” rather than make her own stereotyping apparent.
“It’s their neighborhood, and that’s it.”
Vito DeCandia, a white man who cooks Italian sausages at a stand 12 blocks from the latest attack, tried to disagree, saying it wasn’t provincialism or racism, but a rash of break-ins in the area that have many people on edge.
“I don’t think it matters what color the people are,” DeCandia said. “A stranger in general makes anybody nervous.”
Yeah, but white guys who cross into Howard Beach by accident don’t usually end up being chased by white thugs with bats.
DeCandia attributed the baseball-bat beating to the isolated stupidity of a few young punks – who compounded their mistake by using racial epithets.
But “Fat Nick,” who was born only months before Howard Beach was on the news every night, learned those hateful, racist words somewhere; if not in the neighborhood, then in a home in the neighborhood or from an older guy in the neighborhood.
Jordan’s sister, Juliette Hawkins, of Brooklyn, knows that kids aren’t born racist.
“This is generational,” she said. “This is passed down.”