SHOTS FIRED

Google brings us everything, as we all know, but there are limits. Today I tried to check out two young criminal prospects I encountered in my police days to see if there was any information on their adult careers. I drew a blank, as they say, causing me to conclude that they never got very far in their chosen profession. I might have done better checking morgue records. A lot of once-promising young hoods are to be found there.

Then there’s always the unlikely possibility that they went straight and never added to their criminal records. That would have been difficult for one of them, Sean Ryan, who had two homicide convictions before he was twenty-one years old. I described an escape he made from police in this space last year. After that who knows? Google doesn’t.

The other “person of interest” had a better prospect of rehabilitation than Ryan, since he was only sixteen years old when I came across him. He was a teenage terror, though because unlike other thugs his age, he aimed higher than just knocking off a bodega or two or mugging some senior citizen in a hallway. His name was Mark Orlander and he went heeled. Not with a zip gun or a knife, but with a fully loaded shotgun with a hair trigger. And he didn’t attack stores, instead his target was a movie theater seating 1,000 people.

Our paths crossed just after he had attempted to carry out this scheme, which was interrupted by police in its execution, generating a shots-fired report by the duty captain which I was required to follow up on and supplement a few days later.

I don’t have the original report on which my own was based, so it’s not clear to me what happened when Orlander walked into the theater manager’s office with his shotgun. It is clear that a sergeant and a cop were crouched behind desks therein, waiting for him. It’s clear also that shots were fired, but by whom and how many I can’t say. No one was hurt, though, and Orlander escaped, only to be arrested at home later.

Other things are also clear to me from my report, which repeats a good deal of the original one, though not all. Some unknown way or other the manager of the theater had been tipped off that he was on the spot for that night. He called 911to report a potential robbery, but the message went out as “disorderly youths.” When a sergeant arrived he was told that Orlander was already upstairs in the balcony of the theater along with an accomplice. He also learned that a getaway car should be parked outside. It was, conspicuously. Two cops took control of the driver. Using caution though, they kept the volume so far down on their walkie-talkie that they didn’t hear the sergeant tell them to intercept Orlander as he left.

In spite of this lapse, however, things were handled pretty well inside the theater. An usher in the balcony called down to the office immediately when Orlander and his accomplice left to go there and once he learned Orlander was actually in the theater, the manager instructed the ticket office to allow no more customers into the premises.

Orlander and Liss, his accomplice. may have felt good about getting away after being repulsed at the office, but the getaway driver Stuto, was left behind. He was escorted to the station house and invited to provide the names of his accomplices. He did this and they were soon in custody. The detectives also seized Orlander’s weapon, a twelve-gauge Remington loaded with two shells. If he had managed to fire it inside the office it would have made it look like a classroom at Columbine.

The little communications lapse I’ve described here shows how easy it is for things to go wrong even in a relatively simple operation where there was some time for preparation and only four men involved. A garbled radio message was sent out to begin things and then another message went unheard, allowing an armed robber to escape At least all the cops involved were uniformed men, so that there was no mixup over identification. As I write this three plainclothesmen are on trial in Queens, the same borough you’ve been reading about, for shooting a man who they thought was going for a gun to use on them, but which was never found. Did he know they were cops? He can’t speak for himself having lost his life in the encounter, but his lawyer says he didn’t and so do his relatives. That is usually the case in these affairs.

I’m making an analogy here between the two incidents, but I’m not trying to draw any lessons from them. Murphy’s Law already covers the situation -- if something can go wrong, it will. My focus of interest is the one I had at the beginning of this piece, the remarkable precocity of a teenager who sets out to rob a theater full of people using a double-barreled shotgun. His gang consisted of two boys, or men, three years older than him, but under his orders. I once stopped reading a book called Brighton Rock because it featured a gang leader in his teens controlling an English resort, but now I wonder.

Having paid my respects to the past, which I do now and then, next week I’ll return to today’s world for a look at some of the phenomena now transpiring, e.g., the death struggle for the presidency, the introduction of purified baseball, the business bust, with fleets of Titanics going down with their captains, while the owners take to the lifeboats as they did in 1912, leaving the woman and children behind., and last but not least, the exposure of the Great School Heist out here, where lawyers were found to be full-time employees of several school districts at once, enabling them to work 180 weeks in a 52-week year. Es imposible? Non, c’est magnifique!






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