Larry Hogue

 Daily News (New York)  December 07, 1998

 NO PLACE LIKE HOME

THE WILD MAN OF 96TH ST., 1992

THE STRANGER was barefoot and muttering to himself when he first appeared on W. 96th St.

He was big. He was bad. He was crazy.

The chief feeling that Larry Hogue initially inspired in the good residents of 96th St. was pity not fear. When they spotted him pawing through their garbage, they started leaving milk, crackers and cheese out on the curb for him. When they found him shivering on a subway grate, they covered him with blankets. Nobody tried to chase him away.

Not yet.

THE HOMELESS had been part of everyday New York City life for some few years by now, an army of unfortunates sent packing into the streets when the state began shuttering its mental asylums. Many were just a prescription away from madness. Hundreds of them bedded down every night in refrigerator boxes, on subway gratings, on benches in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, in the hidden recesses along the train tracks at Grand Central. They begged on every corner.

By 1992, there were an estimated 100,000 of them 40% of them substance abusers, a third of them mentally ill.  Any municipal attempt to regard these souls as problems to be dealt with ran afoul, instantly, of pious civil libertarians. An emblematic case was that of Joyce Brown, better known as Billie Boggs, who lived at Second Ave. and 65th St., often cursing at the top of her lungs and usually defecating where she pleased. When social workers tried to commit her, the New York Civil Liberties Union fought them in court, won, then cleaned Billie up and proudly trotted her out on the talk-show circuit. She was back on the streets a few weeks later.

Two high-profile murders committed by deranged homeless men further eroded public sympathies:

Steven Smith, a 23-year-old ex-con who openly roamed Bellevue Hospital dressed as a doctor, a stolen stethoscope draped around his neck, was charged in January 1989 with raping and murdering five-months-pregnant Dr. Kathryn Hinnant as she worked late one night in a hospital lab.

Two years later, a young dancer named Alexis Fichs Welsh was attacked as she walked her cocker spaniels near W. 69th St. Six witnesses identified the man who hacked her to death with an 11-inch butcher knife as a crack-addicted homeless man named Kevin McKiever.

Upper West Siders, however, viewed themselves as a tolerant bunch, and they were less put off by the raggedy legions at their doorsteps than were residents of many other neighborhoods. This, after all, was still the bastion of the liberal left, where the anti-war movement had been strongest, where the rich and poor and middle classes of many races and creeds lived side by side in relative harmony.

Larry Hogue would test them sorely.

THE MANHATTAN Spirit newspaper, writing about Larry Hogue’s case in early 1992, naturally made the old point that there is no more devout a conservative than the liberal who has just been mugged.

Hogue had been mugging the whole neighborhood. Authentic fear gripped 96th St.  as the public behavior of its resident homeless fixture careened from the mildly bizarre to the bent, a change that appeared to coincide with the arrival in the late 1980s of a new urban plague crack cocaine.

Overnight, the pitiful wretch became a raving lunatic who snapped mirrors off cars and heaved rocks through the stained-glass windows of a local church. He menaced children with nail-studded clubs. He stalked senior citizens and threatened to roast and eat their dogs.

The police would arrest Hogue and take him to the psycho ward. Cut off from his crack supply, Hogue’s demons would disappear. And, after a few weeks, to 96th St. he’d return.

Then he slugged a 16-year-old girl and pushed her into the path of an oncoming Con Edison truck. She escaped unhurt, and an angry mob of bystanders held her assailant for arriving cops. Doctors said Hogue, a North Carolinian whose brain damage appeared to be the result of a head injury suffered in the Army as well as of his crack addiction, needed to be in a hospital. The courts thought otherwise, found him guilty of reckless endangerment and gave him 12 months in jail.

Then he went straight back to 96th St. again.

For four years, Hogue held the street hostage as the revolving legal door kept spinning. Doctors couldn’t keep him hospitalized. Cops couldn’t keep him behind bars.

Then, on Jan. 5, 1992, Hogue hurled a stone slab through the windshield of local activist Lisa Lehr’s Oldsmobile so hard it bent the car frame.

First Lehr went to the police. Then she went to the Manhattan Spirit, which put the 48-year-old Hogue on the front page and turned him into a public debate.

Politicians now vowed to crack down on the Larry Hogues everywhere.  Mental-health experts pondered the adequacy of state laws to commit problem people like Hogue. Liberals clashed again with city officials over civil rights. “How can a society get itself in a position where all you can do is wait for a fellow to commit a more serious crime?” demanded Paul Shechtman, the prosecutor assigned to Hogue’s case. “He seems to have fallen through every crack in the system.”

And while everyone blathered on, Hogue quietly bailed himself out of jail.

In August, following him around, detectives made a remarkable discovery:

He had money. The man who spent his days begging at subway entrances and scrounging for food was getting about $ 36,000 a year from the Veterans Administration. Most of it he blew on crack.

After cops caught him slashing a parked car with a long knife and hauled him off to the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, a battery of state psychiatrists concluded what 96th St. residents had known for a long time Larry Hogue was “a disaster waiting to happen.”

The ensuing legal battle became another test of whether people like Hogue could be committed to state hospitals. The civil libertarians branded Hogue’s aggrieved upper West Sider neighbors a bunch of elitists insensitive to the needs of the poor. Hogue made it an explicitly racial matter, declaring the people who had once covered him with blankets “the 96th St. Ku Klux Klan.”

In December, he was ordered committed at last. He was out six months later. By that point, though, he had found Bridgeport, Conn., more to his liking, and he resettled there. Whatever else did or did not lie ahead for him, he wasn’t 96th St.’s problem anymore.

Notes: Daily News Series BIG TOWN BIG TIME A NEW YORK EPIC: 1898-1998  (Posted 2/1999)

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