Word: bosket
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...when he was a boy, the product of a broken home in New York City's Harlem. By nine, he was a chronic and violent troublemaker. When he was given mental tests, he threatened to set fire to the hospital ward and kill a doctor. The tests showed that Bosket was suffering from a severe antisocial personality disorder. His helpless mother had him sent to a reform school, where he began to emulate his father...
...Bosket never met his father, but the parallels between the two men are dramatic. Each had only a third-grade education, was sentenced to the same reform school at nine, went on to commit double murders, and displayed a superior intelligence. The father's goals, however, were different: he studied hard and became the first convict in history to be inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. After his release from prison in 1983, Bosket Sr. found work as a university teaching assistant...
...rehabilitation was short-lived. In 1985 he was arrested for molesting a six-year-old child. Later, after a shoot-out with police during an escape attempt, Bosket Sr. shot and killed his girlfriend and then blew his brains to pieces. This has given Bosket Jr. food for reflection. "I can say with all conviction that genetics has played a role in what I am. But what I learned from my father's life was never to conform to the system, never to forgive, as he did." The "system," he adds, became his "surrogate mother...
...Bosket has now filed a suit against his surrogate mother, charging cruel and unusual punishment at Woodbourne. He is also angry because the authorities have ignored an eight-page handwritten letter in which Bosket volunteered himself for study as a way to help prevent future Boskets. "It's all just theater to Willie, and we try not to give him a stage," says Thomas Coughlin III, New York's commissioner of correctional services...
...Bosket still finds ways to attract attention. While en route to court last month, he kicked a guard who was removing a leg manacle and then shouted to photographers, "Did you get that picture? Did you get that on film?" That act was reminiscent of the time last year when Bosket plunged a makeshift 11- in. knife into the chest of a guard, in full view of a newspaper reporter Bosket had enlisted to write his life story. The guard was critically injured but recovered. "Sensationalism sells newspapers," the baby-faced butcher blithely explains, "and the system responds to violence...