Word: bosket
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...visitor, Bosket plays the cunning Mr. Charm. He is handsome, slightly built at 5 ft. 9 in. and 150 lbs., articulate and witty. He has 200 books in his cell and converses easily about the works of Dostoyevsky and B.F. Skinner. "I'm really a loving and caring person," he protests. "I hunger for knowledge. My pain and suffering have stroked my ability to be intellectual. If the system wasn't so quick to incarcerate me as a child, I could have become a well-known attorney. I could have been a Senator...
Instead, he says, he is a "political prisoner" embarked on a "revolutionary struggle" aimed at killing anyone who represents oppression. In New York, one of the few states that still prohibit capital punishment, legislators are yet again debating the death penalty. The monster is unimpressed. "Willie Bosket is gonna keep striking," he says. "If they / bring back the death penalty, I won't kill. I'll just maim. I want to live every day I can just to make them regret what they've done...
...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...