Concerning the Lords of Chaos

Besides listening to Sunn O))) and Mayhem all day and realizing that Flight of the Behemoth is a pretty poor album, I don't really have a whole lot of thoughts building up regarding music today.

However, I did have a bit of an interesting conversation with Riverdale's art teacher, Mr. Greenblatt. See, it all started when we were talking a bit about the Lords of Chaos in my sixth period. If you don't know who they are, I can briedly explain. They were basically a group of kids who all went to my high school in 1996. They commited some pretty heinous crimes. Besides shoplifting (constantly), mugging one of the member's landlord, and planning on arming themselves and robbing a nearby gas station, they stole dozens of propane tanks from a Starvin Marvin and place them around an old Coca-Cola bottling factory. They then placed a 25 foot fuse inside a Pepsi can filled with gunpowder and watched it all explode. There was over $100,000 in damages. In addition, they also set on fire a cage with two parrots in it at a nearby tropical themed restaurant (The Hut Restaurant, still open) as well as many not-so-famous instances of arson.

However, their most famous act occured one night when 4 of the 8 members broke into the Riverdale auditorium one night and stole some insignificant items. The Riverdale Master of Bands at the time, Mark Schwebes caught them planning to tag the school with spray paint in several places. He recognized them and told them that the enxt day they could expect a visit from the police. Their ringleader, Kevin Foster, said that they had to go kill Schwebes that night because they didn't want to get in trouble. They found his house via directory assistance and knocked on his door at about 11:30 PM. Kevin Foster shot him in the face with a 12 gauge shotgun, killing him instantly. The boys were all arrested. Foster got the death penalty (he chose it over life without possibility of parole), Derek Shields and Chris Black got life with no possibility of parole, and Peter Magnotti (who only sat in the car while it was all happening) got 32 years.

I've read a lot about them, but I was excited at the prospect of having access to people who were around them for four years -- their teachers. I could learn things form them that I could never read in books or on the internet. So begins my interviews of teachers who were around when it happened (there's only a handful that remain).

Today, I talked to the art teacher, Mr. Greenblatt, about Peter Magnotti. He didn't really know the others all that well, besides the fact that some of them hung around the art room when Magnotti was painting. He talked for a while about the group as a whole. They were basically social outcasts who were led astray by the obviously deranged Foster, who would take them into the woods to shoot some of the guns they had taken from his father's pawn shop. They liked the way it felt. They would commit little petty crimes as initiation, like stealing silverware from Burdine's, or setting off a smoke bomb in Wal-Mart. He said that Chris Black wasn't unlike Aaron Preston -- emotionally unstable, short, chubby, an obviously unaccepted person, and an easy target for Foster, who a the time of the arsons, had already dropped out of high school. However, Greenblatt has always been one who is close to his students, and knows a lot about Peter Magnotti that no one else does. He said that Magnotti was a really smart kid... one that he'd leave behind to watch the class for a while. He was very shy, a good artist, but again, wasn't very well accepted by the popular kids. Greenblatt was even asked to testify for him, but he couldn't.

There's even some art left in the room that was done by Magnotti. There was a sculpture that had been in the art room for 12 years, and broke just last year. There are some simple and innocent sketches on the wall that Greenblatt attributes to Magnotti. But the real juicy stuff is hidden well. Greenblatt says that he found some art of Magnotti's right around the time of the shooting that was disgusting. It depicted people getting their heads blown off, getting torn in half, having their guts and brains spilled out. "It was enough to make you nautious," he says.

The principal at the time asked him to destroy the art in order to eliminate the possibility of anyone in the press finding out about it and it generating further bad press about Riverdale.

He didn't.