Late one June night in 1982, Willie Turks, a thirty-four-year-old New York City transit employee coming off his shift, was surrounded and beaten to death by a mob of fifteen to twenty young whites in the mostly Italian-American, Brooklyn neighborhood of Gravesend. "There was a lynch mob that night," the judge remarked in sentencing one assailant for manslaughter. "The only thing missing was a rope and a tree." Indeed, four years later, when whites in nearby Howard Beach chased Michael Griffith onto a highway where he was struck and killed by a car, New York Newsday columnist Murray Kempton would note that "direct homicide was clearer cut in Turks' case than in Griffith's."