Happy Land - A Lover's Revenge
“A devastating must-read for true crime fans”
“While filled with important facts, Modjeska writes with an engaging style that will capture your attention”
“Happy Land is a thoroughly engaging true crime tale by an author at the top of her game, and one that will not soon fade from my mind”
Happy Land - A Lover's Revenge: book excerpt
Chapter 1
In New York's outer suburban rings in the small hours of March 25, 1990, all was quiet, with most residents tucked up asleep in their beds. Meanwhile the streets of East Tremont, the Bronx, were alive with noise, traffic and colorfully clad locals who had no intention of retiring any time soon.
March 25 is the annual date of Punta Carnivale, the equivalent of Mardi Gras in Central America. So it was that even at 3 a.m., the streets thronged with Hispanic and Caribbean revelers, many of whom were spilling out of local nightclubs to head home or continue their fun at other establishments.
The neighborhood, decayed and desperate, was rarely given a thought or a glance by white middle-class New Yorkers—except when there was some kind of crackdown going on. The spectral West Bronx skyline was haunted by the shadows of abandoned buildings, and nestled between them were empty lots strewn with sundry trash—busted pallets, crushed bottles, dirty and torn mattresses, burned-out vehicles. Photographs from the time show a city more resembling Kosovo or Beirut than any image we generally associate with New York, New York.
The area had been through many social and economic transformations since the second world war; mid-century it was home primarily to Irish and Italian immigrants, but by the sixties it had evolved into an African American community, and in the seventies and eighties the black locals were joined by large numbers of immigrants from Puerto Rico, Honduras, Ecuador and Mexico.
Most of the time, as soon as the Central Americans landed in New York, they already knew where they were going. They headed straight to the Bronx—where they would find others like themselves, and where they wouldn’t bother the white folks.
And life in East Tremont wasn’t all bad. Boom boxes playing hip-hop and reggae on corners, street vendors selling colorful curiosities and home crafts, cafes that served homestyle Latin and Caribbean food. And then, after dark, the people would forget their troubles and their straitened circumstances at the clubs that lined the streets of Southern Boulevard and East Tremont Avenue, which served cheap alcoholic drinks and charged no or low entry fees, often around five dollars.
One such club was Happy Land, a small but popular nightspot which occupied an unassuming building located on Southern Boulevard, partway between the intersections of Crotona Parkway and East Tremont Avenue.
Shortly after 3:30 a.m. on the night of Punta Carnivale, pedestrians in the area smelled heavy plumes of smoke. Those passing through Southern Boulevard saw that the entire facade of the building located at 1959 was on fire. A local resident who was out and about for the celebrations rushed to a payphone and dialed the fire department.
At 3:41 a.m., just minutes after the blaze erupted, officers of the FDNY arrived at the scene.
As the firefighters hosed the entry and hallway of the club, on the steps they saw several charred bodies. The victims, Black and Hispanic immigrants in their late teens and early twenties, were piled towards the door; these people had been stampeding for the fire-enveloped exit… which raised the possibility that the blazing doorway had been the only way in our out.
More bodies were scattered on the first-floor bar room floor. The men began pulling these victims on the first floor out one by one. Their number soon reached nineteen; this was very bad, but not as bad as it could be, they told themselves. Fires happened in the Bronx all the time. Such incidents as this had become sadly commonplace over the years.
But they had yet to discover the scene on the second floor. The men began to ascend the steps of the narrow wooden staircase in single file. As they emerged into the darkened room, they noticed a strange feeling under their feet. There were piles of stuff on the ground; clothing and discarded purses and other personal effects.
But that wasn’t all. No, it wasn’t just clothing they were tripping over. They were standing and stepping on bodies.
One of the officers let out an anguished cry.
Oh, no…
The room—small, dim and windowless—was packed with dead bodies. Everywhere the men pointed their flashlights, they saw bodies, piled one on top of the other. In some areas, the bodies were piled four deep.
Once the room was cleared of smoke, the full horror was revealed, so terrible that some of the men vomited. The club had been filled with underaged kids. Many of the victims were little girls, teenagers, dressed in their best party clothes.
Their bodies were not burnt in the slightest. They had died long before the fire could reach them. They had seemingly died in seconds, not minutes. Gas or asphyxiation had claimed them at an unfathomable speed.
Some had died still clutching their glasses. They had died seated at tables. They had died clawing at their throats.
“The scene was paralyzing,” FDNY Assistant Chief Frank Nastro later said. “We stood there numbed. No one spoke. There were 69 bodies spread about this 24-by-50-foot area. They all could have been sleeping.”
Later, when questioned by the press, the firemen would strain to find appropriate analogies for the surreal scene of carnage. For while a fire had surely taken the victims, these did not look like any fire victims they were used to seeing—and many of the men, confronted with what appeared more like a room stuffed with mannequins, wondered how it could even happen.
Pompeii. Hiroshima. A Nazi gas chamber, were some of the words they used.
Sixty-nine bodies in a single small room, frozen in time.
Chapter 2
The detectives and firemen who gathered at the scene quickly surmised a couple of important facts about the fire.
The first was that Happy Land, like many similar clubs around the Bronx, was an illegal operation and had been housed inside a building lacking relevant permits and patently unfit for occupation. Such was part of the explanation for the scene of horror on the second floor, a small windowless room packed well beyond its capacity, that had been rapidly drained of oxygen as the fire approached from the floor below, suffocating everyone inside.
These people shouldn’t have been here, an officer remarked.
Which kind of begged the question—where should they have been?
It was an old problem. Immigrants from Central America came to the United States looking for livelihood and a better existence. Some secured residential rights, others were illegals. They flooded the Bronx, looking for the companionship of congenial relatives and friends, and found themselves on the margins of New York life. Packed into crumbling and unsafe tenements and into illegal and dangerous nightclubs… for these were the places they could afford and could find welcome. Just some years back there had been a fire at a similar nightclub, El Hoyo. The victims had been young immigrants, just like these ones. Luckily only seven, on that occasion.
It was also clear to the detectives that, despite the fact that the building was a firetrap and an accident waiting to happen, the fire at Happy Land had been no mishap. The entryway to the club was pervaded by a smell of gasoline. Then, they found an empty plastic Blackhawk gasoline container on the street, not far from the club’s entrance. They were dealing with arson. And it looked as though whoever had done it was perhaps not too concerned about getting caught.
It was possible that the arson had been a random attack—executed by a crazed passer-by or a patron, someone engaged in destruction for its own sake—but first instincts didn’t tell them so. Nor was it likely the crime had a pecuniary motive such as people were used to seeing in the Bronx—building owners who set fire to their property to collect insurance money. If that were the case, why had a fire been lit when the building was packed with partygoers?
Instead, they were forming an impression that a deliberate act of violence had taken place—an act of aggression against the club, its owners or operators, or somebody who worked there or frequented the place regularly.
Their suspicions would be confirmed within hours. A Puerto Rican woman in her early forties named Lydia Feliciano came into the precinct and told Detective Andrew Lugo, who spoke her native Spanish, that she was an employee of the club and had been there the night before when the fire broke out. She had managed to escape with three other people—she wasn’t sure how many other survivors there might be.
The thing was, she had an inkling that the fire might have been set by her ex-boyfriend. He had come to the club the night before seeking reconciliation. There had been some trouble, an argument, and the bouncer had thrown him out. The fire engulfed the entryway a short time later.
Of course, she couldn’t be completely sure he was responsible. But the timing was very suspicious.
Detectives pulled up the suspect’s information and discovered that, like most of his victims (assuming he was the man responsible), he too was an immigrant from Central America—a Cuban who had come to America on the Mariel boatlift in 1980.
He wasn’t an illegal but a so-called “parolee," a designation given to immigrants released from detention centers who had neither citizenship nor residential status but were allowed to remain in the United States as long as they never committed a crime.
And it appeared from his record that, up until the present time, he hadn’t—at least not one that was documented.
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