[For some weird reason, the URL I posted for this NY Magazine article article now shows a piece by drama critic John Simon, which is not the type of cruelty I intended to spotlight. So, with apologies for going over the limit, let me post this rather lengthy article in two e-mails.]
Cruelty on the Couch
When an animal is abused, most people see an act of petty violence. Dr. Stephanie LaFarge sees a warm-up crime -- and an offender who may soon move on to a human victim.
By Elizabeth Hess
"Animals will change your life," says Armando Laboy, age 19, describing the series of events that ended with his incarceration on Rikers Island. It's a rainy afternoon, and Armando is sitting in the office of Dr. Stephanie LaFarge, a psychologist on staff at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He wears baggy pants, a large ankh around his neck, and big black boots that lace up the front like a corset. Splashes of girlish pink run through his brown hair. Armando looks more like a club kid than like an inner-city animal abuser, if that's what he is.
"It all started when we got the dog." The "we" refers to Armando and his lover, David (not his real name), a veterinary technician in a small Bronx practice. The dog in question is a wolf hybrid named Wolfgang, Wolfie to his friends. Wolfie was a hit-and-run found on the FDR Drive who was about to be euthanized for want of an owner. Instead, Armando and David adopted him. "The dog was kind of gray, and he looked like David's dad, who was very homophobic and never knew about us," recalls Armando, a look of disgust passing over his face like a shadow. "Wolfie reminded David of his old dog, who had died, so I said, 'Okay. We'll take him. I do love animals.' "
Apparently not enough. According to the court record, on December 12, 1998, Armando bound Wolfie's legs, beat him, and stabbed him with a sharp object. David rushed the dog to a hospital and had Armando arrested for animal cruelty. Which is what landed him in the office of Dr. LaFarge, a tall, handsome woman in her early sixties who is wearing a vintage suit and a look of intense concentration.
LaFarge's office is a small, windowless room filled with a friendly clutter -- books, dog paraphernalia, video equipment, a fish tank, and piles of papers -- that leaves barely enough room for visitors to enter and sit. It is on the third floor of the ASPCA, or the "A," as it is called by the humane community, an imposing five-story brick building on East 92nd Street that is New York's corporate headquarters for animal advocates. LaFarge has been on staff at the ASPCA for almost three years, working with a variety of clients. She regularly treats people grieving for a recently lost family member -- a dog or cat -- but she also works with a steady flow of criminals and sociopaths, many of them teenagers, who have been convicted of animal abuse in New York City. Her clients commit the kinds of crimes that sell tabloid newspapers and send chills up readers' spines. LaFarge, it can be argued, is the person who stands between them and their next victim, or victims.
Armando is one of the first to go through a new intervention program that has been set up by LaFarge for people who have been convicted of animal cruelty, the first program of its kind in the country. Until recently, crimes against animals were ignored or considered nuisance misdemeanors, meriting a slap on the wrist from an apathetic judge. Most cases never made it into court. "The courts are beginning to take animal cruelty seriously now that it is more widely understood as a rehearsal crime," LaFarge explains. By "rehearsal crime," she means that people, frequently children and teenagers, experiment with violence against animals before moving on to humans.
In a landmark FBI study of 36 incarcerated multiple murderers, conducted from 1977 to 1983, investigators found that cruelty to animals popped up in the personal histories of a large percentage of serial killers. The first police report against David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, was filed after he shot his neighbor's dog. As a child, Jeffrey Dahmer practiced surgery on dogs and cats in preparation for what his parents thought would be a medical career. Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, trapped pets in crates and then shot them with a bow and arrow. The list goes on. Today, at the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico, Virginia (the profiling unit used as the model for The Silence of the Lambs), two special agents, Jim Fitzgerald and Alan Brantley, have become experts in animal cruelty. It isn't because they love animals but because animal abuse is a key factor in the psychology of violent killers.
Experts outside law enforcement also consider animal abuse an indication of future anti-social behavior. LaFarge notes that animal cruelty has been a factor in the recent wave of teenage crimes across the country. In 1997, 16-year-old Luke Woodham stabbed his mother to death in Pearl, Mississippi, then went off to school, where he killed two classmates and injured seven others. Earlier, Woodham had beaten, burned, and tortured Sparkle, the family dog, to death. In Jonesboro, Arkansas, 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson and 11-year-old Andrew Golden shot and killed four students and a teacher during a faked fire drill. A school friend reported that Golden practiced on dogs with a .22. There are so many similar cases that "the link" has become vernacular in animal-welfare circles for the relationship between animal and human abuse. In LaFarge's view, "anyone who hurts animals has the potential to move on to people." Her goal, clearly ambitious, is to develop the baseline protocol for a preventive treatment program.
Armando LaBoy seems to enjoy the spotlight, but he does not always perform well. Right away, he got off on the wrong foot with the criminal-justice system. He missed his court date ("I didn't have the subway fare to get there," he claims) and showed up a week later dressed as a woman, which he explains away by saying, "I was doing a drag show, and I had an audition." Armando's lawyer failed to recognize him, and they argued. By that time, Armando was sporadically homeless, living off and on with a high-school teacher and making a meager living selling sexual favors on the street. Whatever else Armando did that afternoon to anger the court, suffice it to say that his behavior was outrageous enough to get him locked up. He spent a week on suicide watch in Rikers.
This is Armando's fourth session with LaFarge, but when he walks in, he gives her a big hug, as if they've been working together for years. The first time she met him, she thought he might have a gender-identity disorder. Armando describes himself as bisexual and bipolar. Today he is going to talk about his relationship with David and Wolfie. "I've had dogs before that I never mistreated, but this dog was different," he says. "I don't know what his problem was, but he had seizures, and he would bite me. One time, he was so hyper he bit me and then he bounced into the wall. David was more concerned about the dog than he was about me." Once, when Wolfie got into a fight with a pit bull, Armando got hurt separating the dogs. "I came home with blood on my shirt and a busted lip, and David didn't even look at me. He just bandaged the dog's paw. He had a tiny cut. I told him, 'I want the dog out of here. I don't care if he's killed.' "
Although Armando carries David's photo in his wallet and insists, "I'm still in love with him, no matter what," the feeling is not mutual. David has a signed order of protection against his ex-boyfriend, forbidding Armando from coming near him or Wolfie again. He has changed the locks on the apartment they briefly shared. Armando admits only to hitting the dog in the face that day and tying his front legs together with rubber bands. He argues vehemently that the veterinarians who examined the dog exaggerated his condition. From his point of view, the whole incident seems trivial in comparison with the violence he has known all his life.
Dr. LaFarge has built her career exploring the cutting edge of research and therapy. It began with her Ph.D. project in 1973, an unconventional and highly experimental language-acquisition study conducted at Columbia University under the auspices of Professor Herbert Terrace, a protégé of B. F. Skinner. She was selected by Terrace (her undergraduate mentor) to raise a newborn chimpanzee in the bosom of her own family in New York City -- a family that, at the time, included seven children, three from her first marriage, to renowned artist-puppeteer Ralph Lee, and the four children of her second husband, the late WER LaFarge, a playwright and poet. The idea behind the experiment was, to put it simply, to convince the animal that he was human. "There was a theoretical contest going on between B. F. Skinner and Noam Chomsky," LaFarge explains. "If Skinner was right, then every animal with intelligence of a certain level could learn to talk, or use language. If Chomsky was right, then only human beings had the language gene for deep structure, for underlying grammatical word order."
LaFarge brought a three-day-old chimp, Nim Chimsky, home to live in the family brownstone on West 78th Street. Nim quickly became a celebrity on the Upper West Side, where he was closely watched by the scientific community and the media as he thrived in his human family. The chimp even made it onto the cover of New York on February 24, 1975, with an accompanying article that described this experiment as "revolutionary." At one point, ABC Television approached the LaFarges about doing a Brady Bunch-plus-chimp pilot based on the family. But nothing ever came of it, possibly because the reality of having a chimpanzee in the home was not sufficiently heartwarming for prime time. Eventually, several books were written about Nim and the meaning of this four-year experiment.
Jenny Lee, one of LaFarge's daughters, was 14 when Nim arrived. "It was like getting a new baby brother -- but better! I fell in love with Nim," she said in a brief interview from her office at the Bronx Zoo, where she recently designed the highly acclaimed Congo Gorilla Forest. But raising Nim was infinitely more complicated than raising a human child. "Baby chimps cling to their mothers for their first year, never letting go," LaFarge explains. "I had this chimp physically attached to my body, whatever I did, wherever I went, 24 hours a day." Nim was affixed to her whether she was buying groceries -- or making love with her husband. Not surprisingly, there were problems. "Nim's instinctual feeling toward my stepfather was aggressive," remembers Lee. "His entrance into the family widened a crack that was already splitting in their marriage." LaFarge took the chimp's side, and credits him with helping her end an unsuccessful marriage.
Nim lived with the family for two years. He readily learned sign language, became an active participant in the LaFarge household, and eventually was moved to a mansion in Riverdale, courtesy of Columbia University. Then, suddenly, the grants weren't renewed. Nim was scheduled to be transferred to a laboratory for the next medical experiment down the line. Thankfully, LaFarge got him accepted by the Black Beauty Ranch, a sanctuary in Texas founded by animal-rights activist Cleveland Amory. Nim remains there today.
The intervention clients are asked to take a hard look at what triggered their violence against animals. Not surprisingly, the therapist soon focuses on the clients' personal histories. "I've learned that I need to address the position of the pet in the family," LaFarge explains. "That's where we are going to start."
Armando can rattle off dark stories that begin with his childhood. He paints a picture of an adolescence rife with physical abuse, family squabbles, and neglect. He claims to have been unwanted because his biological father was white (his mother is Hispanic), and put in foster care in Boston when he was three days old. For years, he was shuttled back and forth between his foster mother and his biological mother, who, he says, eventually kicked him out altogether.
The other big problem was his sexuality. Armando claims he was raped by a male friend of the family when the man discovered Armando was gay. He decided to end his life. "I tried to overdose. Then I tried to cut my wrists, but I didn't cut deep enough," he says in a monotone. Some time later, Armando says, "I called my mother up and told her, 'I'm gay, I'm fruity,' but she didn't believe me." So he came out of the closet on the Ricki Lake show. His mother happened to be watching. "Then she believed me," he adds. The two are now estranged.
Perhaps most disturbing, Armando describes watching his 16-year-old girlfriend hemorrhage to death in a Boston hospital after giving birth to their daughter. "She started bleeding," he says. "A nurse tried to stop it. I was just holding her hand and she was shaking and shaking. Then the nurse took the baby and left the room. I was screaming because her hand just got colder and colder. She was calling out my name." Today, their daughter is 3 years old. According to Armando, she lives with his grandmother -- his deceased father's mother.
LaFarge rarely interrupts, unless Armando comes to an incident particularly fraught with drama, whereupon she asks him to describe his feelings. How did he feel when his foster mother, the only person he feels really cared about him, died? All he will say is "I have no tears left." Mostly, Armando feels angry and abandoned. Yet he is not without charm, and is so candid about the details of his struggle to survive that it's difficult to keep in mind that he is potentially violent, unpredictable, and maybe even psychotic. He claims he was diagnosed with a mental-health problem, possibly a multiple-personality disorder, at age 7 and put on Mellaril. Like countless others, Armando got lost in the system.
[end of part one]
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