Granite makes a handsome gravestone, or a stately staircase, and it was once the material of choice for prison construction. Polished granite wouldn’t seem to be especially serviceable as a grinding agent because it offers such a smooth surface, but in a pinch it will do; witness the innumerable weapons that have been fashioned by rubbing pieces of metal against the walls of Saint Cloud prison. In fact, the same qualities that make Saint Cloud Gray so highly favored for mausoleums and prisons—density, impenetrability, cohesive mass—make it useful for sharpening blades.

There are problems though, practical matters that must be recognized and addressed. Chief among them is the presence of scratches on the grinding surface, something prison guards are always looking for. If cell walls were made of diamonds there wouldn’t be any scratches to hide—a possibility that pops up from time to time in prisoners’ daydreams, along with the weary acknowledgment that if dreams came true prisons would be empty. So the inmates make do with what they have, then cover the marred surfaces with a carefully placed footlocker, a picture of mom, any old thing.

There is no record of what inmate No. 22121 used to hide the scratches on his cell wall during the first half of September, 1958. The 22,120 inmates who’d preceded him had developed a substantial body of knowledge regarding knives, so it couldn’t have been much of a problem. All we know for sure is that sometime in early September, while the guards walked the night shift and insomnia-plagued prisoners lay awake turning things over in their minds, No. 22121 took to rubbing a table knife with a round end against the wall of his cell.

Approximately 10 hours of work are required to produce a proper point, and sleep eventually overwhelms even the most troubled mind, so his task must have consumed the better part of two weeks. During those tedious hours he probably lay on his side, face to the wall, footlocker pulled slightly askew, and scraped. He used only a downward stroke because an up and down motion will produce vibrations, even through granite, and those vibrations might reach the ear of a guard. So it was down down down on one side, then down down down on the other.

By the second week the point had taken shape, and was no longer blunt to the touch. Now the blade had to be ground at an angle, requiring either a circular or a back and forth motion. Two or three
passes and a pause. Two or three more. No vibrations.

By the morning of September 15, No. 22121 had managed to fashion a deadly weapon out of a standard institutional table knife. He told the guard on duty that morning that he was feeling sick and didn’t want to go to his job in the prison tailor shop.

Shortly after the guard left he pulled his blanket over his head and plunged the knife into his stomach. He took it out and stabbed himself again. Neither wound was immediately fatal. At that point it may have crossed his mind to go for his heart, but he would have rejected that, remembering the time a year ago almost to the day when he’d lain in a ditch in rural Anoka County near the bodies of his two slain brothers, and turned his pistol on himself. The bullet had nicked his heart, leaving him alive but permanently weakened.

So James O’Kasick, 20, the last of the infamous O’Kasick gang, pushed the crudely-fashioned knife into his stomach for the third time, curled up around the hilt, and slipped into unconsciousness. He died half an hour later in an ambulance speeding toward St. Cloud Hospital, while attendants, for reasons that wouldn’t have made sense to him, tried to save his life.

DAD

Everett Warren Allen was walking down Franklin Avenue one winter night when the snow came whipping in on a bitter west wind and the dog shit on the sidewalk was frozen hard enough to stub your toe. He didn’t have anything but a pint of wine, four dollars, a wrist watch, and a pocket knife to scare the muggers away. He stopped at the corner, snuck a hit of wine, then capped the bottle again with numb fingers, all the while peeking down the side street to see if anyone was watching. Somebody was. “Hold on there, partner,” he heard the guy say.
Maybe the arc light swinging in the wind cast a feral glint off Michael O’Kasick’s lazy eye. It certainly shed enough light for Everett to recognize one of the meanest drunks on the Avenue heading his way.
“That you Mike?” Everett said, as Mike drew near.

Mike didn’t answer. He just stood there, glaring. A gust of wind stung the back of Everett’s bare neck. He pushed his hands into his pockets and felt for his knife. There it was under the Zippo. He knew right then he didn’t have the guts to use it.

“Wouldn’t have a few bucks to spare?” Mike asked. “Naw, I ain’t got nothing,” Everett replied. “Yeah you do, you’ve got that watch,” Mike said. “I seen that before you put your hands in your pockets.”

“Can’t give you that, Mike.”

“You son of a bitch,” Mike said, “let’s just see what you’ve got.” He grabbed Everett Warren Allen by the arm, pulled him down the side street, and tried to trip him.

Everett was a lot bigger than Mike (everybody was bigger than Mike), so he didn’t fall. He kept his balance and started to walk away.

Mike grabbed him again. “Just a damn minute,” he said, and he pulled a toy gun out of his pocket.

“Now what is this crazy bastard up to?” Everett thought. “Am I supposed to pretend he’s fooling me with that thing?”

“See what this is? This here is a gun!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Everett said, and he started to walk away again.

Mike ran up and punched him on the back of the head. He leaped on him and pulled him to the ground. “This is a gun, you son of a bitch, DID’JA HEAR ME? A GUN!” He kicked Everett in the ribs.

Everett gave Mike everything he had so he wouldn’t get beat up any more, even gave him what was left of the wine. Mike stuffed the bills, the knife, the lighter, the watch and the toy gun into his pockets, kicked Everett one more time just for the hell of it, then walked off up the Avenue. He paused, and took a long swig from the bottle. He drained it, and laughed.

“YOU BASTARD,” Everett heard himself yelling after Mike, and he modulated his tone in mid-sentence. “I’ll get you for this,” he muttered.

Mike just shot him a dirty look and flung the empty bottle back in his direction. It skidded past him on the crusty snow.

An hour later Mike was bellied up to the Brite Spot bar with one foot on the rail, and Everett’s last buck tucked under an empty glass in front of him. He had a nice glow on, and he was trying to get the bartender’s attention when all of a sudden the joint hushed up, literally went silent, behind him. He turned around, and there was Everett Warren Allen in the doorway with a cop.

“That’s him, officer, Mike O’Kasick! He done it. Watch out! He’s got a gun!”

Now wait a minute, Mike started to say, but the cop drew his pistol and yelled FREEZE!
Mike froze.

3/18/50- Michael O’Kasick sentenced to two to 15 years in Stillwater prison for robbery from one Everett Warren Allen, cash and items of value in the amount of $11.91: cash- $4.44; ballpoint pen-98 cents; Zippo lighter-49 cents; pocketknife-$1; watch-$5.

THE FAMILY

A probation officer once described Mrs. Florence O’Kasick as “passive, run down, beaten.” A friend of the family told a St. Paul Dispatch reporter; “The old man would get drunk and beat her and the kids up. She developed a nervous disorder, and just fell apart and died one day back in ‘51.”

“None of us can forget mother,” Doris O’Kasick told a reporter after her brothers were killed. “She just couldn’t keep up with it. She died of a broken heart.”

Roger O’Kasick was the smartest one in the family, a bookworm who shut himself up in his rented room and read books from the library. He was a rebel and a scofflaw, but he never had an overdue library book. It was a matter of pride with him. When he wasn’t reading he hung around bars and pool halls, and showed off by carrying a gun.
His sister Joyce called him the bitter one, the quiet one, who would pick a fight for no reason at all. The family’s poverty just gnawed at him, she said. According to a social worker at Phillips Junior High he had sadistic tendencies. He was sent to Red Wing Reformatory for burglarizing a safe at Phillips when he was 17, and joined the army to get an early release.

For a few weeks after he was discharged from the service he treated his sister Doris like a girl friend. He took her out to movies, bought flowers, held her hand when they walked down Franklin Avenue. Doris told a reporter that she thought it was curious the way he acted. The neighbors had always gossiped about incest in the O’Kasick home. The oldest brother, Richard, later verified that Michael O’Kasick sexually assaulted his own daughters.

As a child Roger was shy and ashamed of his threadbare clothes, but by 1957, when he was 26, the police described him as a flashy barroom tough who dressed in straw hats, single-breasted black sport coats, and cream-colored, draped pants that cut his patent leather shoes just so, about an inch above the heel. They said he bolstered his courage with liquor, and was prone to sudden, destructive rages.

Roger’s little brother Ronnie was driving around in a stolen car one night in November 1951, with a buddy of his from Franklin Avenue. A cold sleet that sometimes turned to snow was falling. Mom was dead.

Ronnie wanted to get some money so he could go to California and get warm. The gas company had cut off their service, and there was no heat in the house. He’d been cold for days.

They drove slowly by the Maddox Grocery on 26th Avenue Southeast. “This is called casing the joint,” Ronnie told his pal.

It looked like an easy stick-up, a breeze, even with a toy gun, which was all they had. Ronnie went in while his friend waited in the car. He pointed the gun at the store owner. “This is a stick-up, mister,” he said. “Hand over all your money.”

The grocer came over the counter, grabbed him by the shirt and threw him through the storefront window. He and his buddy escaped in the stolen car, ditched it a few blocks away and started walking back to the Avenue.

The sidewalks were ankle deep in icy slush. Ronnie’s hand was badly cut, and they made a few lame jokes about the trail of blood they were leaving.

Later that night Ronnie was arrested. He pleaded guilty to attempted robbery, and was sentenced to Saint Cloud prison, in January 1952. He was 18.

He got out a year later, and married soon after. He had two children by the time he was 21. He often told his wife about his early home life, how his mother had died when he and his eight brothers and three sisters were just kids. He said they didn’t have much money, and they were hungry many times. They lived in a tiny house right across the street from Phillips Junior High, so their pitiful life was on permanent display for their classmates. Sometimes the old man would get drunk on the Avenue and stagger home, but fail to make it through the door. Instead he’d pass out, and spend the night in the front yard.

People seemed to agree that Ronnie was a likable guy. He had many friends around town, good friends, according to a pal of his, who talked to a reporter in 1957. The interview took place in a graveyard. His friends had gotten together some money to give Ronnie a little funeral, and the press showed up, as they inevitably did at any venue that might produce some tid-bit about the O’Kasick gang.

Ronnie’s buddies got drunk and extolled the virtues of their deceased friend, while gusts of wind sent showers of autumn leaves falling on the casket. The gravediggers stood around eyeing the mourners and the reporters, wishing it would end, wishing they could just fill the hole and go get drunk themselves. It was their first celebrity funeral.
Even the Minneapolis Star had something good to say about Ronnie after he was buried. It said that of the three brothers, Ronnie had the least to answer for. “He shot no one, and may have been an unwilling accomplice,” according to the paper.

It was probably true. He was a mope and a sad-sack, not a killer. His wife had divorced him by the time he started using a real gun to rob stores, and he spent most of his loot in a vain attempt to win her back. She called him a little guy who always wanted to be big. He was 5’3” and weighed 127 pounds. He talked about buying elevator shoes all his life, but never got around to it.

Jimmy was the youngest, a brawler, more like Roger, whom he idolized, than Ronnie, whom he protected. Jimmy liked to throw hands. He reveled in duking it out, win lose or draw, and approached a fist-fight with such gleeful abandon that bigger kids feared him. He once knocked his father down for beating his sister Joyce. He was engaged briefly in 1954, but the girl broke it off when Jimmy beat her up.

Jimmy made his debut in the records of the criminal justice system in June of 1938. He was the “squalling infant” in the arms of his mother, a “distraught, disheveled woman, with missing teeth and a downcast demeanor,” according to a report filed by the probation officer, who’d come by to see her husband, Mike.

Little Jimmy’s face and arms were blotched with angry red welts. He squirmed and yowled so vigorously that the officer inquired about his distress.” We don’t have much in the way of screens, and the mosquitos bite us,” Mrs. O’Kasick explained. “We can’t sleep at night.” ||

Excerpted from “Greed, Rage, and Love Gone Wrong: Murder in Minnesota” by BRUCE RUBENSTEIN, published by University of Minnesota Press (October 2004). Available at your favorite bookstore.

For additional information, go to UPress.umn.edu.

Hardcover: 232 pages, $22.95. ISBN: 0816643377.