BP & Bunchy Cartier - Amity Villains

On March 12, 2021, Ronald DeFeo Jr. died at the Albany Medical Center. An inmate at Sullivan Correctional Facility, DeFeo had been serving 25-to-life for six counts of second-degree-murder. According to the court, on November 13, 1974, at the age of 23, DeFeo shot and killed his mother, father and four siblings. The night of the murders, Ronald Jr. walked into Henry's Bar (later Cloud Nine, now Parisi's Pizza & Pasta) on Merrick Road and said "You got to help me! I think my mother and father are shot!" The next day, Ronald Jr. confessed to the crime. A heroin and LSD user, he pled insanity at trial. The court found him guilty in November 1975 and sentenced him in December. 

That same month, George and Kathleen Lutz purchased and moved into the house where the DeFeo family had lived at 112 Ocean Avenue. They moved out 28 months later, claiming they'd been terrorized by ghosts. This served as the basis for the Amityville Horror books and films, which made the village known across the country. Referencing its infamy as well as worsening living conditions there during the 1980s, some local residents started calling Amityville Horror City, which led to the rise of the Hip-Hop collective of the same name.

Though not part of that collective, Amity Villains BP and Bunchy Cartier likely came up hearing and experiencing many of the same stories; some true, some embellished, some complete fabrications, all equally capable of inspiring more stories. At one point, DeFeo Jr. blamed the killings on his great uncle, a Genovese family capo. The Amityville Horror books and films repeatedly allege the DeFeo home sat atop the site of a former resting place for insane or dying Shinnecock Indians. Neither of these claims is factual, but both are rooted in facts and fears. Many Long Islanders have a great-uncle with ties to organized crime. All Long Islanders live on lands once tended by Native Americans. Our imaginations fill in the rest. In many ways, Amityville is like any other Long Island suburb. Homes there cost about a minimum of $500,000. The informal economy thrives there. Ghosts lurk between those sentences like chambers of commerce between village halls.  

Amity Villains sounds like those phantoms, their half-told ghost stories the very essence of suburban myth: business and government.