The Alescio Manuscripts (1983-1987)

Tristan here. I’m busy working on a big write-up for this October, so this week, we’re having a newer member of the Institute take over. But she’s asked me to provide some context first.


Fictocognition, also known as scribocognition, is the ability to use writing, specifically fiction writing, to tell the future. An arguable example of this is the 1898 novella Futility by Morgan Robertson, which describes the wreck of a ship named the Titan fourteen years before the wreck of the Titanic; however, this is attributable to Robertson’s knowledge of contemporary ship-building and naval practices, and an edition issued in 1912 ‘corrects’ the gross tonnage of the Titan to more closely resemble the Titanic’s, making this claim dubious at best.


Less explicable is the 1989 Norwegian crime thriller novel Den dyreste forbrytelsen av alle (EN: The Most Expensive Crime of All), which details a team of detectives attempting to solve the theft of several valuable pieces of art from a museum in Oslo. Among the works stolen were three by Rembrandt, one by Vermeer, and four by Degas. The methods in which the guards were subdued, the location where they were held, and several other details-- including the artists who created the stolen artwork-- mirrored the thefts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. Notably, however, The Most Expensive Crime ends with the artworks returned; as of writing, the Gardner Museum theft remains unresolved.


This essay discusses an instance of possible fictocognition in 1980s New York.


Original Essay by “Ms. di Corci”

 

1.

 
I’ve been told it’s a good idea to include a content warning for this, so here goes. This report describes cruelty to animals, the American prison system, police brutality, kidnapping, and suicide.


In May of 1986, an inmate from Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York attempted to enter a nationwide writing contest meant to promote literacy and creativity in the vast American prison population. He wrote a seventy-four page manuscript titled “Dog Burglear”(sic), a story riddled with spelling errors about an operation out of Brooklyn which stole “feerce-looking” dogs such as dobermans, German shepherds, and pit bulls and forced them to participate in an illegal dog-fighting ring. Before it was sent off to the group running the contest, it was opened, searched, and partially read by a guard at Sing Sing, who found it uncannily detailed; the guard lived in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, and noticed that several dogs had been reported missing in the area. He brought up his hunch to the Warden of Sing Sing, who contacted the NYPD.


Surveillance was conducted on an address mentioned in “Dog Burglear”. After the NYPD saw a van full of caged dogs being unloaded at the address, they obtained a warrant and raided it on June 9th, 1986. Several animals, unfortunately, had to be euthanized, but almost thirty dogs were returned to their families.


The operation had been ongoing since the winter of 1985; at first blush, it may seem like that the prisoner was simply writing a story inspired by his own crimes, perhaps some attempt at a confession or redemption. But there’s a problem: the prisoner in question had been in Sing Sing since 1982, serving three consecutive life sentences for murder. His name was Gervasio Alescio, and he was an enforcer for the Italian mafia in New York who had been at the wrong end of a plea deal.

2.

Alescio was thirty-nine years old at the time. He had been illiterate for most of his life, only learning how to read in 1983, as part of Sing Sing’s prison literacy program. He had managed to read four books since then: the King James Bible (having grown up in a religious household, he was familiar with the general contents, if not the exact version), A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, and The Prince and the Pauper. With the help of the prison’s chaplain, Father Alexander Mayhew, he learned how to write, but he struggled with spellings of common words.


He had written several manuscripts during his time in prison, several of which were illegible, most of them no more than one or two pages. They were regularly confiscated by prison guards and stored in his file, for fear that the paper could be compacted and made into a weapon. However, after “Dog Burglear”, they went through the file and found several of the manuscripts matched up to other crimes-- a murder in the Bronx, the disappearance of over $5,000 from a register at a department store, and a stolen vehicle in Queens, all crimes committed after Alescio had been incarcerated.


Unable to find a reasonable explanation, Alescio was pulled into the warden’s office on June 12th. When questioned how he knew of the crimes he described, he said that the story ideas just ‘came to him’ and that he just ‘knew how they were going to go’. The warden did not find this explanation satisfactory, and ordered Alescio to be placed in solitary confinement until he was ready to say how he actually knew what to write.


Alescio would remain in solitary for almost eight months, begging to be let out on a daily basis, and begging for something to write with. His only contact with another human during this time was a weekly fifteen-minute meeting with Father Mayhew after he held service on Sunday; the chaplain claimed that Alescio was telling the truth about his writing, and said that what he could do was a God-given gift.


With Mayhew transcribing what he said, Alescio was able to write several stories. Two stories were notable; the first, “Sam’s Granddotter” (Alescio insisted on the spelling) was about an alleged child that serial killer David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz fathered in secret, and how she would go on to terrorize not only New York, but also the Jersey Shore, inspired by Alescio's fascination with the Son of Sam trial.


The second was titled "Stickup”, and was discovered by a guard during a search for contraband that included the chaplain's office. It was incomplete, but it detailed a robbery that took place at an electronics store in Chinatown, and how the thieves were using the items stolen (radios, Motorola DynaTAC cell phones, and smoke alarms, among other things) to create explosives that would be detonated throughout Manhattan, with the Americium (or “Americanium” as Alescio said it) from the smoke alarms causing widespread radioactive contamination. The warden ordered Alescio and Mayhew to both be disciplined-- but he recognized the robbery. There had been a story about it in the New York Post two days previously. Following his gut, the warden alerted the NYPD, and a major terrorist plot was foiled.


The NYPD had previously hired psychic investigators to mixed success. But this was as close to the genuine thing as they’ve ever gotten.

3.

Alescio was released from solitary into the general prison population and given a deal by the district attorney. A three-year-old girl had been kidnapped from Midtown Manhattan, and the NYPD had zero leads. If he could provide a manuscript that could lead them to the culprit, they would reduce his sentence from three consecutive life sentences to thirty years, with a possibility for parole after fifteen. With that, Alescio started writing.


Within a week, he produced four short stories. The first, “She’s Got The Jak”, talked about a car theft ring in Queens. The second, “He’s Our Son”, prevented an arsonist from burning down a prominent nightclub. The final one was entitled “Help Her Pleas God Help Her”, and seemed to describe the kidnapping case… but there were two problems with the manuscripts that led the warden and the District Attorney to withdraw their deal.


Firstly: hours before Alescio started writing “She’s Got the Jak”, he was seen talking to a fellow inmate, who had been sentenced to life in prison for murdering someone during a carjacking. This inmate was previously involved with a car theft ring in Queens, one that the NYPD had already been monitoring. Naturally, it was assumed that this inmate had simply fed Alescio information about the car thefts.


Secondly: “Help Her Pleas God Help Her” alleged that the kidnapping victim was being held by a police officer-- not in any legal capacity. She was being, for lack of a better word, trained to be his police officer’s daughter, after his own daughter had drowned in the Hudson. They even named the police officer explicitly, a first for Alescio’s work.


It was Alescio’s arresting officer, a detective who had been part of the NYPD for nearly a decade.


Believing it to be a vindictive move on the part of Alescio, his sentence was not re-assessed, and his privileges to both Sing Sing’s library and access to writing utensils were revoked for five years.


Alescio was found dead in his cell less than a year later, having slit his wrists with a pen that had been smuggled to him. Allegedly, he used it to write a suicide note; the guard flushed it down the toilet without reading it.


4.

Alescio’s manuscripts are one-of-a-kind, and several of them have been destroyed; however, Alexander Mayhew, Sing Sing’s chaplain, managed to save a handful of them, including “Dog Burglear”, "Sam's Granddotter", and “Help Her Pleas God Help Her”, mimeographing the latter seven times in case the original was destroyed.


The officer identified in “Help Her Pleas” died in 2014 of pancreatic cancer like his father and his father’s father; he left behind a daughter. After the advent of widely available genetic screening in the late 2010s, she got tested to see if she carried the same risk for pancreatic cancer as her ancestors.


The test showed that she was not related to the man she thought was her father. Alexander Mayhew, a friend of the family, told her about Alescio’s manuscripts, and gave her the surviving ones.


I have been trying to find my biological parents ever since.