Last Step to Redemption

On Friday nights, the parking lot of an 18-unit apartment building in Pompano Beach fills with white plastic lawn chairs. The men who gather there seem, at first blush, to have nothing in common, displaying every look possible, from clean-cut preppy to gaunt heroin chic to sunburned construction worker to dreadlocked roughneck. It's the sort of commingling you might expect to glimpse if Abercrombie & Fitch, Calvin Klein, and Ecko decided to shoot a fashion spread together.

But these men, of all ages, have lived a similar nightmare. An insatiable urge to drink alcohol, pop opiates, and maybe smoke some crack cocaine has landed most of them in jail. They're like tornadoes that once destroyed everything in their paths. Their substance abuse has tormented loved ones, terrorized innocents, and made them feel like the scum of the earth. At 1st Step Sober House, these guys have a chance to kick the habit. Make amends. Start fresh.

"This is frontline recovery," says Chris Doherty, a director at 1st Step. "This isn't some Gucci-ass, Kumbaya program."

On the night of last January 25, the men arranged their plastic chairs in a circle and Richard Entriken, 1st Step's 60-year-old founder, stepped into the center. He was tall and George Clooney-handsome, with a gray shadow of a beard and eyes that crinkled happily even when he wasn't smiling. Entriken had picked up a few cocaine charges in his wild days and carried on a long love affair with liquor. But that night in January, he was marking 16 years of sobriety — showing the newbies at the meeting that they too could lead a clean and contented life.

Entriken chose Mike Banas, a 39-year-old with spiky blond hair whom he had helped to put down the crack pipe ten years earlier, to present him with an Alcoholics Anonymous medallion in honor of the occasion. A teary-eyed Entriken accepted the token and launched into one of his motivational speeches. The men sat in rapt attention.

Entriken spoke in his booming baritone of how grateful he was to his wife of 24 years, Sandra, for once kicking his sorry behind to the curb. One of his favorite mottos was, "Tough love without compassion is just cruelty," and Sandra had given him the precise dose of tough love that he needed to straighten out. He spoke of how important it is to share the message of sobriety and to help others learn to navigate life safely. He employed another favorite saying, about how the elevator to success is broken and those guys would have to take the stairs. When he was done, the men cheered.

Richard Entriken personified the 12th and final step of Alcoholics Anonymous, the one that asks the reformed to carry the message of sobriety to others. In his copy of The Big Book, the Bible of Alcoholics Anonymous, Entriken had bookmarked the chapter devoted to "working with others" with a thin American flag. In the margins of one page, he had scrawled these words in black ink: GIVE ALL YOU HAVE. On another, he had highlighted in blue this passage: "Your job now is to be at the place where you may be of maximum helpfulness to others... You should not hesitate to visit the most sordid spot on earth on such an errand. Keep on the firing line of life with these motives, and God will keep you unharmed."

But even God couldn't help the effusive rehabilitation promoter that night.

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Sobriety is a gift for those who check into the 180-bed 1st Step, but there are bills to pay. Rent is a fact of life, and becoming a responsible member of society is part of the recovery process. Newcomers to 1st Step get at least three weeks free before they are expected to pony up cash. Weekly rent of $150 is due on Fridays.

No one knows exactly how much money Entriken had collected from his charges that night, but even if only 100 men paid up, there would have been $15,000 on the premises. Entriken had a routine for taking the money offsite. Well after all the men cleared out of the meeting, the directors of 1st Step would stand lookout around the property while Entriken carried the cash to his car. Entriken served two tours as an airborne ranger in Vietnam, and his military training stayed with him. He was always vigilant, always looking over his shoulder.

But as he approached the driver's side of his truck with the rent money shortly after midnight that Friday night in January, he and his sentries were ambushed.

Chris Doherty was standing guard 20 feet away, on SW Second Street. Banas was positioned on the passenger side of Entriken's truck, just ten feet away. Banas saw three young black men wearing Rasta and ski hats jump out from a nearby hedge. The robbers didn't bother to cover their faces, and they were carrying guns.

One ran up to Richard Entriken, put a gun to his head, and said, "Hold it." As Entriken turned to face his attacker, his eyes seemed to say, What the heck are you doing? The young man pulled the trigger.

For Entriken's protégés on security detail, it was as if time stood still. Then bullets starting flying. Rounds whizzed past their legs and over their shoulders. Banas dove through a hole in a nearby bush, dirt from the bullets hitting his skin. The assailants fled with the cash.

Entriken was the only man shot. Chris Doherty ran to his friend and cradled his head in his hands. Blood was streaming like water from a hose. A fatal wound. For the several hundred men he had ushered into the fellowship of sobriety, it felt as if their JFK had been assassinated. This man, their leader, had overcome much adversity. He was their hero. Their idol. The man they all tried to emulate.

A few weeks later, police arrested Kino Bartholomew, a 30-year-old former client of 1st Step whom Entriken himself had shepherded to the program from the county courthouse, for allegedly planning the murder.

For residents, it was the ultimate betrayal: Entriken had persuaded a Broward judge to send Bartholomew his way in lieu of jail time. Courthouse regulars worried that the murder would put an end to the option of diverting nonviolent drug and alcohol offenders to rehab. The witnesses worried they'd be ambushed again, maybe even outside their own homes. The remaining directors at 1st Step worried that all their energy and effort combined could not fill the void created by Entriken's premature departure.

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Richard Entriken's beginnings were so far from the vicissitudes of crime and redemption in South Florida that they seemed almost from another dimension. He was born in San Francisco, the youngest of Elizabeth and Robert Entriken's three sons. His father was an insurance executive, his mother a former billboard model. Both parents came from well-to-do families, and the Entriken clan was solidly middle class.

When Richard was 5, his parents divorced and his mother moved to New Jersey, then Manhattan. She would marry twice more. Richard and his brother Edward ("Buck") went to live with their mother, but they returned to California each summer to see their father and older brother Robert ("Rocky").

Buck, who was four years older than Richard, says the marriage split up because he and his baby brother were both abused by an uncle. Their father refused to believe that the uncle, his brother Van, had touched the boys, Buck says, so their mother left. For years, nobody in the family discussed the abuse. "We were in denial," Buck says. "Ricky and I have talked about it over the last ten years. It wasn't until my uncle passed that I realized what a huge injustice we were dealt — given a left curve early on. I don't think Ricky ever smoked marijuana over that, although it's a wonderful medicine for someone trying to forget a wrong."

Rocky, seven years older than Richard, agrees with Buck that Richard always had a sunny disposition. He was the happy baby brother. But underneath he was troubled.

As a teenager living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Richard started smoking weed. He didn't play sports and barely went to school. Buck remembers him befriending young Puerto Ricans like the gang bangers depicted in West Side Story. He dropped out of school in the tenth grade.

At 17, Richard joined the Army. His father, a Navy man, was delighted. Richard wanted to learn how to parachute out of airplanes, so in 1965 he arrived at Fort Campbell, Kentucky — home of the Screaming Eagles — to train with the 101st Airborne Division. Then he shipped out to Vietnam. While in Nam, he picked up two purple hearts, a battered conscience, and an opium habit.