A former basketball coach at a venerable New York City sports club who was immortalized as “Lefty” in Jim Carroll’s searing memoir “The Basketball Diaries” has been branded a serial sexual predator in a new lawsuit.
Nicholas Antonucci and others at what was then called the Madison Square Boys Club allegedly molested dozens of boys between 1950 and 1980, the suit alleges.
“For years, as MSBC claimed that it provided young boys with a safe place to belong and stay out of trouble, it was instead giving serial child predators unfettered and unsupervised access to thousands of New York City children,” said attorney Jennifer Freeman, who represents 20 people who are suing the club, which is now known as the Madison Square Boys & Girls Club.
Their lawsuit was filed under the Child Victims Act, which is providing a one-year window for people who say they were molested in New York to sue regardless of when the acts took place.
Carroll, a writer and punk musician who died in 2009, described his encounter with Antonucci in the first chapter of his memoir, which was published in 1978.
“He likes to do funny things to you like put his hand between your legs,” Carroll wrote. “When he did this I got keenly suspicious. I guess I better not tell my mother about it.”