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ON Wednesday morning, a short man walked up to a huge steel light pole in Riverbank State Park in Harlem and began punching away at it.
The logo on the back of his warm-up jacket — “Johnny Knuckles, the Italian Steel Puncher” — suggested that this was not his first time doing this. So did the two discolored spots on the pole where the man’s fists were pounding, as well as the man’s taut physique and his toughened fists, enlarged with calluses.
His punches started out as firm rhythmic thuds, each blow causing a dull clang that resonated up the steel column. But they got quicker and harder until this featherweight was grimacing as his roundhouse rights slammed into the steel. Passers-by shook their heads, the skies darkened, but the man only shed his jacket and kept slamming the steel in the rain.
“I call it my art,” said the man, Johnny DeVincenzo, 77, a Brooklyn native who is 5 feet 2 inches tall. “It makes me feel elevated.”
Art or insanity, this whole business of punching steel is something that Mr. DeVincenzo fell into while hanging around the yards of the prisons where he spent most of his adult life. He kept punching steel after he was released in 2009 and moved into a residence for ex-convicts on West 140th Street, near the park.
“When I got out, I looked around and asked, ‘Where’s my steel?’ ” he recalled. Turns out, the park was full of it: thick steel light poles with trunks three feet in diameter.
“Now it’s more profound because I’m still doing it as a free man,” he said. “It’s part of my life now.”
He punches for an hour or more a day, stopping for a minute here and there to rest his swollen, reddened hands.
“It’s a unique thing I own that nobody else owns — I don’t care if they’re a millionaire,” he said. “I want people to stop and say, ‘There’s nobody else in the world who can do that.’ It’s the accomplishment of doing something even the greatest never did, the feeling that there’s no one better than me at this.”
Mr. DeVincenzo was the youngest of eight children. His mother died when he was an infant. He was placed in foster care in Queens with a loving family, but at age 8 was taken back by his father, who was abusive, he said.
As a teenager, he spent time in psychiatric wards and then began stealing cars. In 1964, at age 28, he fired shots into the Brooklyn apartment of a man with whom he had been feuding.
The shots killed the man’s 2-year-old daughter.
When Mr. DeVincenzo heard the outcome, he said, “I went so crazy, they put me in the psych ward at Kings County Hospital.
“It was an accident — I was out of my mind, mentally sick,” he said, sobbing even now.
He was sentenced to 20 years to life for the girl’s death.
Mr. DeVincenzo was released in the early 1980s, but was soon back in, after an arrest in a robbery of an after-hours bar. In 1997, he made headlines in prison after he offered to donate a kidney to an ailing teenage girl. He also began taking college courses in prison.
The punching started 20 years ago, when a fellow inmate bet him $20 that he could not do a set of “knuckle push-ups” on the prison yard concrete, he said. Mr. DeVincenzo did the push-ups and figured he could keep winning bets with tougher knuckles, so he began punching poles — first wood, then steel.
For the first month, his knuckles bled and he cried from the pain, he said. But they toughened and thickened into a hard ridge of calcium deposits across the punching part of each hand. When he punched, his fists would become numb, he said, “like a tooth getting Novocained.”
With his new métier, he began winning cigarette bets and gained his current nickname. The feat helped prove his toughness and won him respect each time he was transferred to a new prison.
His public display now is “not some grudge to get even — I’m not going after anybody in my mind,” he said in his sparsely furnished studio apartment in Castle Gardens, a residence run by the Fortune Society, which helps ex-convicts after their release.
After nearly a half-century in prison, he said, this crazy activity was keeping him sane. On Wednesday, he was accompanied by Eric Breitbart, a neighbor and filmmaker, who recently befriended Mr. DeVincenzo and made a short film about him.
“This is something I want to do,” Mr. DeVincenzo said, “not something that some mental illness is telling me to do.”
Yes...he shared a cell with a guy on my block for about 6 months..the guy was serving 20 years for manslaughter and got out about 2000. He is also crazy...he is about 5'3 and based on his behavior it is pretty clear he was someone's b****. Everytime he sees me he hugs me and looks at me like a piece of meat. I guess I know what girls feel like. But I digress.
According to him, the guy was completely out of his mind but I take that with a grain of salt because he was also out of his mind. He said the guy was obsessive compulsive about everything...if he masturbated he would do it 10x in a row..if he made his bed it took him 8 tries to get it right...when he would shave he would be all bloody from shaving over and over again until the skin was raw..etc. It was no surprise to read the article about him now punching things...it was another avenue for him to release his obsessive compulsive behavior.
Yes...he shared a cell with a guy on my block for about 6 months..the guy was serving 20 years for manslaughter and got out about 2000. He is also crazy...he is about 5'3 and based on his behavior it is pretty clear he was someone's b****. Everytime he sees me he hugs me and looks at me like a piece of meat. I guess I know what girls feel like. But I digress.
According to him, the guy was completely out of his mind but I take that with a grain of salt because he was also out of his mind. He said the guy was obsessive compulsive about everything...if he masturbated he would do it 10x in a row..if he made his bed it took him 8 tries to get it right...when he would shave he would be all bloody from shaving over and over again until the skin was raw..etc. It was no surprise to read the article about him now punching things...it was another avenue for him to release his obsessive compulsive behavior.
Well I suppose I have to try and believe that you are not completely making all of that up. Particularly because you didn't initially come out and say that you have known about this guy for some time and that he "sounds like quite a character" after reading the write up. Buy interesting if true, thanks for sharing.
I do not know this guy at all, and the guy that shared the cell with him was also a "character." His name is diego, and was a high school friend of my parents and family..I only met him once..when I was just an infant (which I don't remember meeting him) and then when he was released in 2000. He killed a guy because he was hitting on his girlfriend....talk about regrets.
I remember him calling the house every year or two through all of my growing up, and he always wanted to speak to me, see how I was doing, how he remembered me and my family blah blah blah. For me it was creepy, but all of the family was happy to talk to him so I did too. When I finally saw him it was very sad..he is maybe 90 pounds, no teeth, and clearly he had been victimized sexually for years. He lives one block over in a rented room, and always hugs me and tells me how handsome I am...what can I say....he never lost his good taste!
I will happily accept the compliment...not everyone was born with your dashing good looks, chiseled physique, and 175 IQ. Some of us are just regular schmucks!
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