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TwitThisAn Extended Family
As summer turned to fall, the baseball games continued, and several of the boys became frequent visitors to the Rosens' home. In time, the group evolved into five regulars: Will and Kindu, Philippe Medina, Juan Carlos Robinson and Carlos Suarez. Ripton and Morgan, who attended private school on the Upper West Side, were happy to have friends in the neighborhood. The age difference presented no problem. Almost from the beginning, they viewed the "big boys" -- as they are still called -- as their brothers. "It happened gradually and normally," says Leslie, who without thinking about it began purchasing larger containers of Gatorade and chips. "When the boys walked into our lives, it was like a breath of fresh air."The Rosens' soaring living room became a play space where the kids would stack cushions into soft mountains to leap onto from a balcony. For their informal wrestling matches, Leslie purchased gaudy World Wrestling Federation belts; Michael bought baseball gloves for those who didn't have their own. And on weekend nights, when the group slept over, they turned out all the lights, picked teams, and played a game with plastic pistols and flashlights. Leslie and Michael would sit in the dark, monitoring the action. Without planning it, they were becoming an extended family.
"We came to eat and have fun," says Carlos Suarez, who had known little of the latter in his short life. He remembers seeing his father murdered right in front of him when he was 11. "It was Good Friday," he begins, his voice rising, "and we had just bought ice cream -- vanilla with sprinkles. This guy my mother knew threw a cup of alcohol into my father's face, then took out a screwdriver and stabbed him in the heart four times." The family subsequently spent months in a couple of rough homeless shelters before settling in the Jacob Riis projects, a few blocks from the Rosens' penthouse.
Kindu, who says his mother died of AIDS, lived with five brothers and three sisters. Most of the other boys were being raised by single mothers struggling against daunting odds. Drug dealing and poverty were part of their everyday landscape. Relatives had been in and out of jail.
The Rosens came from a separate universe. Michael, the son of a CPA, had grown up in Vermont, where he learned to ski at age seven. In 1975, he enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, where he soon met Leslie Gruss, the daughter of an investment banker with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Raised on East 79th Street in a spacious, art-filled apartment, she had attended private schools and decided in the eighth grade to become a doctor. Michael left Penn with graduate degrees in anthropology and business and joined the faculty of NYU business school. Leslie earned her MD from the Medical College of Pennsylvania, and the two were married in 1983 at a Vermont country inn.
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