Mugged

Allen Burnside grew up in a modest two-story home on Court Street, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. His parents rented the six-room first floor from the Glombosky family, who lived on the second floor.

“Port” natives and those from outside the area considered the neighborhood of his youth—from the early 1950s and the mid-1990s—as among the toughest in that area of the “Garden State.” Elizabethport often presented dangerous obstacles to a young boy who simply wanted to be left alone to enjoy his friends, his neighborhood and his childhood.

Allen, around the time of his 10th birthday, while walking to school one morning, suddenly found himself up in the face of a very heavyset and muscular African-American teenager. The teenager, in a move seen often in those days, stepped in front of the young boy and demanded protection money.

He told Allen, “I’ll guarantee that you’ll only be able to walk this way safely along Court Street in the future if you pay me 50 cents a day out of your school lunch money.”

The younger boy later found out that the teen, known as Alfred in the neighborhood, had shaken down a number of his schoolmates to guarantee their safe passage. The neighborhood kids also said Alfred was a little slow in mental capacity. Allen could not pay this toll from the small amount his working class parents could afford to give him. He also feared that the older teen would beat him to a pulp if he dared to tell his parents or report Alfred to the police.

Allen’s parents didn’t raise no dummy, and he started taking a different route to school in order to avoid confrontations with Alfred. The younger boy thought he had escaped at least one of the dangers of living in Elizabethport, but his problem with Alfred had just begun. One afternoon his mother, Marie, asked him to pick up dry cleaning from Allstate Cleaners, situated on Trumbull Street, about a half mile from his home. As he walked home from the cleaners Allen heard a startling noise from the bushes behind him. Alfred appeared and hit him hard in the stomach with an empty Coke bottle. Although the youngster doubled over in pain the bottle didn’t break and he escaped down one of the side streets.

Then, for a number of months, no matter where he traveled in the neighborhood, he had no further run ins with his protector. Had Alfred vanished? Had the Elizabeth Police finally caught up with him? Had a rival tough guy given him a taste of his own medicine?

One day Allen confided in schoolmate Harry Nichols about the Alfred incidents. Turns out Harry also had fallen prey to Alfred. He said the last time he had seen the tough guy a huge adult in a large Cadillac had grabbed him off Court Street and the car had disappeared in a cloud of purple haze.

Nobody else reported the incident with the Cadillac and there was no account about it in The Daily Journal, Elizabeth’s city newspaper.

Meanwhile, Horton Mitchell, the local beat reporter for The Journal, had befriended Allen’s family and the boy told Horton about the mysterious goings-on with Alfred. The reporter had heard about a Cadillac mysteriously vanishing in Elizabethport and had been following up on the rumors but had not uncovered any leads solid enough to warrant publication of a story.

He agreed to follow up with his sources on the Elizabeth police force and in the Court Street neighborhood. Allen said he would continue to check around with his buddies. They agreed to meet again the following week.

Horton’s police sources also had heard the rumors, but they didn’t want to act on them until they got something more solid. Allen’s friends laughed when he told them about the disappearing Cadillac, even though some of their other buddies insisted the stories they heard made the rumors sound real.

Two weeks later, Allen got a phone call at his parents’ house telling him to meet a fellow named Marvin Sebastian outside Liberty Baptist Church on Court Street on the following Sunday afternoon. The caller said he had heard about Allen nosying around the Cadillac situation and he wanted to make sure he didn’t interfere with their operation. Allen agreed to the meeting, but insisted on bringing Horton.

Marvin showed up a half hour late, and looked very nervous and disturbed. He said he would give Horton and Allen information on the disappearance, but they could not tell anyone where they got the information. Very dangerous people told him about it, he said.

Marvin said some mobsters from the future were out to get Allen and his neighbors from his Court Street neighborhood because they stood in the way of a building project they would want to ram through the Elizabeth City Council for completion in 2035. Even though Allen and his reporter friend expected to hear from the mob types running their city in the future, they didn’t know that Allen would wind up on the edge of disaster.

Over the years following the strange incidents of his childhood the young man and the reporter would become much closer. The youth would go to college and earn a degree in journalism from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Allen then also would become a reporter for The Daily Journal. His beat would include Elizabeth City Hall and he would write a number of very incisive articles about threats by Sam Solonski, a local building contractor, and a few unsavory characters he associated with who wanted to build a marina on the Elizabethport waterfront despite zoning prohibitions and strong neighborhood opposition.

One of Solonski’s henchmen had special powers that enabled him to transport through time and prevent others from messing with his projects in the future.

They wanted to prevent Allen from writing about the true behind-the-scenes manipulation of Solonski and his friends to get the marina approved.

The gangsters hired Jupiter Jones, a local tough, to take on the personna of Alfred in the 1990s and relay a strong message that Allen would vanish if he tried to become a reporter. Alfred (Jones) went back to the Court Street neighborhood of the 1909s in the Cadillac and kidnapped Allen in the disappearing car. They took the aspiring reporter to see Solonski at his estate, and they put it to Burnside to abandon his reportorial ambitions for the future or “you probably won’t survive another day let alone the next 40 years.”

Allen evaded giving Solonski a direct answer. He managed to escape. found a previously-deserted time portal and teleported himself back to the 1990s.

He met with Horton and they began devising a plan to sink the future mobster’s marina and the gang’s blockade of Allen’s journalism career.

Back in 2035, Solonski continued with his plot because he felt he could easily defeat the young punk. He decided to send one of his most experienced henchmen, the renowed time traveller, Roberto Faszmartski, to resolve the Allen matter in the 1990s once and for all. In addition to Faszmartski and a hit squad of the most notorious time-travelling villains of the 21st century, the team included Jason Capone, the grandson of one of the most infamous villains of the 1920s. Capone itched for the chance to avenge the capture of his grandfather and the destruction of his criminal empire.

Solonski told Fazmartski and Capone, “You will go back in time and remove all traces of this aspiring journalist before he even has a chance to think twice about completing his education. When you complete this mission you will become my partners in one of the most profitable construction ventures of the 21st century. Should you fail, however, the world’s only memory of you will lay inscribed on obscure headstones in the 1990s in an Elizabeth cemetery.”

Horton and Allen began assembling their own strike force of some of the most talented private investigators, retired New Jersey troopers and retired military from throughout the Eastern Seaboard. Strike force leaders included David Pinkerton, great-great-grandson of Allan Pinkerton, who headed one of the top private securities and law enforcement agencies in United States history, and Jeremy Schwarzkopf, grandson of H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the New Jersey state trooper investigation of the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby in the 1930s.

Horton and Allen hired their strike force using a small fortune and the fame Horton accumulated from hard-hitting novels he wrote as a sideline during his time as a reporter for The Daily Journal. Although only a teenager, Allen also had stashed away a little nest egg of his own from his father’s financial interest in Greater Jersey Consolidated Transit, one of the chief providers of public transportation in New Jersey.

In addressing the first meeting of the strike force, Allen said, “We don’t know exactly when or how these time villains will strike, but they won’t succeed. My future and the future of a free press and our community depend on it.”

Faszmartski and Capone continued to work on their plans. They believed they had the advantage—access to technological weapons not even conceived of in the 1990s and entrance to the most advanced time portals to make delivery of these weapons possible. They didn’t realize that Allen and Horton had accumulated some of the most effective research tools of their era and Allen, during his short time in 2035, also had familiarized himself with much of the technological advances made in the 40 years since his youth.

Horton, and his aspiring successor read everything written by some of the most prominent futurists and entrepreneurs of the 20th century, including the esteemed Carl Sagen. They also counted among their most avid supporters the thousands of citizens who expected complete transparency from both their governments and members of private industry. They also expected their right to be informed of any attempts to defraud their fellow citizens or to put their lives in danger through shoddy workmanship which endangered their financial or physical safety.

So the stage was set.

The villains began construction of a time portal to ensure their safe passage and return from the 21st century. They also assembled a 21st century armada of weapons that, they felt, would ensure destruction of “that pesky ink scratcher” and their domination of the Elizabethport waterfront for many years to come.

They, after all, had the support of many in the 21st century who thought the political correctness of government oversight was outmoded and standing in the way of true entrepreneurship, even if their idea of entrepreneurship posed a continuing danger to safety and well-being of the earth, its people and free expression throughout the globe.

Allen and his friends believed they had “the weapons and support in the 20th century that would enable them to continue the ideals upon which the United States was founded—especially transparency and fair dealing for all in government and business.”

They began work on a defense to the time portal and weapons to counter any “evil being devised by those who seek to use time travel not as a vehicle for progress and good but as a vehicle for the selfish pursuit of their personal enrichment and the elimination of safety and fairness in government and business.”

So the combatants lined up for battle. Solonski realized he no longer had the element of surprise on his side, but he could rely on the firepower and the criminal intellects of Faszmartski and Capone. Burnside, Mitchell, Pinkerton and Schwarzkopf, believed they had more of an advantage than before because they came to the table this time prepared for battle.

The Saturnski crew launched its attack with a 200-decibel blast from a supersonic cannon, fired at Burnside as he walked through Elizabethport on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

Burnside and his team had studied all potential 21st century weaponry and felt ready for anything their enemies would throw at them. Also, they had access to 20th century technology Saturnski and company didn’t expect from them.

It turned out that many highway construction officials in the 20th century. responding to complaints about traffic noise, had greatly advanced the science of noise abatement.

The Burnside team constructed a 200-foot long wall along Court Street using the most noise-resistant material available to them. After the 21st century villains launched their attack, Allen and his allies successfully repelled it.

Allen went on to graduate from high school with highest honors and completed the Rutgers University School of Journalism with a bachelor of arts degree magna cum laude. He went on to become one of the most respected reporters in New Jersey and, in fact, in the nation.

Not only did the Elizabeth City Council vote down the marina project, but the Union County prosecutor uncovered evidence that Solonski and his allies had planned to ram through a project much more unsafe than the gangsters had originally applied for. It also criminally violated local and New Jersey zoning laws.

In a Linden, New Jersey office jointly maintained by Solonski and his allies, Union County and city officials also found evidence of the plot against Burnside and plans by the duo and their allies to offer bribes to city and county officials to get approval for the marina.

The courts sentenced Solonski to 30 years in Central Jersey State Prison and their allies each would serve 10 years as co-conspirators.

Luckily, the officials who they attempted to bribe reported each of the attempts to shake them down and testified against Solonski and crew.

Allen Burnside also won a Pullitzer Prize in journalism for his stories on the Elizabeth Marina scandal and New Jersey Governor Hugo Simpson presented state medals of honor to Pinkerton and Schwarzkopf and posthumously to Mitchell for their roles in defeating the Solonski gang.