Squalid Site of Queens Rape Unnoticed by Public Nearby

It was late Sunday afternoon when Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, hands buried in the pockets of his topcoat, walked to the end of the deserted train platform, because he had to see this thing for himself.

He stepped carefully down the stairs to the Long Island Rail Road tracks in Queens, threading between two third rails, which carry live electricity. His polished wingtips met wet earth. He said he had not told the local station house that he was coming out to Flushing because he did not want a big scene.

''Stay right behind me,'' he told the detective with him. They entered the dry, dead little thicket beyond the rails, and disappeared from sight.

There it is, on a map. There it is, in pictures. And yet, it is bureaucratic dead space. Two agencies could not agree on whether a team once visited the site. Perhaps the only people who knew the truth about the little thicket were the men who lived there.

On Dec. 19, the police say, a group of young homeless men surrounded a couple sitting on a bench on the walkway above, dragging the 42-year-old mother away, down two sets of stairs, between the lethal third rails, and into their dark hideout in the middle of a sporadically crowded hub of Queens. The hideout sits beside Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, adjacent to a subway and busyard, alongside a crowded commuter line, its small trees and cattails within sight of anyone walking to a Mets game at Shea Stadium or to the National Tennis Center.

The woman told the police that she was dragged into a ''shack'' and raped repeatedly on a mattress. Officers turned out in force, combing the area for two hours, passing by this invisible place in plain sight. It took a police dog to find her.

''If this hadn't happened,'' the police commissioner said, emerging from his tour,, ''they'd be living there, unnoticed.''

Unnoticed: the crime scene appears to have served as home base for a gang of low-level thugs cruising the Corona community, their last two years mapped by a stack of misdemeanor complaints. At least one complaint listed the suspect's address as ''homeless.''

Unnoticed: two of the suspects had been cited for trespassing in the area of the subway yard. There is no mention on the complaints of any camp, any living area. The most recent was June 26. A few hundred yards away, the Mets lost to the Braves that night, before 30,974 people.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said its records showed that agents entered the area three times since August, with homeless outreach groups, to offer assistance. The people there declined. They were ''loitering,'' not living there, said Tom Kelly, an authority spokesman. ''They were talked to, tried to be helped,'' he said. The identities of the people the transit agents talked to were not available this week, and it is unclear whether any of them are suspects in the rape.

Two agencies that supposedly sent officials to visit the site together on Oct. 3, the transit authority and the Salvation Army, do not even agree that the visit took place. Mr. Kelly said they offered assistance together, while the Salvation Army said it had no record of the camp.

''Our outreach teams are positive they were not in that area,'' said Bob Mascali, a spokesman for the city's Department of Homeless Services, which contracts with the Salvation Army to handle outreach efforts in Queens.

Adding to the confusion was initial uncertainty about whether the small parcel, until the rape considered insignificant, belonged to the Long Island Rail Road or the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Without benefit of access to the area, blocked off by the police, reporters immediately labeled it a ''shantytown,'' a word evoking railroad nomads, Woody Guthrie songs, a community making the best of tough times. It is too good a word -- too romantic, too nostalgic -- for what lies at the end of the path into the dry thicket.

There were two lived-in areas, the larger a piece of plywood leaning on a pole and draped with a deli awning. A filthy mattress. Matted, strewn clothing: a pair of jeans, a jacket, a bra. Beer bottles, Black Velvet hair dye. Eyedrops, nail polish, a can of deodorant in the mud. A Bible lay near a pornographic magazine. The second spot was little more than a mattress and a refrigerator box.

Five men have been charged in the attack: Carlos Rodriguez, 22, Victor Cruz, 22, Jose Hernandez, 18, Luis Carmona, 20, and Armando Juvenal, 20.

More is known about the suspects' lives outside the camp.

Mr. Rodriguez was described by the police as the ringleader in the Dec. 19 attack. Two years ago, he was arrested in an assault on a woman in Corona, accused of grabbing her wrists and jerking her along the sidewalk to a 98th Street residence, where he pushed her into the basement and locked them both in a bedroom, according to a complaint filed in Queens Criminal Court. She tried to escape, but he grabbed her and pulled her back down the stairs, the complaint states.

There is no mention of a sexual assault, and Mr. Rodriguez pleaded guilty to attempted third-degree assault and was given a conditional discharge, an order to behave or go to jail; the woman was given a protective order.

A month later, he and Mr. Juvenal, another suspect in the recent rape, were arrested on a charge of threatening another woman with a steak knife. Mr. Juvenal told her, ''I'm going to do something to you if you don't bring your brother to talk to us,'' according to the complaint. They pleaded guilty to misdemeanor menacing and harassment charges.

Mr. Rodriguez again pleaded guilty this year to a July 9 assault on a man, and was sentenced to 90 days in jail.

Mr. Juvenal's record also describes minor violence. He was part of a group of about 20 who, on March 11, 2001, chased two men around Roosevelt Avenue and into a restaurant, ordering them to ''give us everything you've got,'' according to the complaint. He pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. The year before, he was charged with felony robbery in the mugging of a man for a watch. He pleaded guilty to attempted robbery and was sentenced to probation.

Mr. Hernandez and Mr. Carmona have, between them, been arrested on charges of possessing stolen property, possessing marijuana, fare-beating and disorderly conduct. The police have said all the men are illegal immigrants; Mr. Juvenal is Ecuadorean, while the others are from Mexico. Immigration authorities are not routinely notified when an illegal immigrant is arrested, the police said.

The police are investigating at least two members of the group for possible gang ties to the Knights of Destruction, thought to be a subgang of a larger Latino group, and relatively unknown in New York City. Mr. Rodriguez bears a ''K.O.D.'' tattoo, and Mr. Juvenal has admitted membership. A plywood square painted with the letters sits beside one of the mattresses at the camp.

The men are due in court Jan. 13. Most of them have not yet been assigned lawyers. Only Mr. Hernandez's lawyer spoke out this week. ''It would be a mistake to rush to judgment before all of the facts have been thoroughly investigated,'' said Frances Gibbons, his Legal Aid lawyer. ''Not all of those arrested may be equally culpable.''

Given the low-level nature of many of the past offenses, the ferocity of the attack, as described by the police, is stunning. Investigators said the men argued over who would get to rape the woman first. They threatened to kill her because she could identify them, according to the criminal complaint, and she told them about her children as she pleaded for her life.

Half-naked, cut and bruised, she bolted from the lean-to when she heard the police dog's approach, the police said. The dog attacked two of the men.

The day after the arrests, police officers and Parks and Recreation Department workers knocked down the camp but left its contents at the scene, and cleared another, similar one on the south side of the tracks.

The attack particularly shocked park workers. Three female employees looked down at the site last weekend, and the ''Beware of dog'' signs lining the fence around the idle trainyard. ''It should say, 'Beware of the homeless,' '' one woman said. They turned and returned to their job: patrolling the large park for homeless people. Two other workers in a truck paused to lock up the restrooms before dark, two hours before the time posted on the sign.

Mr. Kelly, emerging from the area, said it reminded him of camps he saw while working with the federal Customs Service on the California border.

''I haven't seen it in the city, no,'' he said.