Richard Adan
Cuban-American actor and aspiring playwright, 22, whom Jack Henry Abbott stabbed to death outside the Binibon cafe in Manhattan on 18 July 1981, six weeks after Abbott's Mailer-supported parole.
Richard Adan was a 22-year-old Cuban-American actor and aspiring playwright, working as a night-shift waiter at his father-in-law’s Binibon cafe on the Lower East Side, when Jack Henry Abbott stabbed him to death in the early morning of 18 July 1981 in an argument over the use of the restaurant’s restroom. Abbott had been paroled only six weeks earlier, partly on the strength of literary advocacy led by Mailer, who had brought his prison writing to print as In the Belly of the Beast (81.10). Adan’s killing turned Mailer’s sponsorship of Abbott into the year’s gravest controversy; Mailer attended Abbott’s 1982 murder trial and called the affair “a tragedy all around.”
Stub created during the 1981 ingest.