Five masked Jamaican men barged into [popular reggae] Club William Penn at 57th and Ludlow streets at about 3 p.m., said Lt. John Walker of Southwest Detectives. The would-be thieves intended to rob [bar owner Clinton] Horrit, who is also Jamaican, but shot him once in the leg when he confronted them at the front of the bar.
Horrit, 45, was then shoved into a white Ford or Chevy van that was waiting outside his club, Walker said, and a nail-biting ransom plot quickly unfolded. “By that point, they were too far into it,” Walker said. “The captors used his cell phone to call his family and demanded $450,000.” At some point, the kidnappers took Horrit inside a beige stucco rowhouse on Cedarhurst Street near 60th, across from Turner Middle School. They continued demanding the hefty ransom, and their threats to harm Horrit escalated as hours passed with no pay-off, Walker said.
“They bound him with duct tape,” Walker said. “It appears they stabbed him twice in the chest inside the [Cedarhurst] residence.” Shortly before 7 p.m., the five kidnappers left the house – and their terrified victim – and fled in their white van, which witnesses said had tinted front windows and no rear or side windows. “They weren’t making any headway,” Walker said of the kidnappers. “There was no way they were getting that kind of money, so they might have figured, ‘Why continue?'” With his captors gone, Horrit climbed out of a basement window and hobbled over to a neighbor’s house.
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