After Kirby Marcantonio confessed last week to being a perpetrator in the Great Mystery of the Shark in the Pond — an infamous prank from Easter Sunday 1976 — Billy Strong, the lead conspirator, has come forward to say that Mr. Marcantonio wasn’t involved.
After reading Mr. Marcantonio’s version of the story in The Star, Mr. Strong took to Facebook to object, saying that Mr. Marcantonio “had nothing to do with this.” The vehicle involved wasn’t a Jeep, for one thing, he said: It was an AMC muscle car
“Kirby’s version is completely false,” Mr. Strong declared in a phone call this week. “He had nothing to do with it. ‘Jaws’ was in the movie theater, and I’d seen it a dozen times. I really was crazy about it, so I came up with the idea.”
Mr. Strong said he began working in his garage on the “shark fin” later found floating in Town Pond after Peter Fein, his sister’s then- boyfriend, offered to help with the carpentry. (Mr. Marcantonio said Mr. Fein had handled the carpentry in a follow-up phone call this week.)
“So, Peter helped me build it. Because I was 10 years old, he helped me build some cuts, and used the saw and everything,” Mr. Strong said.
Once it was done, he said, he went down to the pond with Mr. Fein and Tommy Verderosa and slipped the fin into the water, attaching it to a rock with a rope. It circled around the pond just as they’d hoped it would, and got, to put it mildly, a lot of attention.
Over the years, Mr. Strong said, he told the tale to a few people, though he didn’t talk about it often. His family and some close friends knew whodunnit, he said. “It’s a simple story that I did when I was a kid, and a lot of people got enjoyment out of it, and still do.”
“But I was actually a little shocked when I read that article,” he added. After getting off the phone, he texted a photo of himself and Mr. Fein with the fin, taken in 1976.
“It’s not like I went to the moon or anything, but it’s something I did that was pretty cool when I was 10 years old,” Mr. Strong said, before objecting to Mr. Marcantonio’s “taking credit” for the caper.
For his part, Mr. Marcantonio maintains that he was in fact there when it happened, despite Mr. Strong’s saying otherwise.
“The way I remember it, it was all of course Billy’s idea, which is why the headline of the piece says Billy did it, right?” Mr. Marcantonio said. “Not me. I was just an observer. I was just there. I was not the carpenter. I didn’t come up with the idea. And I just happened to be there at the time that the whole thing went on. I thought it was a hoot.”
He remembers the prank “being a little bit different,” though. “In terms of the specifics of something that happened 50-plus years ago when he was a 10-year-old kid, I’m going to differ with him.”
Mr. Marcantonio did agree, though, that it wasn’t a Jeep that was used as the getaway vehicle. It was a Chevy Blazer, he said.
“One way or another, this mystery has been solved,” he said, “and for what it’s worth, if somebody wants to research this 100 years from now, at least they’ve got 99 percent of the facts as they should be, and whatever gray areas are left over, well, that’ll still be the mystery.”
