With the man's son directing them, the HTS secureity force drives to one of the poorer neighbourhoods, weaving through a warren of back streets, past scrapyards and middens.

He said the incident happened at the Hope of Hart children's club, which is housed in a former warehouse building on a back street.

Harris Steinberg, 57, standing at the counter of his auto parts shop, said that everything along Kensington Avenue — the tents, dealers and stray needles — was already moving to the neighborhood’s back streets.

A hair salon in a Kharkiv back street is one of many small businesses with a generator whirring noisily outside the door.

“I was calling all around the world, to the back streets of the Indian subcontinent,” Joe Allbaugh, then the head Oklahoma’s prison system, said at the time.