The young man staggered down a city street as blood flowed from a puncture wound. The weapon used in the steely attack — an ice pick — was sticking out of his lower back.

The scene was reminiscent of an era in the 1930s and ’40s when members of a notorious Brooklyn murder syndicate left a trail of bodies riddled with ice-pick holes. This attack, however, was set in modern-day New York City, specifically, on Aug. 21, at 4:20 p.m. in the Norwood section of the Bronx.

While guns top the list of weapons used in violent assaults, every so often, a crime is committed with a weapon that is suggestive of a different era and seems mystifyingly out of place in the New York City of today.

One such weapon is the ice pick — often associated with the 1940 murder of the Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky: He was killed with an ice pick’s cousin, an ice ax, while he was in exile in Mexico, by an assassin who, acting on the orders of Joseph Stalin, crept up behind Trotsky and slammed the ice ax into his skull.