Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at a 73-year-old career criminal who has been implicated in a plot that could be New Jersey’s next big public corruption scandal. We’ll also look at real estate dramas playing out at two theaters.
The septuagenarian career criminal is George Bratsenis, whose long odyssey on the wrong side of the law includes robberies and burglaries with a guy known as Trigger Lou; the killing of a drug courier known as the Turk; and ties to organized crime. But is he a hit man?
That question may be answered today. He is scheduled to appear in federal court in New Jersey to enter a plea in a murder-for-hire case. My colleague Ed Shanahan, who has sifted through court documents and other public records, says it is a new chapter for Bratsenis, who once took orders from Gambino crime family associates. I asked Ed to put the latest case in context.
Why are we hearing about Bratsenis now?
In January, a veteran political campaign consultant named Sean Caddle pleaded guilty to arranging the killing of an associate in 2014. Caddle said Bratsenis had been the primary hit man. Caddle said he paid Bratsenis thousands of dollars in cash in advance and the balance in the parking lot of a diner in Elizabeth, N.J., on the day after the murder.
You wrote that Bratsenis was an “old-school hoodlum” whose criminal heyday ran from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.
Yes. From 1974 to 1985, he racked up 10 convictions — many of them for felonies like burglary, armed robbery and, in one instance, conspiracy to commit murder. Most of the cases were in Connecticut, in or within an easy drive of his hometown, Stamford. But he also ventured to Florida (where he was charged with grand theft), Nova Scotia (where he robbed a bowling alley at gunpoint for $700) and New Jersey.
One thing I learned in reporting all this was what a cesspool of organized crime and government corruption Stamford was in the 1970s and into the ’80s. It was fertile ground for someone like Bratsenis, who, as one retired Stamford officer put it, “would do anything for hire.” Capt. Richard Conklin of the Stamford police told me that Bratsenis and his crew “would link up with organized crime associates” — chiefly those tied to the Gambino family — “and do their bidding: robberies, burglaries, selling drugs.”
Court records show that his primary partner was a guy named Louis Sclafani, who called himself Trigger Lou and who ultimately betrayed Bratsenis, testifying against him as a federally protected witness in several cases.
Among the most serious crimes Bratsenis and Sclafani were charged in was the killing of a drug courier named David Avnayim, a.k.a. the Turk. Prosecutors said he was killed in 1980 at the direction of Larry Hogan, a retired Stamford police lieutenant who employed Bratsenis as “muscle” and who was notorious in southeast Connecticut at the time because of suspicions that he was close to the Gambinos and involved in the drug trade.
Hogan was also charged but died before trial. Sclafani cooperated. Bratsenis pleaded guilty to murder conspiracy. When I reached David Golub, a lawyer who represented Hogan, to ask about Bratsenis, he said: “If he’s out of jail more than a day, it’s a fluke.”
A little while later, he hatched a bizarre scheme to break out of jail. What was that all about?
He was arrested and charged in 1983 in a jewelry store heist in Little Falls, N.J. While he was in prison awaiting trial, one of his sisters smuggled in a balloon filled with the nausea-inducing drug Antabuse that — strange but true — he kept in his rectum for weeks.
He planned to ingest the drug the day the trial started, make himself violently ill and prompt a trip to a hospital, where armed men would be waiting to spring him, according to a retired investigator from the Passaic County prosecutor’s office.
The plot was foiled with the help of a jailhouse informer and an undercover agent who recorded Bratsenis’s sister discussing it.
What’s next for Bratsenis?
Apart from the court appearance in New Jersey today, he has been in federal custody since September 2014 — about five months after the killing of Galdieri — because he was arrested and charged in a bank robbery in Trumbull, Conn. He pleaded guilty in that case three years ago and has been awaiting sentencing ever since.
Weather
Prepare for temps in the low 50s, with rain, thunderstorms and wind gusts during the day. Late at night, the rain continues as temps remain steady in the 50s.
alternate-side parking
In effect until April 14 (Holy Thursday).
Trump investigator cites ‘numerous felony violations’
One of the Manhattan prosecutors who investigated Donald Trump believed that the former president was “guilty of numerous felony violations,” according to a copy of his resignation letter. The prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz, quit last month after the new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, abruptly stopped pursuing an indictment. Pomerantz wrote in the resignation letter that not holding Trump accountable was “a grave failure of justice.”
The latest New York news
The Covid-19 vaccine
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To bolster inoculations among children ages 5 to 11, city officials began holding vaccine clinics at public elementary schools in every borough except Manhattan.
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Jenny Rivera, a judge on New York State’s highest court, could be removed for failing to comply with the state’s Covid vaccination mandate.
Other big stories
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The agency that runs the city’s subways and buses is getting a new president. He’s from Boston and does not own a car.
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The mother of an 8-year-old autistic boy and her boyfriend were charged in the child’s death after the medical examiner’s office ruled it a homicide.
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This year’s Abel Prize, the equivalent of a Nobel in mathematics, went to Dennis Sullivan of Stony Brook University and the City University Graduate Center.
2 theaters, 2 real estate deals
The Metro Theater in 1988.Credit…David W. Dunlap/The New York Times
Is New York the only place where there’s drama in real estate deals about theaters?
One new theater deal involves Issue Project Room, a performance nonprofit that emphasizes work by experimental artists, and which has been the tenant in a 5,000-square-foot theater space in Downtown Brooklyn. Now it is the owner.
Zev Greenfield, the executive director and chief curator of Issue Project Room, said the deed had been transferred as a donation by Two Trees Management, the developer that converted the rest of the building to condominiums. Two Trees bought the building, the former Board of Education headquarters, from the city in 2003.
Greenfield called the theater “a jewel” and said ownership was something to celebrate. But Issue Project Room cannot celebrate on the premises right now. The theater, at 22 Boerum Place, is closed for renovations that are underway with allocations totaling $9 million from the city.
Another theater deal involves the Metro, an Art Deco movie house on Broadway between West 99th and 100th Streets. It has been closed since late 2005.
The owner, Albert Bialek, said he had signed a lease with an operator that planned to showcase independent films. He would not name the operator but said the plan was for a multiscreen house “with complete restaurant facilities, event space for meetings and that sort of thing.”
Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president, said he had spoken with the head of the company that had signed the lease. Like Bialek, he would not name the company. “The key thing is he actually signed the lease,” he said. “That’s a threshold that’s never been crossed before in the many near-misses that we’ve had to struggle through over the last 15 years.”
What we’re reading
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Nearly two decades had passed since Arcade Fire performed at the Bowery Ballroom. They returned on Friday with a surprise concert (and a parade), SPIN reports.
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After 17 years in Long Island, and a little over 70 years in business, the mother-daughter proprietors of the Parapsychology Foundation are about to lose their lease.
METROPOLITAN diary
Strangers No More
To mark two years (and more) of Covid-19, Metropolitan Diary this week features reader tales of life in New York City during the pandemic.
Dear Diary:
I stepped into a large, empty elevator in Midtown on my way to a doctor’s appointment.
As the doors were closing, one woman, and then another, rushed toward the elevator. I held the doors, and the three of us, masked and standing six feet apart, nodded to one another.
There was a mirror in the elevator. I turned and got a look at my reflection.
“Oh, God,” I blurted out. “My hair is so awful!” (I had not colored it in 19 months and had cut it only once in that time.)
The woman to my left spoke softly.
“I’m so unhappy,” she said.
The woman to my right chimed in.
“I need to see a psychiatrist,” she said.
We all began to laugh. And when the doors opened at my floor, the three of us, intimate strangers now, said, “Have a nice day!” almost in unison.
— Kathy Talalay
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Melissa Guerrero, Jeff Boda and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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