Arson: So Out Of Character!

This is not the kind of story you want to read if you’re suspected of being complicit in arson:

There have been at least four deliberately set fires at properties linked to Joshua Guttman, the owner of a warehouse complex on the Brooklyn waterfront that burned to the ground this week in what Fire Department officials have called suspicious circumstances, according to records collected by fire marshals.

Details of the other fires, which date back to 1991, were not immediately available. It is not known if any of those crimes have been prosecuted. Mr. Guttman has never been charged with any arson-related crimes, his lawyer, Israel Goldberg, said.

“If you look at the kinds of buildings he owns, many of them are suited for rehabilitation,” Mr. Goldberg said of his client, a real estate developer. “Many of them have people residing there, or homeless people and vagrants — people who are more prone to starting fires than other people,” he said.

. . .

Two fires took place within two months of each other in the summer of 1991, in a building at 627 Gates Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, according to Fire Department records. Residents vaguely recalled those fires, but said the building — which they believed was a church — had since been replaced by a two-story residential building.

In 1992, there was an arson fire in another of Mr. Guttman’s buildings, at 1381 Myrtle Avenue in Bushwick, and in 1996, another at 140-142 Plymouth Street, a commercial building just a block from the East River in Dumbo.

Another Brooklyn property owned by Mr. Guttman, at 247 Water Street, burned in a four-alarm fire in 2004. While firefighters initially thought it was suspicious, the final cause was listed as “not ascertained,” and officials said that workers using acetylene torches might have been responsible.

Mr. Goldberg, Mr. Guttman’s lawyer, said that arson “would be out of character for him.”