Deny Everything!

I have to say, the owner of the site of Tuesday’s massive Greenpoint blaze that was labeled suspicious doesn’t sound very convincing:

Authorities labeled the blaze that destroyed several of his buildings in Brooklyn suspicious — but real-estate developer Joshua Guttman isn’t crazy enough to have ordered them set afire, his lawyer said yesterday.

“Mr. Guttman is a very wealthy man who owns a tremendous amount of property,” the lawyer, Joseph Kosofsky, said yesterday as the ruins continued to smolder.

“He has the permits for demolition of the site. He would have had no reason to do this. He is not nuts.”

Investigators say it could be days before they get a close look at the charred remains of the warehouses at Noble and West streets in Greenpoint. It was the city’s biggest blaze since 9/11.

. . .

Kosofsky said the site that went up in flames Tuesday was rezoned a year ago to allow for luxury high-rise apartments.

“We don’t know what happened, but it is not to his benefit to have this happen,” Kosofsky said.

Between 13 and 15 buildings burned before the blaze was finally brought under control after 36 hours. “It jumped from one building to another,” Kilduff said.

The size of the blaze made it look like arson, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

“The level of fire when they arrived was consistent throughout the location. In other words, it didn’t look like it started in one spot,” Kelly said.

Guttman’s wife, Vera, defended her husband: “There is nothing to hide. Why would he have to do something like this?”

Having his lawyer and wife repeat over and over that “he would have had no reason to do this” doesn’t mean that there isn’t actually a reason:

The 15 buildings at the Greenpoint Terminal Market in Brooklyn that were gutted in a spectacular 10-alarm fire on Tuesday were at the center of a complex real estate deal gone wrong between established and, at times, controversial developers. They were tangling over property that was itself the target of neighborhood preservationists hoping to secure the district’s legacy as a landmark.

. . .

The buildings are now in ruins and may be a crime scene, and even before the fire, they did not look like much to a passer-by, just relics from a bygone time when they produced bales of rope for the shipyards along the East River.

But the property’s value skyrocketed last year, when a prospective buyer placed a $42 million down payment, a tenth of the entire $420 million deal, and by itself almost twice what the owner had paid for the property five years earlier. Now a lawsuit seeks the return of the $42 million and describes how the deal fell apart.

Preservationists, who had failed in recent efforts to secure landmark status for other Brooklyn buildings, started a campaign to keep the Greenpoint Terminal Market from being knocked down, seeking the support of the local city councilman, David Yassky.

Whether the site’s value, its status as a landmark and the continuing legal battle have anything do with the inferno on Tuesday is unknown. Fire marshals have been unable to enter the site.