Let Me Strap You Into The Restaulounge So We Can Waterboard You

But in the end, threatening to torture your landlord can only get you so far:

Manhattan prosecutors described yesterday how two Greenwich Village restaurateurs allegedly set the stage for extortion this past January — kidnapping their landlord’s agent, taking him to a nearby apartment, and showing him some hardware decidedly not meant for a home-improvement project, they said.

The unidentified victim took one look at the tarp and the wicker chair on it — alongside a table full of sinister-seeming tools — and agreed to forgive $250,000 in back rent, prosecutors said.

“They showed him a chair, placed on top of a tarp with a table holding pliers, a hammer, a screwdriver, and a candle,” said prosecutor James Meadows. “A burning candle.”

It hadn’t helped that one of the suspects, Vasileios Giamagas, 35, bragged he was a former mercenary and an accomplished killer who’d slain his own brother.

“He told the managing agent that he was in the Chechen army and had blown up a building with more than 80 people in it,” said Eric Seidel, chief of the DA’s rackets bureau.

Giamagas, an illegal alien from Greece, and co-defendant Ekkehart Schwartz, a 70-year-old German architect here on a green card, had fallen behind on their rent at their never-opened bar and nightclub, Restaulounge-Bar De’Vill, at 68 W. 3rd St.