They’re All Corrupt!

A case could be made that they offered the bribe in the first place because they had some reasonable expectation that a bribe would have been accepted:

Four Brooklyn restaurateurs have been arrested for offering $100 to $200 bribes to undercover agents who posed as Health Department investigators, officials said yesterday.

Jian Fang Ren of the China King restaurant on Pitkin Avenue, Sum Tung Cheng of the New Garden Restaurant on Church Avenue, Kwong Chan Hong of the New Fu Lai eatery, also on Church Avenue, and Mustafa Choudhari of Broadway Pizza & Fried Chicken face bribery charges.

The felony could land them up to seven years in prison if convicted.

Fuhgeddaboudit!

The Greenpoint Terminal Market is totally destroyed, and whatever is left will be demolished. That took care of that problem:

To step into what’s left of the Greenpoint Terminal Market is to step into a war zone.

The few warehouses still standing after a huge fire ravaged the historic Brooklyn waterfront were gutted and the remaining catwalks connecting them looked ready to fall.

Huge piles of crushed brick and corrugated metal lined cobblestoned Noble St. And a thick haze from the small fires still smoldering two days later hung over it all.

“It looks like an atomic bomb hit it,” Department of Environmental Protection worker Fred D’Amore, 45, said as he surveyed the site. “This looks like a war zone. Everything’s totally burned down. Fuhgeddaboudit.”

Down by the East River, a damaged wall with wood beams sticking out was all that was left of the pre-Civil War building where fire marshals believe an arsonist touched off the enormous blaze Tuesday.

FDNY First Division Chief John Bley said investigators have not yet been able to sift through that wreckage because “we’re afraid everything is going to collapse.”

The 21-acre site is owned by Joshua Guttman and his son, Jack, who was on the property yesterday wearing a white construction helmet and dress clothes. He declined to be interviewed. The Guttmans have strongly denied torching the buildings.

The Deal

The failed real estate deal the newspapers are focusing on this morning involve two developers who have both been linked to sketchy behavior in the past, increasing the possibility that something untoward happened in Greenpoint on Tuesday:

Properties controlled by both Joshua Guttman, who owns the Greenpoint site, and Baruch Singer, who was trying to buy it, have been investigated by the city for suspicious events in the past.

Fire officials have suggested the Brooklyn blaze was intentionally set due to the speed in which it engulfed the warehouse buildings that are slated for demolition.

Mr. Singer, a landlord turned developer, is suing Mr. Guttman to resurrect an 8-month-old contract for $424 million to buy the property and develop it into a luxury condominium complex.

According to court documents, Messrs. Singer and Guttman did not close on the deal by the January deadline because Mr. Singer came up short on financing.

Mr. Guttman then voided the deal, and seized Mr. Singer’s $42 million deposit.

. . .

Mr. Singer, the prospective buyer, has consistently been cited by tenant groups as one of the worst landlords in the city. In 1995, the district attorney of New York County, Robert Morgenthau, conducted an investigation of a six-story Harlem building controlled by Mr. Singer that collapsed and killed three people. Mr. Morgenthau did not file criminal charges against Mr. Singer because the collapse was not “reasonably foreseeable,” according to a press release his office issued at the time. Mr. Singer’s buildings have reportedly racked up more than 4,000 violations with the city’s department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Phone messages left yesterday at the offices of Baruch Singer and his lawyer, Sean O’Donnell, were not returned.

The city’s fire probe will mark the second time that a building owned by Mr. Guttman will be investigated for arson.

Mr. Guttman, who real estate industry sources say is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, owned a loft building in DUMBO that burned down in 2004, prompting an investigation by the city. Mr. Guttman was never charged, but some suspected that the landlord had started a fire to allow him to convert the building into luxury units.

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.

That Would Be Suspicious

The Post reports that the Greenpoint Terminal Market blaze was, according to eyewitnesses, definitely arson:

The raging inferno that ripped through a historic Brooklyn warehouse complex yesterday was immediately labeled suspicious — and eyewitnesses told cops they saw a man pouring a flammable liquid on an adjacent rooftop amid the blaze.

The possible arson at the former Greenpoint Terminal Market was the second blaze in as many years to be labeled suspicious in a building owned by developer Joshua Guttman, authorities said.

Witness Sean Vegezzi told The Post that he and some pals ran to the former terminal with their cameras at around 10 a.m. after hearing about the blaze and scurried up to one of the buildings’ rooftops to take photos.

There, he said, they spotted a man pouring what looked like flammable motor oil into an elevator shaft.

“I said, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ And he started running down the catwalk,” said Vegezzi, 16.

The teen said that moments earlier, they had seen the same man stuffing sticks and brush into a drainage pipe along the side of the building.

“He didn’t light it, but it looked like he was going to until me and my friends approached him,” he said.

Vegezzi described the man as slim, middle-aged, with graying hair and wearing a beige T-shirt and khakis.

He said that as he and his pals were reporting what they saw to the cops, a man who identified himself as Guttman approached the group.

Vegezzi said the man kept repeating, “It’s not one of my guys, it’s not one of my guys,” before adding to cops, “You’d better catch this guy.”