The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (19 page)

Dillon drove back to the firehouse.

FIRE DEPARTMENT
ENGINE CO. 230
FEB. 25, 1996

Responded to a structural collapse at 49 Lorimer Street. This was the THIRD COLLAPSE in the past few weeks at this construction site. Fortunately, the workmen were able to escape without injury. The Owner Chaim Ostreicher was given three summons.

I AM REQUESTING A PERMANENT STOP WORK ORDER AND JOINT INSPECTION OF CONSTRUCTION SITE TO DETERMINE STRUCTURAL STABILITY OF EXISTING STRUCTURES.

See attached report dated 2/9/96 from BC O’Connor, fwded after the SECOND COLLAPSE. …

Respectfully submitted,
Edward J. Regan, Captain, E230.

Hertzberg & Sanchez
Consulting Engineers
295 Northern Boulevard, Great Neck, NY 11921–4701

Feb. 26, 1996
Department of Buildings, Borough of Brooklyn
Att: Mr. Darryl Hilton
Chief Inspector

RE: 29 Lorimer Street (#300437800)

21 Lorimer Street (#300437837)

41 Lorimer Street (#300437064)

Dear Mr. Hilton:

This will confirm that Hertzberg and Sanchez will be observing the construction in progress to assure that the walls will be properly braced by the installation of the floor joists
.

The bricklayers have been instructed to brace the walls before they close for the day
.

We require immediate approval to continue with the work as vandalism is rampant in the area
.

Very truly yours,
Louis Sanchez, P.E.
Vice-President

The engineers wrote as if they were in charge, which they were. Because the city Building Department, which sounds like a massive government bureau, is so small, with only eight hundred workers, including office maintenance workers, receptionists, and computer workers, there is no way to inspect the eight hundred thousand buildings in the city, particularly if City Hall cuts the funds to nothing. Buildings Department people rarely see any structures. The architects and professional engineers supposedly put up their reputations and license and certify each of their construction jobs. If anything falls down, their licenses flop with it. That never happens. What does happen every day is that the trust of a huge city is given to people with no official responsibility.

On March 14, 1996, Michael Caterina, a compliance officer from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—which is commonly known as OSHA—received an anonymous complaint about collapses of Ostreicher buildings on Lorimer Street. In the building world, an anonymous complaint is too often a phoned-in stiletto. Business competitors or personal enemies regard them as a marvelous way to hurt another. Caterina, then, was wary when he walked down Lorimer Street.

Here, standing in the street, a statue of a biblical character who suddenly was breathing, was Eugene Ostreicher. He was short, stocky, and suspicious. He was in black from hat to shoes. A great white
beard billowed at the cheeks. Prominent dark eyebrows stood out over his pale blue eyes. He had the brusque movements of someone used to being in charge on the street. He was impatient when Michael Caterina of OSHA spoke to him in the middle of Lorimer.

Caterina asked Ostreicher if there had ever been a collapse at the site.

“What collapse? What are you talking about? Do you see a collapse? Tell me. Do you see a collapse?” He waved at his site of attached three-story brick condominiums. “A collapse. Where did you get that from?”

“I heard that,” Caterina said.

“Where did you hear that from? Who told you that? You heard a fairy tale from somebody.”

“You’re stating that there have been no collapses at this site?” Caterina said in official tones.

“Absolutely. There never is a collapse here.”

Caterina went back to the OSHA offices on Varick Street in Manhattan and typed up a report with Ostreicher’s answer to an official question from a government agent.

If Ostreicher hadn’t been so quick and boisterous to hurl out his denials, Caterina might have helped him. OSHA has only civil penalties, and the staff would have been anxious to push Ostreicher away from dangerous practices. He liked loud lying better. And this became obvious, and started Caterina on investigating the building being done on the block. First, there were witnesses who had seen a collapse. Then there were the Fire Department records. Caterina then began to talk about this lying with James Vanderberg, a thirty-two-year-old agent for the United States Department of Labor. This agency could prosecute criminally. The file on Ostreicher now included the results of all this investigating, along with Fire Department reports of collapses on the scene and of Ostreicher’s involvement with the buildings. Neither memos nor Fire Department reports would go away. They were written and filed in the time of computers, but the
paper lasted and the reports retained their clarity and impact about the three collapses in February 1996.

J
OSEPH
T
RIVISONNO,
the buildings superintendent for Brooklyn, was in anguish trying to keep his job against stiff interference on the Lorimer Street buildings. Suddenly, Trivisonno was bewildered by the papers about a building being built at 26 Heyward Street, up the block from the brick condominiums being built by Eugene Ostreicher. The more he looked at the papers, the more his eyes narrowed. He was on crazy street. The plans for 26 Heyward were for a building that was 108 feet deep. That allowed room for the building and for a 35-foot-deep backyard as required by law. Trivisonno knew that the lot was only 100 feet deep. Somewhere the builder had to reach into the air and come up with eight feet of Brooklyn land. The owner of the land behind the offending building said he wanted to keep his eight feet and would fight all the way to the Supreme Court for it.

At the end of 1996, two businessmen who were of the Puppa sect of Hasidim bought 26 Heyward and wanted to change the footprint of the building, the floor-to-area ratio, to build nine condominiums in the five-story building to house faculty for a yeshiva. Under the zoning laws, if you put even as little as a rabbi’s office in a building, you were allowed to enlarge it. Excavation for number 26, on an empty lot next door to number 18, and the placement of struts between the old and new buildings (which meant the new building was holding up the old one) put cosmetic cracks in the old building. A complaint came in by phone, and Trivisonno had his inspectors stop the job until 18 Heyward was stabilized. No blueprints had been turned in. Another call brought a claim that there was no such religious anchor as a rabbi’s office in their five-story building, but there were condominiums that would go for $350,000 each.

The records of the United States Department of Education show that a great college was located in the tan two-story building a few doors up at 105 Heyward Street. Supposedly, it was a converted
yeshiva grammar school. It became the most ambitious temporal reach of the Skver Hasidic group, who came out of Russian mud to Williamsburg. They also occupy their own town of New Square, in near upstate Rockland County.

In a bakery on the corner of Heyward, the milk bottles have the labels of New Square Farms, the upstate milk farm of the Skver group. There are about three thousand living in New Square, eleven hundred of them registered voters. All are dedicated to study and the passing of knowledge and wisdom to those who follow. While this is a beautiful way of life, all this studying takes as many as thirteen hours a day, and this leaves no time for a job. Simultaneously, bills must be paid with more than prayer. One day, four of the men of the village sat down and developed a plan that would allow the village to study and still have an income. They announced a university-level school called Toldos Yakov Yosef. The students were not required to attend classes, but regular contact with an assigned mentor was supposedly required. The school was beautiful to run in that it required no start-up fees other than the few dollars for applications for government Pell grants for students. The Pell grants are American government at its most indescribably beautiful. Named after Claiborne Pell, the senator from Rhode Island, they are federal college tuition assistance grants—not loans—awarded to undergraduates and based on income. It gives a student without enough money some help to finish an education. The students receive grants of $1,500 or so, with a maximum of $3,300 a year. The program has some defenses against the stray schemer, but it never envisioned nor threw up breastworks against an organized criminal raid from a place like Heyward Street, Williamsburg. Soon, the new university had 1,544 checks for Pell grants coming in the mail to the school. This made the school more than somewhat profitable….

Because there was no school.

While 105 Heyward grammar school was the address, there were no students. There was no faculty. There were no books.

On streets whose waking hours were dedicated to trimming corners, Eugene Ostreicher looked up from his cinder blocks and bricks a block or so away, and found his shaky buildings produced loud, treacherous candy store money in comparison to 105 Heyward, where they had only to empty the mailbox each day to gain their fortune.

They collected the Pell grants for the first year of their no-show college. There wasn’t even a letter asking a question. They went on to the second year and it was better yet: they added a few students and received grants for them. After this, year after year it went on, and the school brought in $40 million of government money. All of New Square studied and prayed, and the bills were paid. Four people ran the school. They spent all of their time cashing checks and evading inspections.

A federal Department of Education group, including agent Brian Hickey, finally moved on Heyward Street, the home of the great university. This time, Hickey came in with a scheduled government inspection, from which there could be neither postponement nor subterfuge. Also, it was scheduled for five days, from the second through the sixth of June, 1992, with a full team of inspectors. The school could not stand the light of a heavy candle.

The inspectors began with the book lists of the college students. They discovered that books bought with Pell grants were high school books for the eleventh and twelfth grades of the yeshiva schools upstate in New Square.

The inspectors found that the chief administrators listed on the Pell grant records were: Chancellor Chaim Berger, the “brilliant thirty-two-year-old nationally known educator,” and the registrar, Kalmen Stern.

Hickey found the chancellor in a room on the first floor. He was in fact a ninety-one-year-old man.

“Hello,” Berger said.

“Are you the chancellor?” he was asked.

“Hello,” the old man said.

Next Hickey met the registrar, Kalmen Stern. Somehow he got Stern to write something for him. “Write down what you think of your job,” Hickey said. Stern wrote, “He has a good car.” Then he wrote what he thought of America: “A-M-R-I-C-A.”

The first floor of 105 Heyward had some old men reading religious textbooks. They had been gathered up from the neighborhood and thrown into a sudden university.

There was a great amount of noise from the second floor, where the student body, preschool and kindergarten kids ages three to six, was running about. They had been dispossessed from their usual first-floor playroom to make room for the university inspection.

The inspection team asked to speak to six college students. The school could produce only four. Registrar Stern presented a man who said he was a college student.

“When did you enroll?” Hickey asked.

“What do you mean by enroll?” the man asked.

A woman had a transcript that showed two years of philosophy courses.

An agent asked her, “Do you know what philosophy is?”

“No.”

A woman named Polyna was introduced as an English major. She needed a Russian interpreter to speak to one of the inspectors.

“Student number 21,” the federal report stated, “could not recall when he started at the school, but thought he had attended last year. Student 21 stated that he did not understand most of what went on because he doesn’t know the English language.

“Student No. 23 stated he did not have time to discuss education. Student 23 did not respond to questions regarding the subjects studied. He asked the reviewers to put the questions in writing and send them to him.”

When the reviewers were leaving, the educational genius, ninety-one-year-old Chaim Berger, looked up from a nap.

“Hello.”

Back in the Manhattan offices, the federal education team filed a simple report: “We are requesting emergency action and termination be taken against Toldos Yakov Yosef.”

The students and school were an illusion, but the money from government grants was more than somewhat real.

The New Square educators took down $40 million from the government over ten years. In recorded American crime—groups under five members, no weapons—this receives all-time honorable mention.

But then it went further. There were four people sent to prison over this. On the day they went in, Skvers were writing letters to get them out. The Skvers were ceaseless and went from one official to the other until, in the year 2000, they wound up with a president’s wife who thought everything she looked at, from trinket to mansion, was hers. Hillary Clinton was running for the Senate. All Hasidic groups voted against her, for good reason: She was a woman. However, at New Square, she willingly walked on the women’s side of the street, and did not shake hands with the men. When meeting the wise man, Rebbe Twersky, she sat with the desk between them. The town of New Square alone voted for her, by 1,200 to nothing. After the election, all she saw was black hats. She then made an appointment at the White House for Rebbe Twersky. The date was for a Friday. The rebbe and his people were unsure of where the White House was. One of them called an editor of a Jewish publication in Brooklyn and asked, “Can the rebbe go to Washington and come back in time for sundown?” At the White House, Twersky and Ms. Clinton, now a senator-elect, sat happily as Bill Clinton issued a presidential pardon for the New Square prisoners. That night in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a non-Jew, and therefore one who could answer a phone that day, rushed into a synagogue and told the son of one of the New Square prisoners, “They pardoned your father!”