The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (21 page)

Once more, she had to grope through her grief to come up with money for a dead body.

Now here she is, five years after leaving medical school, standing in her room, a baby sleeping on her bed that is covered with a big brilliant red Mexican blanket. Still, energy and enthusiasm fill her eyes and brighten her face and she says that soon, yes, soon,
she will be able to leave this place and go back to medical school in Mexico. It is still the reason she does not try to find time to go to school for English. Why should she? She just told you that soon she would be going back.

Never once does she pause to realize that she has no money for any school, and that she is a cleaning woman when she should be a doctor, and that her husband is sweeping up in a beauty parlor when he should be an engineer. And that all around them the lives of the Mexicans are the same. Here in her house right now, Lucino is an accountant, and he was the cheapest of labor. Visiting for the basketball games was Alejandro, an upholsterer who works for perhaps a dollar over minimum wage. Simultaneously you’d look at each week’s pay with Mexican peasant eyes—it was rich man’s money—and then add their weekly bills in Brooklyn and realize they live at the bottom.

At those moments when Julisa suddenly saw the walls of her room for what they were, a life sentence, she said to herself right away, soon I will go back to school. She says that through each year.

Does she still love the husband she met at the fair?

“For my children I love him.”

And Eduardo worked at bricklaying, which he knew, for the lowest money in all of construction. He didn’t have the slightest idea that a white in New York gets $23 an hour for the same work. How could he know such a thing? Nobody could speak English, and the only people they knew had jobs as bad or worse. Sometimes Julisa felt sad for Eduardo when he walked past her as if afraid to talk.

When Eduardo went out at other times, he hung out in front of the Mexican store on Neptune Avenue with a kid named El Viejo, which means “the old man.” He was twenty. They went to the boardwalk at Coney Island and played video games and talked with others who were their age. Frequently, they now rode the el up to Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, where one night in a Mexican restaurant the waitress looked at Eduardo and when he put his chin down, she
put her hand under it and lifted it. “I like you the best,” she told him. His chin went right back down.

When they left the place, everybody was laughing at Eduardo because of his shyness. It was one thing for the older guys back in the room to make fun of him, but these were kids his own age. He told them that he would show them all. He would go back to the restaurant and take the waitress out of there for all to see how much she loved him. A week later, he walked ahead of the others into the restaurant; he didn’t know exactly what he was going to do, but for sure they were not going to laugh at him anymore because he was going to talk to that waitress and make her like him and go out with him. Nobody would laugh. He walked in and found another waitress working. He asked for the one he wanted. “She quit,” the owner said.

O
N
M
ARCH
11, 1999, an application for a $2 million general liability insurance policy on Ostreicher property under the name of Faye Industries Corp., 527 Bedford Avenue, was forwarded by a broker to Greg Portnoy, a broker in the Westchester suburb of White Plains who places accounts with the First Financial Insurance Company, which has an Illinois license but conducts business all over, much of it in the state of North Carolina.

The application called for the policy to be in effect on March 17, 1999. It was a simple three-page questionnaire of yes-or-no answers in boxes. There were two questions about background, the first of which appears to be there only to please the religious beliefs of Carolina:

7. Any past losses or claims relating to sexual abuse or molestation allegations, discrimination or negligent hiring?

Let no hands commit a sin of the flesh in a lumberyard. (The discrimination and hiring can be considered a throw-in.)

Answer: no.

The next question was at the center of the insurance business:

8. During the past ten years has any applicant been convicted of any degree of the crime of arson? The question must be answered by any applicant. Failure to disclose the substance of an arson conviction is a misdemeanor punishable by a sentence of up to one year of imprisonment.

Answer: no.

There is not even a thought of punishment, save loss of this particular policy, for some grubby child molester. Strike one match without admitting it and, according to the piece of paper, leg irons can be clamped on.

As collateral, Faye Industries listed ten vacant lots and two buildings. The lots happened to have buildings on them. Industrial Enterprises listed five vacant lots and one building. Ramon, Inc., listed four empty lots and a building. Both Ostreichers said they had three empty lots. A cousin, Samuel Newman, was down for three vacant lots. Middleton Street, where everybody worked, had seven addresses that were listed as vacant lots. This could disorient an experienced postman. Later, a lawyer for First Financial thought that the number of addresses for Middleton Street were there to dizzify those looking at the application.

Then on the third page of the application there were three questions, short and easily answered.

12. Any structural alterations contemplated?

Answer: no.

13. Any demolition exposure contemplated?

Answer: no.

14. Has applicant been active in or is currently active in joint ventures?

Answer: no.

One possible explanation for all of Ostreicher’s answers was that it was cheaper to insure an empty lot than a building full of
workers. Anyway, who was going to check? If there was no catastrophe, the policy would sleep in a file. Who would be dumb enough to list all the work being done and pay those higher premiums?

On the last blank on the application, Ostreicher came up with his personal safety net:

APPLICANT’S SIGNATURE:
_______________

The space was blank.

Two brokers and an insurance company collected premiums. Therefore, the policy was good. What does it matter if the guy forgot to sign his name? Just an oversight. We’ll get it when we get it.

They could not envision Ostreicher sitting at a legal proceeding and saying, in substance, “It is not my policy. I never signed it. This policy is full of mistakes made by some clerk in the insurance company. I have never seen such an application full of errors. You can see I never signed it. Where is my signature?”

8/10/99 BF 25 FIRE OPERATION REPORT

58 Middleton Street. On arrival found cause for alarm to be a partial collapse of a building under construction with workers trapped. Engine 269 stretched hand lines, stood fast assisted with first aid and victim transport. Three non-life-threatening injuries to workers, all taken to Bellevue. A two story building 20 feet by 40 feet. A phone alarm at 11:17 units here four minutes later 11:21 all hands at 11:23 three engines and two trucks and special units rescue two squad one. Under control 12:42. Three civilian victims. Chief Corcoran from 11th division pd 90. Buildings Mr. Maniscalco on site. Supervisor Leon Schwimmer Industrial, 527 Bedford. Block Foreman Colin Torney.

Since the accident had happened at the far end of the construction site, none of the Mexicans knew about it. Only that something had happened.

The three workers battered in the collapse of a floor went out
through the building’s rear and were taken over the bridge to Bellevue Hospital on First Avenue in Manhattan, which is the Yankee Stadium of emergency rooms. Their names on police aided cards were Herb Lubin, Brian Dubois, and Robert Jackson. All the Mexican workers were at the other end of the construction site. They let these three work together because they spoke no Spanish. The injuries were minor: a sprain, a bruise. They had no medical coverage from the job. They walked out of Bellevue and went into the perpetual night of itinerant workers.

Only Eduardo and his brother José knew about this collapse. A few days later, the boss, Leo Schwimmer, sent them up to the building. (Leon Schwimmer, known as Leo, is the father-in-law of Faye Schwimmer, who is the daughter of Eugene Ostreicher. Faye and her husband, Ed, who live in Ostreicher’s house at 527 Bedford, are part owners of the sites on Lorimer and Middleton Streets. Including the founding father, Eugene, there are eight Ostreicher relatives on the building company’s payroll.) José says now, “The building wasn’t level. It didn’t have a lot of beams. We wanted to know who was working there but we couldn’t ask or we’d be fired.”

The cause of the collapse was cinder blocks heaved onto the third level before cement poured on the C-joists as support had hardened. The cinder blocks were put there because the man in charge of the job, Eugene Ostreicher, had ordered them to be.

The day after the accident, Blaich was on the block when Ostreicher drove up.

“The fools!” Ostreicher said of the people working for the lowest money. “I told them not to put anything heavy on the floor. They’re fools!”

Someone at the Building Department put in papers for violations and went home. His job was done, and he knew the paper would be in a file or on a computer forever because anything to do with Ostreicher, or any other Hasidic builder, was fixed by City Hall in advance.

Blaich, who admits to having had more faith, was at least surprised when the job, which had been closed for three days, suddenly reopened with Ostreicher and his engineers, Hertzberg and Sanchez, standing with one foot on the Mexican workers as usual. The Buildings Department sent no inspectors to see if they were making anything any safer. The Buildings Department issued a statement saying that, under the law, they do not have to inspect such a building until it is completed.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

H
is thirty-second birthday was on the twelfth of September, 1999, a Sunday, which is why Nelson Negrón is sure of most of the things that happened. The day before, Saturday, he had been out on the curb in front of the bodega on Bedford, and at eight o’clock a van pulled up and the guy called out for three people who wanted to work. Nelson and his friend Miguel got in the van, which took them to a factory in Long Island City where they spent the day moving sewing machines. To push a machine was a two-man job. Even so, by the middle of the afternoon their arms were made of lead. The guy gave Nelson and Miguel $60 and drove them back to the bodega. Nelson walked home. His roommate, Tony, had rice and beans ready. After that, Nelson watched television and fell asleep.

“My birthday,” he said when he woke up at 7
A.M
.

“Happy birthday,” Tony said. “What are you going to do?”

“To work. I have no choice.”

He got dressed and walked to the bodega, the DR, on Bedford Avenue. He had a pastrami sandwich and coffee and stood outside
on Bedford, eating and hoping for the great job, a birthday present, a trailer truck from the south coming up and paying a hundred for the day to unload it. Instead, Leo Schwimmer pulled up in a green van and asked Negrón if he wanted to make $50. Put the $50 together with the $60 from the day before and I got $110 to begin the week, Nelson told himself. Beauty! If I ever put together five days, including the weekend, on top of this, then I got the best week I ever had working.

Negrón enthusiastically went over to the van, which he remembers had a sliding door. Leo knew from past jobs that Negrón could speak the language and was a good strong worker. Nelson had worked on beams, support beams, and taping for Leo. When Leo got to the Middleton Street site, a full crew was working. That it was Sunday meant nothing to Leo, and was not vital to the Mexicans, who believed that work is prayer. Leo told Nelson to get fifty-pound sacks of cement up to the third level of the new buildings. The building fronts were wide open. Framing would come later. They were working on a series of four-story brick houses that started at the corner bodega and ran up the street, taking in numbers 40–50 on Middleton Street. Across from the houses was a dreary brick grammar school.

Nelson got a sack on his shoulder and stepped up to the bottom level of the scaffold. That was one. Now he went up another level. Heaving and sweating already, up the scaffold he went, looking up at Eduardo’s face and a roof held up by false hope.

“Too heavy!” Eduardo said. By this time, September 1999, he had gone from the curb at Bedford to construction sites all over Brooklyn, one job leading to another. Finally he was part of the crew on this group of buildings being built by Ostreicher. This was the job he had first heard about in Mexico.

“Nothing is too heavy for me,” Negrón remembers saying. He weighs 220 and can handle weight.

He threw the sack onto the floor. The wood went up and down. Not a lot, but just enough to give him the idea that the floor where they were working was no good.

Negrón stayed on the scaffold and looked in. There were little cracks in the few beams he could see holding up this top floor. There were only three beams across.

Seeing that Negrón, too, had noticed the floor support, Eduardo asked, “Where’s the rest of the beams?”

When Negrón complained, Eduardo’s friend, Lucino, knew Negrón was saying the truth, but he didn’t know what to do about it.

“We could get hurt,” Negrón remembers Eduardo saying.

“You could get more than that,” Negrón said.

He remembers that Alejandro then came over and said, “Could we get killed?”

“That’s right,” Negrón said.

“What are we supposed to do?” Alejandro said.

“I don’t know,” Negrón said.

“If we say it, the boss fires us,” Alejandro said.

“This is how he wants it,” Negrón said.

“It’s wrong, but he told me to do it this way,” Eduardo said.

“Around here,” Negrón said, “around Bedford, the guy with the money runs your life.”