One Year to the 10 Alarm Greenpoint Arson

Still-unsolved May 2006 arson that razed 6 blocks a sore point for nabe

A year after the city’s largest inferno in a decade engulfed 15 buildings along the Brooklyn waterfront, the historic site of the Greenpoint Terminal Market remains a charred wasteland and a sore spot for locals.

Nobody has been convicted in the arson fire that broke out on May 2, 2006, and eventually took 6 million gallons of water to extinguish. And nothing has been developed on the scorched earth where the warehouses once stood.

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“That fire destroyed one of the most beautiful industrial buildings on the waterfront. and that’s a permanent loss,” Councilman David Yassky, who represents the area, said yesterday. “There’s nothing good about it.”

Some 400 firefighters battled the 10-alarm fire, which burned for 11 hours on a sunny day near Noble St. in Greenpoint. When it was finally extinguished two days later, six square blocks were destroyed. Preservationists had wanted the site to be landmarked.

Polish immigrant Leszek Kuczera was initially suspected of setting the fire. He is believed to have triggered the blaze while burning the rubber off copper wire he planned to sell for liquor money.

But the day laborer never admitted guilt, and a judge ruled in December that he complete a six-month rehabilitation stint for alcohol problems.

Initially assigned to a program in upstate New York, Kuczera is finishing his term in Brooklyn, a spokesman for District Attorney Charles Hynes said.

The case is closed and no new suspects have emerged, a Fire Department spokeswoman told the Daily News.

“Leszek never admitted any guilt,” said Phil DePaolo, president of the New York Community Council and an activist in northern Brooklyn. “He pleaded no contest, so as far as I’m concerned this is still an open case. We have no closure in this community as to what really happened.”

Polish-American businessman Zbigniew Sarna, who told investigators that Kuczera was working for him on the day of the fire in Pond Eddy, N.Y., agreed the unsolved case leaves loose ends, but still insists that Kuczera was with him last May2.

“I’m happy he’s no longer a suspect,” Sarna said. “Whoever did it, he’s long gone, maybe in Hawaii.”

The 21-acre site – once home to the city’s fifth-largest employer, American Manufacturing Company – is owned by six companies controlled by developer Joshua Guttman.

The fire was the city’s biggest – not including the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks – since a 19-alarm fire at the St. George Hotel complex in Brooklyn Heights in 1995.

Guttman, who has been hit with more than 400 counts of failure to maintain privately owned waterfront property and has seen four other buildings he owns burn in suspicious fires, has insisted he was not involved in the arson.

Neither Guttman nor his lawyer, Israel Goldberg, returned calls for comment yesterday.