City hires firm with mob ties to demolish Prospect Plaza Houses in Crown Heights
A demolition firm with mob ties and a deadly safety record has been selected to finally tear down an abandoned public housing development that’s remained vacant for more than a decade, the Daily News has learned.
Some 1,500 tenants of the Prospect Plaza Houses in Crown Heights were relocated starting in 2001 with the promise that they’d be back in by 2005 once everything was renovated.
A decade later, the renovation plans have been abandoned and the city has decided on demolition instead, hiring a company called Breeze National to tear down the four boarded-up, rotting buildings that remain.
The hiring of Breeze, however, has its own set of issues.
Until recently, the company was owned by Toby Romano Sr., an alleged organized crime associate who was convicted 1988 of bribing a health inspector during an asbestos removal job.
In 2006 the city’s Business Integrity Commission denied a Breeze affiliate, Breeze Carting, a license to haul trash in the city, citing Romano’s record and charging that the company made what it termed “material misrepresentations” — aka “lies” — in its application. By 2009 the city began requiring that Breeze hire a special anti-corruption monitor to oversee its work — but even that didn’t necessarily fix the problem.
That year while Breeze was tearing down the old Shea Stadium, the monitor in place discovered that one of Breeze’s employees was Herb Pate, a “known associate of the Luchese crime family.” Breeze got rid of Pate and insisted that since then, Romano Sr., the company president, “no longer has an ownership interest.”
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