A cape-wearing Soho art dealer described as “the real Auntie Mame’’ was fatally strangled in 2024 by a sick hobo — who was only nailed Sunday when he shoplifted from a TJ Maxx, cops and sources said Monday.
Suspected homeless killer Larry Powlis — a 60-year-old convicted sex offender who just served 30 years in Texas for a violent rape — was done in when he tried to lift $25 in art supplies around 1:10 p.m. from the retail store near West 57th Street in Midtown, cops and law-enforcement sources said.
Powlis — who tried to throw off Sunday’s cops by giving the fake name Larry Davis, only to be foiled when they ran his fingerprints through the system — was charged Monday with Egizio Panetti’s murder, police and sources said.
Police have arrested a suspect in connection to the killing of Egizio Panetti (pictured) in 2024. NBC
Larry Powlis appears in court on Nov. 2, 2026. Steven Hirsch for NY Post
Powlis had met Panetti, an eccentric legally blind 67-year-old with cancer, on the street while the doomed beloved art dealer and decorator was out to dinner with a friend in Greenwich Village in September 2024, authorities said.
The suspect and victim eventually went to a nearby ATM before Panetti invited the vagrant back to his posh pad on Spring Street near West Broadway at around 2 a.m. — where Powlis fatally choked him, prosecutors and sources said.
Powlis was then caught on surveillance video six hours later leaving Panetti’s apartment with a duffle bag full of the victim’s stuff, said Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Anthony Giliberti at the suspect’s arraignment Monday.
Prosecutors said Powlis’s DNA was on Panetti’s body.
A friend found the victim “face down on his bed and half naked with a pillow over his head” when he didn’t return an earlier phone call, Giliberti told Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Elizabeth Shamahs.
Powlis allegedly admitted to cops that he stole items from Panetti’s home — but he didn’t admit to the murder, prosecutors said.
Larry Powlis was arrested after he got busted for shoplifting from a Midtown TJ Maxx on Sunday. NY State Sex Offender Registry
Pals mourned Panetti as “the real Auntie Mame,” paying homage to Rosalind Russell’s legendary flamboyant title character in the 1958 classic “Auntie Mame.”
They described him as fabulous cape-loving “Venetian count” who was “simply one of a kind.”
Investigators identified Powlis as a suspect early on but were waiting on an official ruling on cause of death from the city Medical Examiner’s Office and crucial DNA evidence, sources said.
They finally got enough to formally name him a suspect Sept. 3, allowing the eagle-eyed cops Sunday to nail him when they spotted the designation in the NYPD computer system, sources said.
Prosecutors said the murder happened “on the heels” of Powlis serving out a 30-year rape conviction in Texas.
He gave police a false name after the TJ Maxx theft because he wanted to “move on from” his checkered past, prosecutors said.
“The reason I gave a false name is because I am trying to move on from my past, and I missed my [parole] check-in,” Powlis told cops, according to prosecutors.
He was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court on murder, petit-larceny and false-impersonation charges and ordered held without bail.
Powlis’s lawyer, Margaret Darocha of the New York County Defenders, reserved a bail application for a later date.
Powlis faces up to life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder in the case.
He’s due back in court Nov. 6.
— Additional reporting by Amanda Woods