By Noah Powelson<\/p>\n
The former head of the city\u2019s Department of Buildings said in court last week that Eric Ulrich asked her to help reopen a Brooklyn bakery connected to two men who have since admitted to bribing Ulrich in exchange for favors.<\/p>\n
The second week of Ulrich\u2019s trial concluded on Friday with the testimony of Melanie La Rocca, who served as the city\u2019s commissioner of the Department of Buildings before Ulrich took over the agency in 2022.<\/p>\n
The crux of her testimony on Friday focused on wiretapped phone calls between her and Ulrich on March 10, 2022, when Ulrich, a former city councilmember from Queens, asked for her help reopening the Fortunato Brothers Bakery in Brooklyn after a fire had forced it to close.<\/p>\n
Ulrich\u2019s involvement in the bakery\u2019s rapid reopening is central to the district attorney\u2019s case; it\u2019s one of the alleged instances in which brothers Joseph and Anthony Livreri said they bribed the former city councilmember in exchange for his help.<\/p>\n
In September, the Livreri brothers admitted in court that they had made regular payments to Ulrich for years in exchange for favors related to their business interests. One of those payments was $4,000 to lift a vacate order placed on Fortunato Brothers Bakery after a fire broke out in a residential unit within the building.<\/p>\n
In a recording played in New York County Criminal Court on Friday, Ulrich told La Rocca in an early morning phone call on March 10, 2022, that he needed her help with a \u201ctime sensitive\u201d issue. Recordings and emails shown in court on Friday were made when La Rocca was still DOB commissioner and Ulrich had been serving as special adviser to Mayor Eric Adams.<\/p>\n
In the recording, Ulrich told La Rocca that the bakery was due for an inspection that day and the owners wanted to get their full vacate order reduced to a partial one so it could reopen. Ulrich also told La Rocca he wanted to make sure the \u201cright inspector\u201d from the DOB was sent, and to notify Kazimir Vilenchik, then Brooklyn borough commissioner, about the situation.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to make sure that [Vilenchik] or whoever sends the right inspector, because they want to just clean out the bakery and be able to file to permanently reopen,\u201d Ulrich said in a recorded phone call.<\/p>\n
Ulrich also said that he got word of the building\u2019s inspection from \u201cBiagio and the owner and his friend.\u201d Biagio Fortunato is one of the owners of the bakery.<\/p>\n
Following the call, La Rocca notified DOB staff members to look at the bakery\u2019s inspection. As a result, the inspection was carried out and the order to vacate was lifted that same day.<\/p>\n
Under normal procedures, La Rocca said, inspections are usually only ordered after an individual requests one from the city. In the case of the bakery, the owners should have made a request through Brooklyn construction enforcement.<\/p>\n
But La Rocca said the standard procedure was not followed, and she only got involved because Ulrich directly contacted her as a member of the mayor\u2019s office. <\/p>\n
\u201cEric called and I reached out to staff,\u201d La Rocca said from the stand. \u201cThe individual did not in fact contact Brooklyn construction enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n
She also said she had never met the Livreri brothers or any of the men currently accused of bribing Ulrich.<\/p>\n
Phone calls played in court also showed that multiple members of the Adams administration took an active interest in the bakery reopening. <\/p>\n
In one call, Ulrich said that Ingrid Lewis-Martin had also been asking about the bakery. Lewis-Martin was a longtime ally and adviser to Adams. She was also indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney\u2019s office for allegedly taking more than $100,000 in bribes while she worked in city government.<\/p>\n
La Rocca said she found it \u201cpuzzling\u201d that Martin was interested in the bakery. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Noah Powelson The former head of the city\u2019s Department of Buildings said in court last week that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":391449,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-391448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/391449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}