The murdered Brooklyn cafe owner whose corpse was dumped in rural Pennsylvania and then torched beyond recognition was peddling heavy amounts of marijuana before he was killed, his pals told law-enforcement officials.
Joshua Rubin, the owner of the struggling Whisk Bakery Cafe in Ditmas Park, had been pressing his friends to buy large weights of weed, sources said.
Rubin’s friends told investigators that he’d get them as much as a pound of pot at time, according to the sources.
Police are also investigating whether Rubin, 30, a novice entrepreneur, may have gotten himself mixed up with loan sharks.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate to speculate. Obviously, it’s one of the areas we looked at,” said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.
Rubin, who was at least $14,000 in debt at the time of his Halloween disappearance, is presumed to have been killed out of state, and Pennsylvania authorities are in charge of the investigation.
“We have some leads on people with whom he had contact in the last days of his life. They are certainly not suspects,” said Lehigh County District Attorney James Martin.
“He may have said something about what he was up to. We want to see what they can tell us.”
Rubin, who also suffered from bipolar disorder, was last seen entering a vehicle near his Brooklyn apartment.
He had ordered bagels for the day, but then never showed up at his Newkirk Avenue cafe.
A burned body was found near Allentown, Pa., the next day, but the body wasn’t identified as Rubin’s until a tipster called the cops and DNA confirmed it was his, sources said.
“We are devastated about the loss of our beloved son and brother, Joshua Rubin,” his family said in an e-mailed statement published on the Ditmas Park Blog.
“He was a kind, caring and gentle young man. He was the type of person that people gravitated to because of his funny personality and truly caring nature,” said the statement from his mother Sandra, brother Jonathan and sister Hilaire.
Additional reporting by Aaron Feis and Lorena Mongelli