City Sanitation bigs played a dirty trick on an elderly Brooklyn insurance salesman — slapping him with 643 in bogus summonses totaling more than $48,000 in fines, The Post has learned.
Levy Zelishovsky, 72, received the avalanche of summonses at his Midwood office April 5 for supposedly illegally posting fliers advertising a moving company on public lampposts throughout Brooklyn. Each summons carries a $75 fine.
The problem, Zelishovsky said, is that he is not and never has been in the moving business.
“All my life, I’m in the insurance business. I’m a senior citizen, and I can hardly move myself,” he said.
Zelishovsky said he frantically called the phone number on the fliers — which were found on lampposts in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Canarsie and Flatbush — and spoke to a representative of the now-defunct Low Cost Relocation Moving Co. of Bay Ridge. The rep told him they hadn’t posted the papers, either, he said.
Robert Samuel of “Low Cost” told The Post that the company went belly-up in December, three months before the summonses were issued.
“I never heard of [Zelishovsky]. I feel bad for him, of course,” he said.
It turns out that the mix-up occurred because the Department of Sanitation had apparently only done a reverse check on the phone number on the fliers, which led them to Zelishovsky.
The DOS said it has since learned that the phone number is Zelishovsky’s old number, which he hasn’t used since 2006.
Zelishovsky claims he’s had the same phone number for 25 years and that he never owned the phone number on the flier.
He must still appear before a judge at the Environmental Control Board hearing April 29 to officially sort things out, although the DOS says it plans to write to the judge recommending that the summonses be voided.
Chaim Deutsch, a special assistant to city Councilman Michael Nelson, whose office got involved on Zelishovsky’s behalf, called the incident “a bureaucratic nightmare of mistaken identity.