The scion of a Big Apple bar-owning family made infamous in the notorious 1986 “preppy murder” case admitted yesterday he flat-out lied to cops probing the 2006 murder of Imette St. Guillen after she was seen at his bar.
“I could just imagine the repercussions it would set off — lawsuits, police, bad press,” Danny Dorrian testified at the murder trial of bouncer Darryl Littlejohn. “If I pretended it didn’t happen, maybe it wouldn’t be true. I didn’t believe it was true.”
Dorrian was worried about a repeat of the 1986 scandal in which Robert Chambers hooked up with teenager Jennifer Levin at the Dorrian family’s infamous Upper East Side bar, Dorrian’s Red Hand, before killing her later that night in Central Park.
Dorrian admitted he didn’t tell cops he ordered Littlejohn, 44, to escort Imette St. Guillen out of The Falls bar in SoHo at closing time. He said he didn’t want to relive the scrutiny the family experienced after Levin’s murder. Dorrian, 36, initially told cops he didn’t remember seeing St. Guillen at The Falls on the night of her February 2006 murder.
“Frankly, I didn’t want to get involved,” he added.
Looking puffy-faced and ill-at-ease on the stand, Dorrian testified that he only decided to come clean a week later, after cops pored over the bar seeking evidence for 12 hours. Dorrian called his father and “asked how to handle it.”
“It looks like there’s a situation down at The Falls, and it looks pretty serious. A young lady was murdered, and I think the police should look at my doormen because they would be the last people to see her alive,” he told his father, Jack Dorrian.
But even after his father and his brother-in-law Anthony Carbinetti — who was chief of staff under Mayor Rudy Guiliani — drove him to police headquarters to meet with detectives, Danny Dorrian said, he still wasn’t entirely forthcoming.
“I told them certain things and I left certain things out. I didn’t want to get any more involved,” he said.
St. Guillen’s mother, Maureen, and sister, Alejandra, eyed Dorrian as he heartlessly told how he tried to wriggle out of any responsibility for the 24-year-old student’s death.
Dorrian said he knew very little about Littlejohn’s background when he hired him from a man he knew only as “Tony” and paid him $100 per shift.
“I thought he was in law enforcement. My understanding was that him and [another bouncer] would go after people who had subpoenas against them. They’d go out and hunt down people in trouble with the law,” he said.
St. Guillen ended up at the bar that night after leaving friends following a night of drinking. Bartender Rebecca Scherle said St. Guillen had wandered into The Falls at about 3:45 a.m., minutes before closing time, and ordered two rum and Diet Cokes.
The medical examiner testified that St. Guillen’s blood alcohol level was 0.17 — more than double the legal driving limit.
On the witness stand, Dorrian only reluctantly de tailed what happened in the early morning hours of Feb. 25, 2006, under laborious questioning from prosecutor Ken Taub.
“There was a young lady sitting by the bar . . . who didn’t want to leave,” he recalled. “I told her it was time to leave.”
“She said, ‘I’ll leave when I finish my drink.’ And I said, ‘Either finish it or I’m going to pour it out,’ so she finished,” he said.
He said he then headed down to the basement and when he returned, he told Littlejohn to take the sable-eyed beauty out.
“She was just getting up to leave. I instructed Littlejohn to escort her out,” he said.
Fellow bouncer Tim Catella walked out right behind Littlejohn and St. Guillen — who Catella said was slurring her words and had been slumped over the bar. Catella walked in a different direction and didn’t see what happened next. It was the last time St. Guillen was seen alive.
Her body was found the following day bound and gagged with a sock and wrapped up in a blanket dumped in a remote, weed-strewn field in an industrial section of Brooklyn. She had been raped and died from asphyxiation as the result of packing tape wrapped around her face.
Dorrian said he knew something had gone wrong only the next day when “a girl came in with a picture asking if we’d seen her.”
He told the girl he didn’t recognize her.
But despite his intransigence, The Falls and the family name — especially with its connection to the Chambers case — ended up splashed all over the news.
Immediately, business was “decimated,” the bar’s liquor license revoked, and the place shuttered.
Dorrian says he is now unemployed and lives off his father’s wealth.