Prosecutors say the rents at this Greenwich Village address were just torture — literally.
A building manager for a never-opened Third Avenue bar and lounge will be on the witness stand all afternoon in Manhattan Supreme Court, describing how his tenants tried to squeeze out of paying $250,000 in back rent.
Niroo Yavari, 48, says that for more than a year, his two tenants on various occasions kidnapped him and threatened him with fake guns, pliers, a screwdriver, and forcible sodomy by what he described to cops as a never-identified giant guy with an Eastern European accent.
Actually, there are two giant guys with Eastern European accents implicated in Yavari’s alleged ordeal, and only the second one is charged in the case. That’s Kakhaber Gogoladze, a Georgian native who weighs in at around 350 pounds and allegedly told Yavari he had better “play along.”
Accused renters from hell Vasileios Giamagas, 36, and Ekkehart Schwarz, 71, never opened their planned “Restaulounge-Bar De’Vill” at 68 West Third Street. They contend Yavari was a lousy manager who never made the promised renovations, and only came forward a year after his so-called kidnapping.
But lead prosecutor James Meadows told jurors in openings this morning that he’ll play tapes in which Yavari surreptitiously recorded his alleged tormenters as they kept the heat on him.
In one, Giamagas allegedly boasts of having once had his own brother killed. He also allegedly crows that before coming to America, “He fought as a mercenary in the Chechen War,” Meadows said.