A Congolese man who used to live with a trio of former Disney World waiters in a Brooklyn apartment was charged yesterday with beating one of them to death more than eight years ago.
Marien Theophile Mbossa Kargu, 40, was hauled in from France, where he’d been living since September 2001. In that month, he allegedly killed Antonio Guzzardi, 34, inside an apartment on 19th Street in Sunset Park that the two were sharing with their girlfriends.
Sources said Kargu visited Disney World in 2001 to see his girlfriend, Melle Leila Grison, who was working as a waitress in the France section of Epcot Center’s World Showcase.
There, he met Guzzardi, a native of Catania, Sicily, who worked in the Italy pavilion, and Guzzardi’s girlfriend, Eleonore Jacopin, who worked with Grison.
The quartet relocated to Brooklyn soon afterward – and things turned sour between Guzzardi and Kargu.
Sources said Kargu beat Guzzardi to death, sitting on his chest at one point. He was enraged because he believed Guzzardi was fooling around with Grison and offering her drugs, the sources said.
Jacopin was out of town when the killing occurred – sometime in the early days of September – and returned home to find the other three gone. She became suspicious when Kargu and Grison, back in France, stopped answering her calls.
Cops in Williamsburg found Guzzardi’s badly decomposed corpse in a Dumpster on Sept. 6. It took until the following January to identify the body, partly due to its condition but also because of the massive amount of 9/11-related work that was to hit the city medical examiner’s office.
In 2007, French cops pulled in Kargu and Grison, then living in the Paris suburb of Creteil, and the NYPD finally got diplomatic clearance to talk to them. Kargu at first claimed to know nothing of Guzzardi’s disappearance, but soon cracked. He allegedly admitted to killing the Italian, but claimed the victim had started the fight.
“He blamed me for taking away Leila and Eleonore from him,” said Kargu, in a statement in French translated by police. “The tension went up and Angelo made a move with a book bag . . . We fought body to body, and I continued to take over and punched him.”
Suddenly, he claimed in the statement, Guzzardi stopped breathing. “His lifestyle, way of work and the cocaine weakened the state of his health, and I felt that he succumbed to a heart attack,” Kargu allegedly told cops.