A Manhattan parking-garage exec killed himself just days after he and “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno were sued for allegedly swindling an elderly Macy’s heir out of two pricey cars, The Post has learned.
Dennis Ricca, 55, shot himself in the head with his registered 9 mm pistol last Friday while sitting in a pickup truck outside his Greenwood Lake retreat in upstate Orange County, a law-enforcement source said.
The tragedy came a day after The Post and other media reported the Oct. 14 suit by the family of late Macy’s heir John Straus.
“That did it to him,” a mourner said yesterday at Ricca’s wake, referring to the suit and the publicity it generated.
The Manhattan Supreme Court filing claims that Ricca, top execs at Garage Management Corp. and their affiliates – along with Leno – “knowingly participated in certain unlawful purported auctions and sales of” Straus’ two cars.
Leno ended up with one of the rare vehicles – an ultra-rare 1931 Duesenberg Model J valued at $1.2 million.
The other, a 1930 Rolls-Royce Phantom convertible valued at $500,000, somehow ended up in Ricca’s possession.
Bruce Bronster, a lawyer for both the garage companies and Leno, said, “We hope the press will respect his family and let them grieve in peace.”
Richard Chapman, a Garage Management Corp. officer, yesterday told a reporter, “I’m not going to say anything to you.”
A man at the Ho-Ho-Kus, NJ, home of another GMC honcho named in the suit, Gordon Hamm, slammed a door in the face of a reporter last night.
Ricca was GMC’s director of maintenance. His neighbors near the town of Warwick said Ricca – who was married with at least three daughters and a son – appeared depressed in recent months. “He seemed stressed out from work,” said Bob Hadley, a neighbor.
On Friday morning, Ricca drove alone to the country home where he chatted with another neighbor, said a law-enforcement source.
That neighbor later told Hadley he had asked Ricca about the suit. The garage exec replied, “I could care less.”
“[Ricca] said he did everything on the up and up and that he even had the same lawyer as Jay Leno, so he wasn’t worried,” Hadley recalled.
But the other neighbor also told Hadley he could see there was something wrong with Ricca as he walked around his property and tinkered, Hadley said.
“We knew something was wrong. We should have done something,” Hadley quoted the neighbor as saying.
In the early afternoon, Ricca lit a fire in his fireplace, then went outside and climbed into the front seat of his pickup truck, the other neighbor later told Hadley.
Hadley woke from a nap at around 1 p.m. “I looked out my window, and saw [Ricca] in his car. I didn’t think anything of it. I figured maybe his cellphone died or something,” Hadley said.
About 1:30 p.m., another neighbor heard a gunshot coming from Ricca’s property. The neighbor discovered Ricca’s body slumped in his car, with a pistol near him.
No suicide note was found, sources said.
Ricca also had a vacation home in Florida in addition to his primary residence in Franklin Square, LI.
Ricca’s relatives and friends flocked to the Stutzman & Sons Funeral Home in New Hyde Park, LI, on Tuesday and yesterday for his closed-casket wake.
Straus for decades had kept his Duesenberg and Rolls at Windsor Garage. In 2005, the garage notified Straus that his account was massively in arrears and that the cars would be auctioned off if he didn’t pay the more than $20,000 he owed.
Straus – who was in his 80s and suffering from dementia – sent a check. But the garage allegedly did a bait-and-switch and applied the payments to arrears he owed for two far less valuable cars he was keeping in another facility owned by GMC.
The garage then purportedly held sham “public” auctions for the cars, with its corporate alter ego getting the Duesenberg for a $0 bid and the Rolls for an unknown amount, the suit says.
In December 2005, the company sold the Duesenberg to Leno – who’d been lusting after it for years – for $180,000.
A lawyer for Leno and the garage said the garage was entitled to sell the cars because Straus had become “extremely delinquent in the payment of storage fees.”
Additional reporting by C.J. Sullivan, Brigitte Williams, Erin Calabrese, Aliyah Shahid and Joe Mollica