It’s the chilling case of two infamous murders tied to two popular Manhattan watering holes – with the same two family dynasties inextricably linked to both.
In 1986, there was John Zaccaro Jr. – the son of famed first female vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro – tending bar at Dorrian’s Red Hand, an Upper East Side bar for well-heeled preppies.
One warm night in August, handsome bar regular Robert Chambers, would leave to have sex with 18-year-old Jennifer Levin – and later be charged in her gruesome strangulation death.
The bar is run by the family of Jack Dorrian, whose Irish dad “Poppy” had come to the city years before and begun his fledgling booze-fueled empire with speakeasies.
Nearly two decades later, another Dorrian-owned bar, The Falls in SoHo, is now being linked to a vicious slaying of a pretty young woman – in a building that belongs to Zaccaro’s family.
In an added twist, just as Zaccaro Jr. was toiling at the Dorrian establishment on the night Levin disappeared with Chambers, Jack Dorrian’s son, Michael, was working at The Falls in the wee hours that tragic grad student Imette St. Guillen vanished Feb. 25.
St. Guillen’s tortured body was later dumped, bound and gagged, in a remote area off the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. The building where The Falls is housed is only a tiny portion of the Zaccaros’ diverse real-estate empire.
A building at 200 Lafayette St., just down the block from The Falls and also owned by the Zaccaros, is infamous for once housing a mob-tied porn distributor – a scandal that helped bring down former 3-term Queens U.S. Rep. Ferraro’s vice-presidential run. Attempts to reach Michael Dorrian, Zaccaro Jr. and Ferraro were unsuccessful.
Additional reporting by Steve Dunleavy