Two robbers posing as pot buyers shot the son of a top NYU official and a druggie ex-con in a marijuana-laden Greenwich Village apartment last night, authorities said.
Now the victims — Alex Bongard and Lucas Hinde — face likely pot-dealing charges after police found marijuana in Bongard’s $2,500-per-month Bleecker Street pad following the attack, sources said.
Bongard, 24, is the son of Debra LaMorte, New York University’s senior vp for development and alumni affairs, and had previously taken continuing education classes at NYU.
Bongard, the ex-con Hinde, 31, and a woman named Alissa Adler, 27, were in the third-floor apartment at 185 Bleecker around 11:30 p.m. last night, when two men arrived wearing black masks, cops said.
One of the masked men shot both Bongard and Hinde once in the chest apiece, before he and his accomplice fled with an undisclosed amount of cash and Adler’s pocketbook, police said.
“There was definitely a fight over head for two minutes . . . I heard a girl scream,” said Jackie, an artist who lives below Bongard’s apartment. “They were fighting all through the apartment. Rolling around as if they were fighting for a gun.”
“There were multiple gunshots.
Bongard and Hinde were both taken to Bellevue Hospital, where they were listed in stable condition today, and where LaMorte was at Bongard’s bedside. The assailants remain at-large.
The super in Bongard’s building, Eddie Dominguez, said Hinde had been living for the past two weeks in the apartment, which reeked of marijuana and was a pigsty.
“There’s a lot of traffic going in and out all day,” said Dominiguez. “Common sense would tell you . . . that maybe he was selling.”
Bongard’s father is Florida hotel exec Burton Bongard, 69, who previously served more than six years in Ohio and federal prisons for financial crimes related to a collapsed Ohio savings-and-loan.
Hinde in 2008 began serving a two-and-a-half years prison sentence in Arizona for a marijuana-related conviction, records state.
Less than a month after being paroled in November 2009, he was busted in Utah in a car containing four pounds of pot after leading cops on a 130mph chase. Hinde was sent back to Arizona to complete his original sentence, and was released last June.
With Larry Celona and Vinita Singla