He’s the neighbor and landlord no one wants to have, but that hasn’t stopped him from building his own killer real-estate empire.
Cross-dressing killer Robert Durst has more than doubled his money by selling two Brooklyn buildings for $21.15 million after buying them in 2011 for $8.65 million.
Durst, a disgraced member of the Durst Organization real-estate clan, was the only suspect in the 1982 disappearance of his first wife, Kathleen McCormack. McCormack, a 28-year-old medical student, disappeared after a meeting with him at their South Salem home.
Although Durst has been cut off from his famous billionaire real-estate family — last year he was arrested for trespassing on his brother Douglas’ property at 413 W. 43rd St., and 13 family members have taken out restraining orders against him — he still has access to his $43 million trust fund.
He tapped into those funds in November 2011 to buy 250 Pacific St. — a 25-unit, five-story residential building in Carroll Gardens — for $4.4 million. That month, he also bought 234 Union Ave., a 32-unit, six-floor, mixed-use building in Williamsburg, which had five residential stories and a tattoo shop.
Durst has also gotten his hands on some killer real estate in Harlem, where prices have skyrocketed. In 2011, Durst paid $2.4 million for two mixed-use buildings in East Harlem, 61-63 East 125th St. — as well as an 1888 town house at 218 Lenox Ave., for which he paid the full ask of $1.75 million in 2011. Durst also reportedly paid $3 million in September 2012 for a 41.96 percent interest in Havemeyer Portfolio LLC.
Durst was never charged with a crime in connection with McCormack’s disappearance. But years later, in 2001, he was found to have killed and then dismembered the body of his neighbor in Galveston, Texas, where he had moved — and lived as a woman under a fake ID, “Dorothy Ciner” — after the McCormack incident and another suspicious slaying, of Durst’s friend Susan Berman, in 2000.
Durst told a jury that he shot, killed and dismembered the neighbor in self-defense. The jury believed him and acquitted him of murder. He eventually served about three years in prison following a plea deal for which he admitted to evidence tampering and bond jumping. He was released from custody in 2004, though he ended up serving a bit more jail time after being found to have violated the terms of his parole.