Anthony Franzese
Anthony Franzese is walking around — somewhere — with what might be a multimillion-dollar hole in his head.
But if he doesn’t turn up soon, he’ll never see a penny.
“I think he’s a little bit out of it, to tell you the truth,” said lawyer Stuart Shaw, who is repping the missing Franzese in a bizarre personal-injury lawsuit.
On Sept. 28, 2010, Franzese was standing outside his apartment building on Second Avenue in the East Village when an air conditioner fell from a sixth- story window, bouncing off an awning and striking him in the head.
“He was in a coma two weeks,” the lawyer said of Franzese, a decorated Vietnam War vet in his 60s. “And then in the hospital, while he was still in a coma, he had a heart attack.”
“Somehow,” the lawyer added, “he lived.”
Franzese stuck around long enough to get nine months of rehab and to file a $21 million liability lawsuit against landlord Zear, LLC, building manager Zenon Chernyk and the property’s insurers.
But about a year ago, Franzese vanished, his lawyer said, without bothering to sign the papers needed to pocket an unrelated, $25,000 rent-dispute settlement with his landlord.
“I don’t know what happened to him,” Shaw told The Post by phone, after Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Richard Braun ruled yesterday that he has only a few more months to subpoena medical records in hopes of finding Franzese. After that, the whole case gets dismissed.
“I don’t know if he lost his mind,” the lawyer said. “I mean, who would walk away from $25,000? Not even Donald Trump walks way from $25,000. And who walks away from a million dollars? And even the worst lawyer in New York City could win at least a million dollars in this case.”
Franzese appears to have no family and has definitely not returned to his old address.
“He refused to go back to that apartment because he was scared to death something else might fall on him,” the lawyer said.
If Franzese doesn’t turn up, the property’s insurers will walk away without paying a penny toward the hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital bills Franzese rang up, through no fault of his own, at two taxpayer-funded hospitals: Bellevue Medical Center and the Veterans Hospital on East 23rd Street.
“If I could speak to him right now, I’d say, first, ‘I hope you’re alive and well,’ and second, ‘It doesn’t have to be me to be the attorney, but you should go forward with this case,’ ” Shaw said. “Do it for the taxpayers. Don’t let this go.”