In the months leading up to Brooklyn slumlord Menachem Stark’s murder, a staggering $1.7 million was siphoned from an account he and his business partner controlled, a bankruptcy trustee revealed Thursday.
“It appears [this] is not something from the past month or two,” court-appointed administrator Jonathan Flaxer told Judge Elizabeth Stong at a hearing in Brooklyn bankruptcy court.
“It’s been going on for a protracted amount of time.”
Flaxer is overseeing the 2009 bankruptcy case of South Side House LLC, a Williamsburg building run by Stark and longtime partner Israel “Sam” Perlmutter.
The missing money was “improperly taken” from a bank account that should have had $2 million in it, Flaxer said in court documents.
Another account that was supposed to have held $200,000 in security deposits is down to just $3,500, Flaxer said.
Stark, who owed more than $60 million to a string of creditors, was abducted off a Williamsburg street Jan. 2. His burned corpse was found in a Long Island trash bin the next day and his killers are still at large.
Flaxer was appointed trustee of South Side’s bankruptcy a week after Stark’s murder.
He launched an investigation that revealed Capital One bank statements were “tampered with’’ to conceal that money was missing.
“There is reason to believe that further monies have been misappropriated,” he noted in court papers.
In court Thursday, Flaxer told the judge he has been stonewalled in efforts to talk to those involved in the South Side building, including Perlmutter and an associate, Hillel Porges.