On Wednesday night, police released surveillance footage of one of the men suspected of kidnapping and killing Hasidic businessman Menachem Stark (the Post remains unmoved by the uproar over its callous headline, referring to him as “a Brooklyn slumlord”). Previously, police shared a hard-to-make-out video of the attack, but the new clearer footage shows a white Dodge Caravan with Ohio license plates parking on Rutledge Street. A man in a dark ski cap and light plaid jacket emerges from the car and walks in front of Stark’s nearby real-estate office, just hours before the kidnapping on January 2. Sources tell the Post the man was spotted lurking in Williamsburg as far back as December 19, and detectives are looking into the possibility that the murder was a professional hit.
Police Commissioner William Bratton said earlier this week that investigators are examining various surveillance videos, but in the footage released so far, the suspects’ faces and the license plate number are obscured.
Stark was attacked and thrown into the van in the early hours of last week’s snowstorm, making the footage even harder to decipher. But according to the Daily News, the storm may explain why Stark’s body was discarded in a Great Neck dumpster. “They were zig-zagging. You can see them going back and forth in the same area … . The belief is they wanted to drive way out onto (Long) Island to get rid of the body. Instead, because of the snow, they wound up in Great Neck,” said a police source. “They were panicking — they clearly were trying to figure out a spot to dump the body when they got off the highway,” added another officer.
