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Developer Thomas Kramer loves the
bad-boy image. File photo by Mitchell Zachs/Magicalphotos.com |
Thomas Kramer, South Beach’s most
notorious high-rise developer and 50-year-old bad boy, has again
eluded criminal charges that could have landed him in prison.
Three
months ago, gossip columnists from the New York Post to
the Miami Herald broke word of Kramer’s arrest after a
late-night incident on March 31 in the Rainbow Room at the top
of New York City’s Rockefeller Center. Police detained him at
about 11:30 p.m., charged him with three misdemeanors —
endangering the welfare of a child, abusive sexual contact, and
forcible touching of a minor — and threw him in jail. According
to police, a 13-year-old boy accused Kramer of clasping the
boy’s genitals in a Rainbow Room lavatory that night. Both were
attending a birthday bash for Jeffrey Steiner, CEO of Fairchild
Corp., a leading manufacturer of nuts, bolts, latches and other
fastening devices used in the aerospace industry.
Not
surprisingly, accounts of what happened vary wildly. On May 11,
during a recent interview at his Star Island compound, Kramer
said he was standing at a urinal peeing when the boy bumped into
him. So he pushed the kid back. He denies he touched the boy’s
private parts. “But you know what? There was never a police
statement filed. And there was no process. And the charges got
dropped,” Kramer claimed during the interview.
Contrary
to Kramer’s assurances, however, the charges had not been
dropped. In reality, he was facing a June 29 court date in New
York State Court in Manhattan. All three misdemeanor charges
were still pending. “The case is being investigated,” Jennifer
Kushner, a spokeswoman at the Manhattan District Attorney’s
Office, said in late May. “It is up to the judge ultimately to
determine if charges are dropped.” In May, Kramer did not
respond to a request for comment on the discrepancy between his
account and that of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
Moreover, again in stark contrast to Kramer’s version of events,
NYPD officers had indeed filed a statement about the incident.
Kramer’s Miami-based lawyer Richard Sharpstein said he even read
it. “It was three lines,” Sharpstein said last week, though he
couldn’t recall whether the report employed the word “crotch,”
“groin” or “genitals” in describing the boy’s allegation.
While
all this looks bad in the court of public opinion, in Manhattan
criminal court last Friday, June 29, Assistant District Attorney
Lais Washington asked the judge to scuttle the charges. “The
assistant [district attorney] said the People [of New York]
moved to dismiss the case because it couldn’t be proven beyond a
reasonable doubt,” Kushner said. Kramer, who appeared in court
with Jesse Berman, a Manhattan-based criminal defense attorney,
did not respond to a request for comment. “Mr. Kramer is
thrilled, overwhelmed” about the dismissal, Sharpstein said.
“He’s the victim here.”
The
victim’s reputation for failing to respect boundaries — be they
personal or architectural — dates to the early ’90s, when Kramer
relocated from New York City (where he worked as a stock trader)
to Miami Beach. Inspired by the construction of Battery Park in
Manhattan, he fixated on the blighted southern tip of Miami
Beach. He bought $30 million of property south of Fifth Street;
his plan was to turn it into the semblance of a quaint Italian
port village, only with skyscrapers instead of mountains. After
a long court battle in Miami-Dade, Kramer won the right to built
Portofino Tower, a salmon-pink, 44-story, and by many accounts
ugly, luxury condo high-rise. He later sold several parcels to
other high-rise developers, most particularly The Related Group,
making a hefty profit.
But
Kramer has been unable to escape the specter of a lawsuit filed
in 1991 by his then-father-in law Sigfried Otto to reclaim $145
million from Kramer. In April a state circuit court judge ruled
that Kramer owes Otto’s daughters $108 million. Otto, who died
in 1996, maintained the money was a loan; Kramer says it was a
gift. He is appealing the ruling.
Kramer
has enjoyed great success, however, fending off accusations of
lechery. He’s now beat at least five such allegations in the
past 15 years. On Halloween night 1992, a model told Miami Beach
cops that Kramer squeezed her breasts at his short-lived South
Beach nightclub Hell, but then she filed no charges. In 1995,
Swiss judges dismissed charges that he jumped a woman in a
Zurich nightclub bathroom. In 1999, a Miami-Dade judge dismissed
a battery charge filed by a man after a fight in a South Beach
restaurant, and London police charged him with raping his
secretary, who ended up not testifying, thus ending the case.
With the
dismissal of the Rainbow Room incident, Kramer can focus his
energies on another allegation involving someone else’s body.
Abigail Brzezinski, a-29-year-old ultrasound technician who
lives in Broward County, is suing him for grabbing and exposing
one of her breasts on Halloween night last year. The alleged
incident occurred at Quattro Restaurant on Lincoln Road while
the two posed for a photo. Brzezinski was reportedly dressed as
Tinker Bell.
Kramer
denies he touched Brzezinski’s breast and accuses her and her
Boca Raton-based lawyer Brian Glick of “blackmail.” Kramer’s
attorney Sharpstein calls it “clear, unadulterated extortion”
and says Glick asked him for a $450,000 settlement. Glick
refused to disclose how much he demanded before moving ahead
with the lawsuit in April in Miami-Dade civil court. He denies
he is engaging in blackmail; he says he was giving Kramer an
“opportunity” to be “straight up” with his client, whom he
described as “a nice girl.”
Kramer told this reporter in
May that he intended to fight the Brzezinksi allegation if it’s
the last thing he does. But so far he has rebuffed Glick’s
attempts to deliver a subpoena, preventing discovery in the case
from beginning.
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