PHILADELPHIA – Two businessmen were told the pier holding up a nightclub would collapse within hours but ignored the warnings, a decision that ultimately led to the deaths of three women, a prosecutor said Monday as their trial began.
Pier 34 owner Michael Asbell and Heat nightclub operator Eli Karetny were being tried on charges of risking a catastrophe and conspiracy. They ignored years of warnings about the pier, which collapsed and sent dozens of nightclub customers into the Delaware River on May 18, 2000, prosecutor Jude Conroy said.
“Every repair that was done was done for cosmetic reasons only,” Conroy told jurors in his opening statement. “There were no repairs to that structure.”
Warnings about the pier’s state got increasingly dire, Conroy said. On the morning of the collapse, a crack in a wall and the floor doubled in size from 5 inches to 10 inches, Conroy said. A contractor told Asbell and Karetny the pier would collapse at low tide that night or the next morning.
Jean Marie Ferraro, 27; Monica Rodriguez, 21; and DeAnn White, 25, died when the east end of the pier plummeted into the river.
The defendants blamed the collapse on three related contractors they had hired over the years – S.T. Hudson Engineering Inc., J.E. Brenneman Co. and Commerce Construction. They said they paid the New Jersey companies nearly $2 million for repair work dating back to about 1994, and had a five-year warranty on a 1996 repair that covered the date of the accident.
“There isn’t one among us who can fathom the loss of a child,” Asbell’s attorney Thomas Bergstrom told the jury. “You are here to determine whether Michael Asbell and Eli Karetny are criminals. That’s the issue.”
Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham fought for six years to pursue criminal charges against Karetny and Asbell. The charges were twice thrown out by lower courts before the state Supreme Court said there was enough evidence to send the case to a jury.
Conroy said the jury would also hear from a firefighter who struggled to hold onto Ferraro in the murky, 60-degree water.
Asbell bought Pier 34 in 1984. After a hard winter, a parking lot on one end of it collapsed in 1994.
Conroy alleged that Karetny and Asbell nixed a recommended $660,000 rebuild in favor of a “patch job” to save money and to have the pier ready for the 1996 arrival of the Moshulu, a floating restaurant then owned by Campbell’s Soup heiress Dorrance “Dodo” Hamilton. The Moshulu was moored at Pier 34 until the collapse.
The women’s families were awarded $7.4 million each in civil damages from Asbell, Karetny, the city and others, while $7.4 million more was divided among about three dozen injured victims.
Until the collapse, the city did not require piers to be inspected. Pier 34 was built in 1909.