Crime in the City: Workplace Crimes

In New York City, the workplace is where millions of people build their careers, run businesses, and keep the city moving. But behind the office doors is a darker history, stories of violence, betrayal, and crimes that made international headlines. In this episode of Crime in the City, we revisit deadly shootings, a hostage crisis, an alleged Chinese government outpost, and the largest known Ponzi scheme in history. This is Crime in the City, Workplace Crimes. For our first story, we begin in midtown Manhattan, where a gunman who was wearing full body armor and carrying an AR-15-style rifle entered an office building at 345 Park Avenue and killed four people, including an off-duty NYPD officer who was working security. And this building here, this prestigious building, one of the most prestigious office buildings in New York City, has now become a high rise crime scene as investigators from the NYPD, the detective squad, as well as federal investigators comb through it floor by floor, looking for evidence and looking for more clues about how this could have happened. The search is also on for answers about how a mass shooter could do something like this and take innocent lives. Now, bullet holes. Shattered glass at one of the most prestigious office buildings here in the city, and here's what stunned people in the area are saying. This kind of stuff, you can train all you want, but it's the once in a blue moon that actually happens. All right. We have a society in which guns are everywhere, and people are murdered, and we say thoughts and prayers, and we move on, and the next incident happens. The horrific scene unfolded just after 6.30 Monday evening. 27-year-old Shane Tamora walking casually into the high-rise office building with a loaded M4 semi-automatic long gun after driving here from Las Vegas in a BMW. Police say that BMW was packed with a high-powered rifle and a handgun, along with extra ammo, magazine clips, and bullets. Investigators also found a suicide note in which Mayor Adams says he complained about a brain injury from playing football when he was younger. The mass shooter was apparently looking for the NFL offices, which are at this building, but took the wrong elevator. The NFL issued a statement which said in part that counseling services would be made available to all employees. Tamora ended up shooting and killing an employee of Blackstone, the financial management company. They issued a statement which said in part, we are heartbroken to share that our colleague Wesley LaPalmer was among those who lost their lives in the tragic incident at 345 Park Avenue. Words cannot express. Now here's Mayor Adams. As you indicated, he turned the gun on himself and shot himself in the chest. He appeared to have some history of mental health history from what we're getting from our partners in the Nevada, Las Vegas. It was after 6 p.m. and so many people were no longer in the office, but he appeared to have gone to the wrong floor. Due to the wrong elevator bank, where you can see on the front desk which elevator bank was the NFL, but he did not go to that bank. Now the building remains closed to everyone except for investigators and officials and other necessary essential personnel here today. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch says at this point in the investigation, cautioning that it is early, less than 24 hours old, it appears that Tamora acted alone, that there were no other associates. Now I have learned from law enforcement sources that tomorrow was granted a concealed carry permit by the Las Vegas Police Department in 2022 and that that was on him at the time of this mass shooting. Now let's head back more than 40 years ago. On the morning of July 10th, 1978, an angry man entered the World Trade Center. He claimed he carried a hand grenade and a shopping cart filled with dynamite. What followed was a nearly 10-hour hostage situation that brought the South Tower to a standstill. Most people up on the 36th floor of Tower 2 didn't need to be told to evacuate. The offices of the State Workman's Compensation Board were just about empty by the time the When the emergency squads arrive. Five people remained in one of the hearing rooms, four of them hostages, and the other a man who threatened to blow them all up with what he claimed was 80 sticks of dynamite in a shopping cart. His name is Ladislav Fracek, an unemployed Polish machinist who speaks little English. He'd been demanding more than the $6,000 awarded to him as compensation for the loss of two fingers suffered in an accident several years ago. Adelaine Walker was in the hearing room when the frightening day began. I told his lawyer he had a bomb, that he was going to throw the bomb. The lawyer was sitting there with him? The lawyer was sitting in front of the judge. I was sitting next to the judge. What did the lawyer do then? The lawyer tried to explain to him that the judge would give him whatever he wanted, but he still didn't want it. Anybody that came to the room, he shut the door. He wouldn't let you out. I tried to get out. He closed the door. Then when the guards came, and the guards said, the door has to stay open, that's when I got a chance to run out. He didn't have to say what he wanted? Wanted. He wouldn't answer. He wouldn't answer. See, they were adjourning his case because he didn't have enough medical evidence. And his lawyer... The judge adjourned him for two months to give him a chance to bring in medical evidence. He didn't want that. Then they said they would give him money. No, he didn't want it. He said everything is finished. Yes. Within an hour, Port Authority police evacuated everyone from the 33rd to the 44th floors. Medical units were posted nearby. The hostage negotiating team set up communications with Polish-speaking interpreters. Teams of detectives and emergency squadsmen in bulletproof vests took up positions. Dogs trained to smell explosives were brought to the floor and kept close to the door of the hearing room. Fracek asked that an editor for a local Polish-language newspaper be brought to him. Other than that, he had little to say, and everyone settled in for what would be a very long wait. More than five hours after it began, there was no word that Fracek was any closer to giving up his claimed bomb or releasing his hostages. At least 80 police officers spent the afternoon upstairs, mostly conferring with each other. Hundreds of World Trade Center workers went home early, and dozens of news people scoured about the lobby picking up bits of information and, after a while, trading Polish jokes. But the grim possibilities of the situation were then underscored by the arrival of the cases holding rifles and shotguns. They'd be used only if a catastrophe seemed near imminent. The newspaper editor was brought to Fracek, but his deputy police commissioner, Ellen Fleischer, revealed at about 6 p.m. that seemed to do no good. When the editor finally arrived, perhaps he was impatient. I don't know the reason. We don't know. We won't know for quite some time. But he threw the phone outside the door, the hardline phone that was set up. Did you have some argument with the editor? No, we never spoke with the editor at all, Steve. The phone was thrown outside the door. Sure. And so now? And it was decided that contact would be reestablished at his insistence and not pushed upon him by the police department. And so right now we're just waiting. Then suddenly, just after 8 o'clock, it was all over. As police reconstruct what happened, one of the hostages managed to escape from the room, and then the other three challenged Fratschek. They said they didn't believe he really had a bomb, and they jumped him. The police rushed in, and after a brief scuffle, he was overpowered. His shopping cart taken from him turned out to hold nothing more deadly than four loaves of dark bread and some other unidentified package. No word yet on the other so-called device, which he claimed was a hand grenade. Vraczek's been taken to the first precinct for booking. The list of charges against him have not yet been fully determined. In 1994, a man named William Tager from North Carolina attempted to enter NBC Studios over at Rockefeller Plaza. He then shot and killed a stagehand who attempted to call the police. 46-year-old William Tager of Charlotte, North Carolina, didn't say a word on his way to central booking. Police say he fired this Chinese-made simulated AK-47 assault rifle, killing NBC stagehand Theron Montgomery. NBC surveillance camera reveals Montgomery seen in the lower right hand corner wearing a white T-shirt. Tager's in the upper left. They're looking at each other as Montgomery is on his way to alert police that Tager has a gun. The next picture shows Tager in the upper left-hand corner leaning against a tree as he aims at Montgomery. Montgomery is out of the camera's view when he's gunned down. Seconds later, police have Tager on the ground. They say that he came to New York to get even with television executives. He said NBC, CBS, and ABC were the networks that were after him. They were bugging him. They were tapping his phone. They were sending rays out through the television set, and he couldn't take it anymore. Police say that Tager came to the Today Show because it was easy to find. They advertised that they're broadcasting the famous Rockefeller Center, and he shot Montgomery, calling him a network goon. Tager allegedly packed an arsenal in his car. The AK-47 was fully loaded with 29 more bullets that could have killed. There were another 248 bullets to fire from the rifle, plus two magazine clips loaded with 30 rounds and 28 live rounds for his Beretta pistol. It NBC stagehands found it difficult to work today. Just kind of put a cloud. He was a great guy. He was just doing his job. What's to say? You've got crazy people all over the place. You've just got to be careful today. It's tough to trust people. That's what it comes down to. A passerby placed flowers at the deadly scene. Former NBC employee Bill McCauley is Montgomery's neighbor. That's exactly in keeping with who he was. He encountered a situation and tried to help the way I'd seen him do here. Sadly, this time, Theron Montgomery paid the ultimate price for trying to do the right thing. In the year 2000, five workers lost their lives in a mass murder inside a Wendy's restaurant. Then, as mourners were gathering for that tragedy, the Whiz electronics store, located just a block away, was hit by armed robbers who stole about $20,000. All Sunday afternoon, people on the crowded sidewalks of Main Street and Flushing Queen stopped outside the Wendy's where the Wednesday Massacre took the lives of five Wendy's workers. Scores of floral bouquets and lighted votive candles were left by people touched by the senseless murders. Then at 1 22 Sunday afternoon, just a half block down Main Street from the Wendy's Massacre site, two men in their 20s, one black, one Hispanic, used a black semi-automatic handgun to rob the Whiz electronics store. The gunman forced two managers into their office, tied the managers together by their hands with duct tape, and took up to $20,000 in cash from the safe. No one was hurt in the Whiz robbery, but the boldness of the criminals who did it angers local residents. Right across the street, you had a similar robbery this afternoon. Yes, that's true. You know why? Because the courts, they need to bring back the electric chair. And to show these people you can't just take a person's life like that and walk away. NYPD Lieutenant Eric Adams and two other officers from 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement left flowers at the Wendy's memorial, saying the nearby Whiz robbery only sends a stronger message, get the guns off the streets. The Wendy's or the Whiz or any other place, to have to have yourself lose a family member in this fashion. Should not be tolerated in New York City, nor should it be tolerated in America. There are those who would copycat various things that they do see in the press. And they'll say, wow, I want to get my name in the picture. Even bold enough to do it across the street from Wendy's Massacre. Definitely so. And it is something to think about here in this precinct area in the 109. This is a fairly residential community, low crime area. But try telling that to these two teenagers who work in the Dr. J's clothing store across from the Whiz. This makes you scared. What's your thing? Do you have armed security in your store? I don't think so, I don't know. We got security for shoplifters, but as far as like two people coming in with guns, like just pulling out? Yeah, we got nothing for that. Nah, we don't got nothing for that. We ain't ready for that. Let's talk about what happened back in 2023. That's when an ordinary-looking office building down in Chinatown was actually being used as a front for a secret police station on behalf of the Chinese government. Authorities say the undeclared outpost was used to track and intimidate a U.S. resident, calling it a blatant violation of national sovereignty. This nondescript office building in the heart of bustling Chinatown in lower Manhattan Has a dark secret. An ominous description from US Attorney Brian Peace, who says that until several months ago, an entire floor hosted an undeclared outpost station of the Chinese National Police. Now just imagine the NYPD opening an undeclared secret police station in Beijing. It would be unthinkable. Liu Jianwang and Chen Jinping, seen in this photo from the criminal complaint, are accused of helping set up the station. But U.S. officials say it was not the type of police force the average American might think of. Instead of combating crimes, they say, they were committing them. Specifically, acts of transnational repression, where foreign government, in this case China, stalks or intimidates individuals in the United States. The Chinese National Police appear to have been using the station to track a U.S. resident. When the defendants learned that they were under investigation, prosecutors say they deleted communication with the Chinese government official who was giving them instructions. This is clearly a blatant violation of our national sovereignty. It shows the PRC's efforts to globalize the oppressive tactics used domestically in China to silence dissent. In today's charges, send a crystal clear response to the PRC. That we are on to you. We know what you're doing. And we will stop it from happening in the United States of America. And finally, we end in Lower Manhattan, where Bernie Madoff, a stockbroker who admitted orchestrating the largest known Ponzi scheme in history, faced a 150-year prison sentence after wiping out the life savings of thousands of investors. It was perhaps the greatest scam ever pulled off in the history of Wall Street, but today it was the end of the line for Bernie Madoff and his victims, well, they gave him a send-off. Tonight, Bernie Madoff sleeps here, the Metropolitan Correctional Center. The question, will he soon have company? There could be a very high likelihood that other people could be joining Madoff in prison. Between his wife and his sons, there's a wide-ranging investigation that the prosecutors are pursuing right now. Madoff came to court and pleaded guilty. He apologized to his victims, but did not implicate anyone else, and even insisted some of his business was legitimate, including the ones run by his family. The strategy is to protect his family members and to protect their assets so that his wife can keep $62 million while the thousands of customers have to look for places to live. Three victims of the $50 billion Ponzi scheme got to tell Madoff off. You can see the cuffs on him. That's justice. It is temporary justice. And then Judge Denny Chin ordered Madoff's bail revoked. In all likelihood, Madoff will no longer spend another day free for the rest of his life. Every citizen of the United States wants to see justice done, and this is not a crime that one person committed. I could see the judge shuffling his papers around, and I thought, good for him, he's going to send this guy right into the slammer. So how did he do it? Madoff says it started in the early 90s. When I began the Ponzi scheme, I believed it would end shortly, and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme. However, this proved difficult and ultimately impossible. It seemed to be a situation where you had to lie to cover up the lies, and a situation where, you know, oh, what a tangled web we weave. The investigation may now zero in on Madoff's wife. Where did Ruth Madoff's money come from? Did she have it independently of the fraud through inheritances and her work, or was it the fruits of the fraud? If it came out of the Madoff firm, she's going to have to give all of that money back. And it could be worse for members of the family if indeed they are prosecuted. In the meantime, once again, Madoff will be sentenced in June and faces up to 150 years, which is effectively a life sentence. That's the latest from lower Manhattan. I'm Dick Brennan, Fox 5 News. Back to you guys. Thank you very much, Dick. And the victims who lost money with Madoff, some their entire life savings, are enjoying some sense of justice tonight, but they realize it's unlikely they'll see their savings restored. I could see the judge shuffling his papers around and I thought, good for him, he's going to send this guy right into the slammer. I'm very glad that Mr. Madoff is in jail. It's a message to the world that the United States can traffic our own crimes and handle them appropriately. To see the cuffs on him, that's justice. At his sentencing, Madoff said that he realized that his arrest would inevitably come. I'm Dan Bowens, and that's this week's Crime in the City, available on Fox Local, Spotify, and YouTube.