It’s been some time since we’ve heard the name Ivaylo Ivanov. The would-be bomber of Remsen Street has spent the last two years in jail on Rikers Island on charges involving spray-painting anti-Jewish slurs and swastikas in the Heights.
So what’s he been up to? Turns out, Ivanov’s been making friends with Ronald Tackmann, an illustrious thief, considered the Keyser Soze of NYC’s prison system because he keeps escaping.
New York: Recently, [Tackmann] invited me to the Hanukkah party at Rikers Island. The party is held at night in a gym. Through the gates of their cells, inmates howl at the female guests (“Hey, mami!”) and bark at me (“What the fuck you looking at, f—–t?”) as we enter the facility.
Tackmann scans the room as Lubavitch boys sing and dance to a keyboard klezmer. In Rikers, he decided to become Jewish because he likes the kosher food and the rabbi. He declines to wear a yarmulke (“It messes up my hair”) and eyes the gefilte fish suspiciously. At other tables, inmates sit with wives whose fresh eyeliner applied in the visitor’s bathroom now washes away in tears. …I ask Tackmann’s tablemates what they think of him.
“He’s meshuga,” says Kenneth Glassman-Blanco, who has spent three years on Rikers awaiting trial on attempted murder.
“Well done,” Ivaylo Ivanov of Bulgaria says of the escape.
If we hear/read anything further about inmate #09557033Q, you’ll be the first to know.
