Norman Adie, owner of the much-loved two screen Brooklyn Heights Cinema at Henry and Orange Streets, has been charged with fraud in connection with a scheme that involved promising investors he would turn the Cinema site into condos.
New York Post: The feds brought down the curtain today on an alleged fraud scheme by the owner of the Brooklyn Heights Cinema.
Norman Adie was busted for allegedly pocketing $530,000 he said would finance development plans that included turning the beloved two-screen movie house into condos.
Adie, 53, promised three unidentified victims returns as high as 13.5 percent, but made only several payments to two of them after they handed over their cash in 2007, court papers charge.
And instead of investing the dough as promised, Adie used most of it for “personal purposes,” according to a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court.
According to the Post story, Adie faces up to 80 years in prison for securities and wire fraud. What will become of the Cinema is not clear.
The weird part here is that in 2008 they were talking expansion and becoming the Heights version of Angelika:
http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/2088
you gotta love it
it’s a great theater though, I hope it survives.
they’ve been talking selling or expanding or selling air rights, or this or that for 15 years!
The stretch of blockage, from the cinema to Cranberry, seems to have had an unusual share of poips working business on it.
Do hope the cinema survives! Always evokes the Brattle in Cambridge for me…
AEB: Did you come to Brooklyn Heights for the waters?
…to get rich quick, Claude….
If they close down and a drug store opens, I am outta here…
AEB: Then, I suppose, you were misinformed?
Claude, I live in hope…
Hopefully he will be convicted and put in the same jail cell as the owner of the Blue Pig, who was caught stealing and selling customer credit card numbers. They can reminisce about their good old days behind bars. The theater is in such a prime location as the potential be much greater.
He forgot to keep recruiting new investors and use some of the money to make dividend payments to the earlier investors…. Oh he also for got to skip town.
I heard the developer turning the Cranberry St. empty lot into a single-family home was taking over this site for a private tennis court to go with the pool and squash court he’s planning to build…
When I moved here, there was a barber shop on the Orange Street side, but the main place was a hardware store.
Seems logical that you could build on top, like they’re doing with Sleepy’s on Montague.
13.5% returns? promised? on real estate??? granted it was the top of the market but COME ON……