In 1989, Bruce Bailey, a NYC Tenants Advocate was kidnapped just outside of his apartment building. Only for his remains to be discovered the next day.
00:00Hello and welcome to the Dark Mystery Lounge. Today we're going to talk about the Bruce Bailey case, a New York City tenant's advocate whose murder leaves more questions than answers. So let's get started, shall we?
00:12It was a busy day for Bruce Bailey on Wednesday, June 14, 1989. He spent most of his morning in housing court defending his clients' complaints against landlords. In the early afternoon, he met in Scarsdale, New York with the landlords of a building on West 164th Street.
00:36The meeting was the pressure landlords, the real estate firm of Houlihan and Parnes, to evict drug dealers from their building.
00:44Later on in the day, Bruce and his wife attended their 14-year-old son's 8th grade graduation at Cathedral School.
00:53Afterwards, Bruce, Nellie, and their two sons went home to have dinner.
00:57Around 6.30 p.m., Bruce says goodbye to his family and leaves his apartment on 507 West 111th Street to drive to a tenant's meeting on West 125th Street.
01:11It was the first of two meetings he was going to attend, before calling it a day, but he never made it to his car. No one has heard from him since.
01:19The next day, his remains were found in a remote industrial site, Hunts Point, in the Bronx, only four miles away from Bruce's apartment.
01:30He was dismembered and placed in the trash bags. His torso was in one bag, his legs in another, and his arms in another.
01:38His head, hands, and feet were never found.
01:40The only way his wife was able to identify his body was from a mole on his back, a birthmark on his left arm, and a two-inch scar on his right knee.
01:51Blood test confirmed it was indeed Bruce.
01:53But who could have abducted Bruce Bailey in broad daylight, and why?
01:58Who would want him dead?
02:05Bruce Bailey was born in 1935 in Toledo, Ohio.
02:09He spent his childhood moving from place to place, roaming around the Irish hills in Michigan.
02:15Growing up with a semi-rural upbringing, Bruce dreamed of moving to the big city.
02:20He moved to New York City, enrolling at Columbia University on a basketball scholarship in the late 1950s.
02:27As a student, Bruce was introduced to leftist politics.
02:31He was a conscientious objector during the Korean War.
02:35He graduated in 1959.
02:37He started hanging around in neighborhood bars with writers and intellectual people in the counterculture movement.
02:44His politics led him to a career in housing activism.
02:48In 1973, Bruce's first big fight was against his alma mater, Columbia University.
02:55That's also when the Columbia Tenants Union was founded together with a couple of neighborhood activists.
03:00Columbia University was buying up affordable housing in Morningside Heights and Central Harlem, converting them into dorms, leaving the tenants with nowhere to go.
03:11Jacking up the rent so high that tenants were unable to pay their rent, they were often evicted, forced into tenement buildings with landlords that just didn't care.
03:20This was kind of the first wave of gentrification.
03:24For tenants in need, Bruce became the man you call when you needed help dealing with a crappy landlord.
03:30Bruce and CTU became well known for a tactic to get landlords to fold.
03:35Rent strikes.
03:36That's when you get all the tenants in a building to stop paying rent until housing conditions improve.
03:42It was a way to hit landlords in their wallets without waiting for housing court to step in.
03:48It was pretty effective.
03:50To tenants, Bruce is a hero.
03:52To landlords, he was a thorn in their sides.
03:55But what set CTU apart from all the other groups was their sketchy reputation.
04:00According to Bruce's records, Bruce and his wife were convicted of filing for $14,000 in illegal unemployment benefits.
04:09In the early 1980s, Bruce was accused by the New York Attorney General of embezzling funds from CTU Treasury.
04:18In 1982, Bruce and a couple of CTU officials were accused of assaulting a Jewish landlord.
04:25Both of these cases were eventually dropped, but they were enough to get CTU removed from the Metropolitan Council on Housing.
04:32It's an umbrella organization for tenant advocacy groups.
04:36Bruce was also accused of accepting bribes from landlords.
04:40His wife Nellie and others that know Bruce dismissed these charges as slander.
04:45But Bruce's friends admit that he could be a bit abrasive.
04:48He wasn't all warm and fuzzy.
04:50He could be gentle, but he was just a very direct person with a very low tolerance for BS.
04:56So does Bruce have enemies?
04:58In short, yes.
05:00Lots of them.
05:01Any angry landlord could have done this to him.
05:03Someone was pushed too far and decided to strike back.
05:07But how do you abduct a 54-year-old, 6'2", 225-pound man in broad daylight and there are no witnesses?
05:22Bruce definitely had his share of enemies.
05:25But trying to narrow down which one could have abducted, killed, and dismembered him was going to be difficult.
05:31The NYPD figured that whoever killed Bruce might have been a landlord trying to send a message.
05:37His body wasn't hidden.
05:39It wasn't buried.
05:40The message was, if you speak out or try to fight back, this could happen to you.
05:46There was a Village Voice article from August of 1989 that listed three plausible suspects.
05:52All were landlords.
05:53But the police had their eye on one in particular.
05:56A man by the name of Jack Ferranti.
05:59Now Jack Ferranti is quite a character.
06:01He lost ownership of four tenements on 147th Street after Bruce organized the rent strike.
06:08He has an arrest record.
06:10In 1984, Jack was arrested after a high-speed car chase.
06:14At the time, he had accumulated more than $500,000 in fines
06:19and had one of the longest records of housing violations in the city.
06:22On Jack's orders, his brother Mario would evict people from their apartments using a large dog to scare them.
06:29Newspapers labeled Jack as New York's baddest landlord.
06:33He was very pissed off at Bruce.
06:35Jack made public threats against Bruce in the weeks before his murder
06:39because Bruce organized a rent strike on Jack Ferranti's buildings.
06:43There was an informant who came forward to police to say that Jack was responsible for killing Bruce
06:49but soon backed off after receiving death threats to kill this person and their family.
06:55Jack was never charged or arrested for the murder of Bruce.
06:58He wasn't even questioned because without any physical evidence,
07:02the police couldn't consider Jack Ferranti as an active suspect.
07:06But they kept tabs on him until 1992.
07:08In early 1992, an apartment building in Queens was deliberately set on fire,
07:14killing a firefighter that fell from the building to escape the blaze.
07:18It was one of Jack Ferranti's buildings.
07:21He had ordered it set on fire to the clothing store that was on the first floor to collect some insurance money.
07:28He was arrested along with his brother Mario and another person in 1994.
07:33During a bail hearing on whether or not to set bail, a lot of information comes out.
07:37As an effort to deny bail, two prosecutors submit documents stating that the Ferranti brothers
07:44had a history of involvement in violent crimes, justifying their pretrial detention under federal law,
07:51stating that Mr. Bailey, 54, had been killed shortly after beginning protests
07:57on one of Jack Ferranti's buildings in Morningside Heights
08:00and despite Jack Ferranti's earlier efforts to bribe Bailey to stop.
08:05A confidential informant had revealed that on Jack Ferranti's direction,
08:10Mario Ferranti stalked Bailey shortly before his murder,
08:14and that Mario bragged about dismembering Bruce's body.
08:17The allegations that the brothers were involved in Bruce's murder were dismissed by the judge as hearsay.
08:23Two years later, they were sentenced on 19 counts, including arson, resulting in death.
08:29The judge sentenced Jack to 36 years in prison, and Mario only got five years for his role.
08:35What is frustrating is that due to good behavior,
08:38Jack Ferranti might be released as early as 2026.
08:42He is currently incarcerated in a low-security federal prison in Pennsylvania.
08:46After only a year of investigation, Bruce's murder was quickly shelved and labeled a cold case.
08:59The NYPD clearly didn't investigate enough.
09:02If they truly suspected the Ferranti brothers, why didn't they get a search warrant to search the other properties?
09:08I think that they just flat out didn't care.
09:10The one person that did care was the only person to leave a bouquet at the doorstep of the Columbia Tenants Union at West 106th Street,
09:20a bouquet of five roses with a card that read,
09:24Five Roses from Apartment 5E.
09:26After many years, in 2016, Nellie Bailey finally sold her apartment and moved away,
09:33saying that the neighborhood has changed too much for her, and not for the better.
09:38Even though she will miss her neighbors, she feels like it's time to move on.
09:43It seems like that's the current theme with this case,
09:46because it has been almost 34 years, and no progress was made, and it remains cold.
09:51Everyone just wants to move on.
09:53But Nellie is living out her life without her husband, and the kids grew up without their father.
10:04This case is nothing short of frustrating,
10:07because it feels like even though Bruce was murdered and dismembered,
10:11that no one really truly gave a damn that he died.
10:14No matter who he pissed off, at the end of the day, he's still a human being.
10:19He had family and friends.
10:21Those people that he was fighting for loved him for his work.
10:24Even when doing research for this case, there were only a handful of articles and one podcast.
10:30Hardly any pictures of the man.
10:31I guess no good deed goes unpunished.
10:35By the way, this case was suggested by a viewer,
10:38Roberta Ferrero.
10:40I'm hoping I said that right.
10:41If I didn't, I apologize.
10:43I know it took a while to make this video,
10:45but if I find enough information on a case,
10:48I will cover it.
10:49It might take me a while,
10:50but I will definitely cover it, I promise.
10:53I had never heard of Bruce Bailey,
10:55and after researching what happened to him,
10:57I knew I had to cover it.
10:59So thank you so much.
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