Piermont, New York Mayor Bruce Tucker got sued along with his garment business compadre Carmine Spinella, while dabbling in the Brooklyn second-mortgage market. And as far as garmento restaurateur Bruce Tucker goes, I mean dabbling.
Witness the case of Green Point Savings Bank v. Bruce Tucker, Carmine Spinella, et al. (Sup. Ct. Kings Co., Index No. 18270/92), a foreclosure action brought by Green Point Savings Bank in New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. The litigation file is below.
All of it.
In Green Point Savings Bank v. Bruce Tucker et al., Bruce Tucker, now Piermont's mayor, found his perennially-sorry self foreclosed-upon as a subordinate mortgagee. In other words, the bank's purchase-money mortgage took priority. Bruce only had a half-interest in a second mortgage. Tucker and Spinella had loaned US$130,000 to the property-owner, according to the litigation file.
There are a number of unbelievable things about this case, especially the fact that, as gleaned from the litigation file anyway, Bruce Tucker appears to have been acting as a mortgage-lender as an individual as opposed to through a corporation. (The LLC did not come into use in New York until 1994).
Green Point Savings Bank sued Tucker and Spinella as individuals, rather than sue a corporation which Tucker or Spinella owned or controlled. Moreover, I am not seeing any motion to dismiss in this litigation file wherein Tucker or Spinella may have sought to move the Court to discard the case against them for failure to name a correct corporate party in the case caption in lieu of naming Tucker and Spinella. In other words, from this litigation file, it appears that Tucker and his buddy Spinella at least tacitly assented that they were conducting mortgage-lending business as individuals, rather than through the protective layer of a corporation.
Another unbelievable thing? As you will also see in the papers printed below, about a decade after the conclusion of Green Point Savings Bank v. Tucker et al., Tucker's lawyer got picked-off, and then and thereafter imprisoned and disbarred, for grand larceny.
As the current residents of Piermont, New York have recently discovered, it's all
about the company you keep, isn't it?
