Aftershocks of Big Blast
'Dr. Doom' Blew up Townhouse 1 Year Ago, but Court Battles Heat up

By Joe Gould
Daily News Writer
July 11, 2007

A year after Dr. Nicholas Bartha blew up his East Side mansion, the empty lot has become a curiosity to tourists and a frustration for those entangled in the legal battle with the estate.

Former Daily News intern Jennifer Panicali, who suffered significant scarring after she was showered with flying glass
when the four-story building exploded, is Estate of Nicholas Bartha is being sued by 10           among 10 people involved in suits against
people for injuries and damages caused when          the Bartha estate.
he blew up his East Side townhouse last year,
 killing himself.                                            "She'll be lucky if she receives even a
fraction  of what she's otherwise entitled to," said Panicali's lawyer Jeff Korek. "Unfortunately, there's a limited amount available in the Bartha estate."

Bartha, 66, killed himself on July 10, 2006, while faced with losing the E. 62nd St. house in a bitter divorce battle. Authorities said he opened the mansion's gas lines to trigger the explosion that reduced it to rubble.

Bartha, the so-called Dr. Doom, had sent Cordula Jennifer Panicali is among the plaintiffs  Hahn, his wife of 29 years, a 14-page manifesto hours before the blast in which he threatened to transform her from a "gold digger" into an "ash and rubbish digger."

Now an empty lot, the site is popular with out-of-towners staying at the nearby Regency Hotel, said Miguel Santiago, 36, a building superintendent on the block.

"The funny thing about it is it's become a tourist spot. Everybody comes by to take pictures," Santiago said. "People come to the empty space and say, 'Wow, that's where it happened.' "

When doorman driver Victor Zotos, 57, looks at
The blast site is now a vacant lot.              the lot, he still recalls the panic and chaos that gripped bystanders.

"I thought [the boom] was a truck with a flat tire, but then I saw the smoke, and the fire, and the building coming down," Zotos said. "You had people saying it's terrorists. Nobody knew what happened."

The Bartha estate, administered by the doctor's adult daughter Serena, sold the lot for roughly $8 million in December to satisfy Hahn's $4 million judgment against Bartha for his hospital stay after the explosion, his funeral tab and some unpaid debts.

The Russian Investment Group, which bought the plot, plans to build an 8,000-square-foot townhouse with a bamboo-fringed garden, underground pool, all-glass elevator - and an asking price of $30 million.

The Bartha estate faces at least 10 suits in Manhattan Supreme Court from people who were hurt or had property damaged by the explosion - all looking for compensation.

"I would call it a conundrum," said David Jaroslawicz, lawyer for several plaintiffs. "We're trying to take the pot of money and divide it up in some way."

 

 

Jennifer Panicali is among the plaintiffs.

The blast site is now a vacant lot.

Photo Gallery: Unhappy anniversary

 

'Dr. Boom' Suits Grow

  By Jill Culora
  New York Post
  July 8, 2007

An elite golf club damaged in Dr. Boom's spectacular suicide is suing Con Edison, claiming the utility failed to properly investigate complaints about a gas odor on the morning of the townhouse explosion. The Links Club is also claiming in its Manhattan Supreme Court suit that Con Ed was negligent in continuing to offer Dr. Nicholas Bartha a gas supply when he had a history of tampering with gas lines. The lawsuit - filed in December for an unspecified amount - named Bartha's ex-wife and two daughters, alleging the family knew he planned to damage or destroy the house NICHOLAS BARTHA              and should have taken action to stop him. The Links Club's claims are just part of a growing number of suits against the Bartha estate by several victims, including three pedestrians injured by flying debris in the explosion on July 10, 2006. Bartha's estate faces at least 10 lawsuits seeking both compensatory and punitive damages for personal injuries and property damage. Although the lawsuits are seeking unspecified amounts, lawyers for several plaintiffs expect the multimillion-dollar total to topple available funds in Bartha's estate. The estate, administered by Bartha's estranged daughter Serena Bartha, sold the leveled townhouse at 34 E. 62nd Street for $8.3 million earlier this year. But Bartha's ex-wife, Cordula Hahn, holds a Supreme Court judgment for more than $4 million of that money, court documents show. Together with site cleanup fees, real estate fees, taxes and other liens and fees, "limited monies" remain for the 10 lawsuits. None of the plaintiffs, defendants or their lawyers would comment.

                                            Doc's Lot for Sale in Land Boom

Dr. Doom's Heir-ball
Kin Face a Big-bucks Nightmare

By Barbara Ross and Adam Lisberg
New York Daily News
July 22, 2006

Copy of a photo left on grave at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Queens showing Dr. Nicholas Bartha with one of his daughters. The doctor who leveled his upper East Side townhouse in a demented suicide bid died without a will - leaving his ex-wife and estranged daughters to sift through the financial mess he left behind. According to court papers filed yesterday, Nicholas Bartha's estate still owes $4 million to ex-wife Cordula Hahn, 64, and her lawyers - a debt from their bitter divorce that would have forced the sheriff to seize and sell the townhouse at 34 E. 62nd St. It estimates the 124-year-old home - now just a pile of debris - was worth $4 million, though observers say a prime vacant lot on the upper East Side could be worth as much as $9 million. The filing in Manhattan Surrogate's Court was made by Bartha's daughter Serena, 28, with the assent of daughter Johanna, 27, and Hahn. In the absence of a will, Serena is asking the court to appoint her administrator of her father's estate. Under the terms of their parents' divorce settlement, the sisters appear to be in line to both inherit 25% of the value of the property. The filing says Bartha died with an estimated $100,000 in cash, while his debts include a $5,000 hospital bill, the $5,730 tab for his Queens funeral Wednesday, and an estimated $230,000 to reimburse the city for the costs of clearing the rubble of his home. It made no mention of any insurance policy on the building, though legal observers say it is unlikely any insurer would pay a claim for a deliberate blast. It also does not assess the impact of any estate taxes. The papers don't mention any anticipated lawsuits against his estate from injured passersby and neighbors blown out of their homes by the July 10 explosion. At least one couple living next door has already sued Bartha and Con Ed. Bartha, 66, apparently rigged a basement gas line so he could destroy his beloved home rather than move out and watch it be sold. "This is going to be a lawyers' employment act here," said attorney Scott Mollen, who is not connected to the case. "The litigation could take years to resolve." Serena Bartha's lawyer Frank Glinsky didn't return calls for comment. Court officials expect a hearing on the application late next week. To read Doctor Bartha E-Mail Click here.  He was also had it in for the judicial system. To read the appellate decision in the Bartha case Click here   Debris Is Gone, but Legal Issues Remain to Sift Through By Anemona Hartocollis The New York Times July 22, 2006 When Nicholas Bartha’s townhouse on East 62nd Street blew up — in what investigators think was his suicidal attempt to punish his ex-wife for divorcing him — the explosion created a legal mess as big as the pile of rubble the blast left behind. As Dr. Bartha, 66, was buried at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Queens on Wednesday, in a quiet family ceremony, lawyers for the family, the injured, the neighbors and New York City began sorting out various claims to the property. So far, no will has surfaced, and Dr. Bartha’s former lawyer, Ira E. Garr, and the referee in his divorce, Marilyn Dershowitz, speculated that he was too disorganized to leave a will behind, or that if he did, it was destroyed along with his house and its other contents. If no will emerges, legal experts said, his adult children, Serena and Johanna, inherit everything. The two daughters together owned 25 percent of the house already, while Dr. Bartha owned the rest. His ex-wife, Cordula Hahn, will become one of many creditors, seeking to collect the $4 million judgment she won during divorce proceedings. Other creditors could include the city, which paid for cleanup, people injured by the blast and neighbors whose apartments were damaged. "It’s very complicated," Donna Bennick, Ms. Hahn’s lawyer, said of the disposition of the estate. "I’m trying to unravel it myself." Since it appears that the mother and daughters have a good relationship, it seems unlikely that the daughters would contest their mother’s claim to any proceeds from the property, lawyers said. "So all roads ultimately lead to Rome," Charles F. Crames, an estate and trust lawyer in Manhattan, said this week. It was a court judgment ordering Dr. Bartha to be evicted and the house to be sold as a way of satisfying his ex-wife’s claim that seemed to precipitate what may have been Dr. Bartha’s decision to destroy the house. Investigators said a gas line had been tampered with before the blast. Dr. Bartha was the only person in the house when it exploded on the morning of July 10. He was plucked from the rubble and died in the hospital five days later. Property was an emotional issue for Dr. Bartha. In a rambling, often incoherent e-mail message sent to his ex-wife before the explosion, he said one of his earliest memories was of hiding in a cave in his native Romania during World War II. In a tale of wounded family pride, he told how his father owned a gold mine, which was nationalized after the war. The family lost its home in the village of Rosia Montana, Romania, he wrote, and his mother was obsessed with getting it back, to no avail. Dr. Bartha’s parents bought the town house at 34 East 62nd Street in 1980 for $395,000, according to court records, but did not move in until 1986. Ms. Dershowitz said the price of the house was low for the time because it was occupied by tenants who had to move out before the Barthas could move in. In his final e-mail message, Dr. Bartha indicated that he did not want his daughters to inherit the house. Berating his ex-wife, apparently over the divorce, he wrote, "Cordula with this you disinherited your children." "The ultimate irony would be that she gets to administer the estate," Harold A. Mayerson, former chairman of the Matrimonial Law Committee for the New York City Bar Association, said of Ms. Hahn. If a will is found that cuts the daughters out of the estate, they could conceivably contest it by challenging his mental competency at the time he made the will, lawyers said. "You have a right to disinherit a child," Mr. Crames said. "However, if there is no will, no matter how bad your attitude toward your children, your spouse inherits first, and then your children. In this case, there is no spouse, because they were divorced." Dr. Bartha has nephews, who unsuccessfully tried to claim a share of the house from Dr. Bartha’s mother after she died, according to court papers. Phone messages left for one of the nephews, Thomas Bartha, were not returned. Eric Proshansky, a lawyer for New York City, said the city was considering filing a claim for cleanup costs, but had not calculated how much that would be. The city’s claim would go first in line, followed by the ex-wife’s. The property, worth $6 million when the house was standing, is probably worth about $7 million as a hole in the ground, said Guthrie Garvin, a broker who is director of sales from East 60th to East 76th Street for Massey Knakal, a brokerage firm. He said the property would probably be sold for a town house. "There is a great appetite for town houses in that area," he said. "With the price of town houses in that area, you’re right in prime territory." While the ghoulish history of the property might scare off some buyers, Mr. Garvin said, there is always someone undeterred, attracted by the chance to build a dream house. "That’s the kind of area where you’re going to have a very sophisticated buyer and somebody who’s going to do a top-of-the-line renovation," he said. Dr. Bartha’s former lawyer, Mr. Garr, said the doctor had little or no assets apart from the house and perhaps some retirement funds. Ms. Dershowitz, the divorce referee, said that Dr. Bartha had aspired to be a cardiologist but had never qualified as one. Instead, he had worked all his career as an emergency room doctor. She said he had lived very frugally, cooking with a microwave and a hot plate.

Dr. Boom Is Buried

By Mathew Charles and Neil Graves
New York Post
July 20, 2006

Dr. Boom went out with hardly a whimper yesterday.

Dr. Nicholas Bartha, who last week allegedly blew up his own tony East Side townhouse rather than see his ex-wife get it, was finally laid to rest in Cypress Hill Cemetery, Queens.

Bartha, 66, died late Saturday night after hanging on a week following the July 10 blast, making good on the last of three reported suicide attempts.

A woman who answered the phone at Glascott Funeral Home in Forest Hills yesterday said she had no details on the doctor's final above-ground appearance.

Bartha                                            "There was no funeral services or anything else like that," she said. There was a gathering "just with the immediate family."

Bartha, locked in a life-and-death struggle with ex-wife Cordula Hahn over a building worth more than $5 million, vowed that he would never give it up alive - and he didn't. The East 62nd Street townhouse was blown to smithereens on July 10 after someone opened a gas line, fire officials said.

The blast left a four-story gully between the adjoining buildings.

At the double tombstone, there was a sole vase containing a selection of red roses, carnations, white daisies and white chrysanthemums. A note said the flowers were "from the Foldes family," the family that owned the adjacent tombstone.

Taped atop the Bartha half was a 3-by-5 snapshot of the doctor, taken perhaps 20 years ago, since he looked to be in his mid-40s.He was holding a little girl, about 2 1/2. Bartha is survived by two daughters, Serena and Johanna, both of whom would have been very young at the time of the photo.

Attached to the snapshot was a purple string with a bouquet of white roses, the flowers a bit flattened. A cemetery worker said they had been left by Hahn.

Tomb of Doom Widow's Not Weeping as Doctor Who Blew up House Is Buried By Kerry Burke and Bill Hutchinson New York Daily News July 20, 2006

Dr. Nicholas Bartha's grave awaits him yesterday. A photo of Bartha with his daughter was placed on his gravestone. The doctor plucked from the smoldering rubble after he blew up his upper East Side townhouse was buried in a Queens cemetery yesterday after a tearless ceremony. The only tender moment came as the ex-wife Dr. Nicholas Bartha tormented laid atop the black polished tombstone some white baby roses - and a photo of the physician playfully hugging one of his two daughters when she was a baby more than two decades ago. "There weren't any tears. It wasn't what you'd expect. Nobody was really busted up," said a gravedigger at Cypress Hills Cemetery, who stood nearby as the mourners gathered around Bartha's coffin before it was lowered into the ground. Bartha's ex-wife, Cordula, the object of his vengeful suicidal scheme to rob her of a big-bucks divorce settlement, attended the 11 a.m. service with about 15 friends and relatives. "It was a short, quiet ceremony," said the gravedigger. "A preacher read a short prayer from the Bible. Then we lowered the white coffin." Bartha, 66, was buried in a family plot containing his brother, Attila, and other relatives whose names are etched on the 5-foot-long gravestone that features a crucifix. A single bouquet of carnations, roses, daisies and lilies were in a white vase atop the tombstone with a sympathy card attached reading "Rest in peace." The grave sits just inside the cemetery's wrought-iron fence, which runs along Jamaica Ave. As workers shoveled the gravelly earth onto Bartha's coffin, J and Z trains could be heard running on the elevated tracks a half block away. Bartha died Saturday at New York Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell, after lingering in a medically induced coma for six days after the July 10 explosion. His death was ruled a suicide. After firefighters dug him out of the rubble of his $9 million townhouse at 34 E. 62nd St., they discovered Bartha had rigged his gas meter to destroy the four-story building. Just before blowing up his beloved home, the demented doctor sent his ex-wife and others a rambling, 14-page e-mail explaining his madness. "You will be transformed from gold digger to ash and RUBBISH digger," he told his ex-wife in the e-mail. Bartha, who was born in Romania and attended medical school in Rome, blamed his ex-wife for his downfall. Cordula Bartha had been awarded a $4million divorce settlement, and her ex was being forced to auction his beloved home to pay it. In court papers, Cordula Bartha, whose Jewish family fled Nazi-occupied Holland, accused her husband of mental cruelty, claiming he displayed swastikas around their house to spite her. Four days before the midmorning explosion buried Bartha and injured four pedestrians, he was served with an eviction notice, which is believed to have triggered his plan. The most seriously injured person was Jennifer Panicali, a 22-year-old Staten Island woman, who was released recently from the hospital.

Burns Killed Dr. Boom

Post Wire Services
New York Post
July 18, 2006

The crazed cardiologist who blew up his Upper East Side town house in a deranged suicide bid died of severe burns as well as of complications from diabetes and heart disease, the city Medical Examiner's Office said yesterday.

Medical examiner spokeswoman Ellen Borakove said Dr. Nicholas Bartha was critically burned over 35 percent of his body in the gas explosion last week.

"Contributing factors [to his death] were diabetes and heart disease," she said, adding, "The manner of death is suicide . . . [based on] the information and evidence we have."

Bartha, 66, was pulled, barely alive, from the rubble and remained in a medically induced coma until his death late Saturday.

New York Doc's Death Declared a Suicide

By Karen Matthews
Associated Press Writer
July 17, 2006

NEW YORK-A doctor suspected of blowing up his Manhattan town house to avoid selling it in a divorce settlement died from his severe burns, the medical examiner's office said Monday in declaring his death a suicide.

Dr. Nicholas Bartha, 66, had warned his wife in e-mail shortly before the July 10 explosion: "I will leave the house only if I am dead."

He was pulled from the rubble alive after the blast, but died late Saturday from burns over 35 percent of body, with diabetes and heart disease as contributing factors, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the New York City medical examiner.

She added that "the manner of death is suicide."

Bartha had been ordered to sell the Upper East Side town house, on a wealthy block of 62nd Street between Park and Madison Avenues. The home was valued at $6.4 million in a divorce judgment.

Police were unable to speak to Bartha following the explosion because he was in a medically induced coma, but authorities have said they were investigating whether he was the person who tampered with a gas line leading into the home's basement, allowing vapors to flow freely for hours until it caused the building to blow up.

Bartha was not charged and "if he's dead, there's no criminality," said Detective John Sweeney, a police spokesman.

The physician, who lived and worked in the four-story landmark, was its lone occupant during the blast, which leveled the building and left the upscale block covered in bricks, broken glass and splintered wood. Authorities said at least 14 others were injured, including 10 firefighters.

The last victim to leave the hospital, Jennifer Panicali, a 22-year-old Web site developer, was released on Saturday.

The town house was to be sold at auction in October to pay a $4 million judgment against Bartha, though his ex-wife had predicted he wouldn't leave without a fight.

Cordula Hahn Bartha told police she received an e-mail from her ex-husband shortly before the explosion, saying he would not leave the home alive and warning that she would be "transformed from gold digger to ash and rubbish digger."

"He has said many times that he intends to 'die in my house,'" she said in a petition filed last year.

The doctor had, at least briefly, considered selling the town house, bringing the matter up with his broker about 2 1/2 weeks earlier, the broker Mark Baum said. Even then, Bartha seemed unconvinced.

"He kept saying 'if'" in reference to the possibility of a sale, Baum told The New York Sun. "And that's it, he never mentioned it after that."

Bartha had been visibly depressed the last several times the two had seen each other, he added.

"He just wanted to destroy himself, and 'himself' was the house, too," Baum said.

A lawyer for Cordula Bartha, Polly Passonneau, said her client would have no comment on his death.

"His death, though expected, is the sad end to a long series of tragic events for him," Ira Garr, a lawyer who had represented Nicholas Bartha, told the Daily News. "Hopefully his family can get some peace out of this."

Bartha was responsible for other implied threats against his ex-wife, according to court records.

A 2005 appellate court opinion said he had "intentionally traumatized" Cordula Bartha, a Jew born in Nazi-occupied Holland, by posting "swastika-adorned articles and notes" around their home. The opinion also said Bartha had "ignored her need for support and assistance while she was undergoing surgery and treatment for breast cancer."

Bartha's next-door neighbors, Niso and Sherry Benbasat and their son Vidal, sued him Friday, claiming the explosion damaged their cooperative apartment and forced them to leave it. Their lawyer said the lawsuit would proceed against Bartha's estate.

Dr. Doom Dies at Hospital

By Nicole Bode and Adam Lisberg
New York Daily News
July 16, 2006

The embittered doctor who blew up his East Side townhouse rather than sell it died yesterday of injuries he suffered in the blast, a law enforcement source said.

Dr. Nicholas Bartha, 66, had lingered in a medically induced coma at Weill Cornell Medical Center since Monday's explosion. He had allegedly rigged a gas line in the basement so the building would blow up with him in it - a bit of twisted revenge on his ex-wife. But when firefighters found him in the rubble, he said, "Could you help me?"

He was not charged with a crime for the blast, which injured four pedestrians and 11 firefighters and damaged nearby buildings. Bartha had worked in emergency rooms all over New York, but he never let on that his bitter divorce and his growing despair were about to become an explosive combination.

"Who would have predicted something like this would happen? There were no signs," said Dr. Emil Nigro, director of emergency medicine at Phelps Memorial Hospital Center in Westchester, where Bartha worked from 1999 to 2004. "If he had gotten proper intervention, maybe it could have prevented all of this."

The destruction of 34 E. 62nd St. capped a sad transformation for the doctor, who came to America as a newlywed immigrant full of promise and drive, but withered into a cold, friendless man who withdrew into his job and his home.

"He was one of the most solitary people I've ever met in my life," said his divorce attorney, Ira Garr.

Bartha was born in Romania at the start of World War II. Studying medicine in Rome in 1973, he met Dutch student Cordula Hahn. The next year, the young couple moved with his parents to Rego Park, Queens, where they married and had two daughters.

Bartha and his parents pooled their money to buy the brownstone, proud to live in one of Manhattan's most exclusive areas. But his parents died, his marriage soured, and by 2003, Bartha found himself alone and despondent - and on the hook for a $1.2 million settlement to Cordula.

He appealed the ruling and won a procedural victory, but lost interest in the case and ignored the new trial - letting his wife win a $4 million default judgment.

The Friday before the explosion, Bartha was served with legal papers so the sheriff could evict him. On Monday, he finished writing a 14-page screed that concluded: "Life passed me by, and I could not achieve everything I planed [sic]."

When he sent it to former acquaintances that morning, some who read it got worried and called police - but it was too late.

Following the appeal the $4 million judgment was entered by default in the lower court, which means that Bartha did not appear and neither did his lawyer, only the wife's lawyer appeared.

                                    Honey, I Blew up the House

By Tom Liddy
The New York Post
July 12, 2006

The shell-shocked woman whose bitter divorce exploded in an Upper East Side fireball said yesterday she was devastated by her wacko ex-husband's apparent decision to blow up the four-story townhouse they once shared.

A grim-faced Cordula Hahn told The Post she was struggling with Dr. Nicholas Bartha's scorched-earth

response to their split.

"It's tragic," Hahn said as she left the Washington Heights apartment she has called home since the divorce. "It's tough," she said, adding that she is doing "as well as can be expected."

Hahn's ex-husband, Dr. Nicholas Bartha, remained in critical condition yesterday, a day after he allegedly used a rigged gas line to destroy the building that housed his office and home. It was a suspected spiteful suicide bid designed to keep the property out of Hahn's hands.

A stressed-out Hahn declined to discuss her husband further, relying instead on her lawyer, Polly Passonneau.

Passonneau, in an e-mail to the Associated Press, said her client was not a "gold digger," as described by Bartha in a vituperative e-mail delivered shortly before the blast.

"He unfortunately did not want to give her one penny, so he kept fighting," Passonneau said. "He is living with the consequences of his own behavior."

The only relative who has apparently visited the ailing Bartha at New York Hospital is his daughter, Serena. She was spotted yesterday leaving the center, her fists clenched and appearing shaken.

"I'm not talking," she curtly told reporters before fleeing.

Meanwhile yesterday, investigators released new details about how Bartha blew up his landmark, 19th-century East 62nd Street building and spread debris and chaos throughout the tony neighborhood.

Police and fire officials said Bartha rigged a pipe to tap into the building's main gas line, a connection he controlled with a brass radiator valve.

The doctored pipe was connected to a flexible hose investigators believe was snaked into the basement, where the blast ripped through the townhouse shortly before 9 a.m. Monday.

Sources said Bartha, 66, likely chose that method of tampering because it gave him more control over the deadly gas - and access to a larger gas line.

"By turning that valve, it would provide a free flow of gas into the basement, flooding [it]," said Louis Garcia, the city's chief fire marshal. "We are saying it was intentional."

Officials said Con Ed inspected the gas line June 8 and discovered a leak but no rigged connection. Service was shut off until repairs were made.

The morning of the explosion, Con Ed was called to the building next door after a resident reported smelling gas. The worker was there when the townhouse exploded.

Property's Value Set to Boom

By Jeane Macintosh and Braden Keil
The New York Post
July 12, 2006

The gas blast that leveled Dr. Nicholas Bartha's landmarked Upper East Side townhouse didn't lower the property's value - and may even have increased it, real-estate experts told The Post. The value is not in the building, but the land on which it sits - especially in that area," said Corcoran Group CEO Pamela Liebman. broker, who asked not to be named, said the site, minus the four-story brownstone "is a developer's dream" because  there's
GAS BLAST: Serena Bartha leaves the hospital    no need to pay for demolition or to go
last night after visiting her father, Dr. Nocholas    through the costly and time-consuming
Bartha, whom the FDNY believes rigged the gas   process of evicting tenants.
main to blow up his town house.
Photo: Robert Miller
He added that it also could be more desirable because a developer wouldn't have as many landmark issues to contend with - although the new building's façade would have to be a reasonable facsimile of the original.

Another real-estate source, who has visited the house that Bartha allegedly destroyed rather than give up, said that beyond the exterior, the 96-year-old, 4,931-square-foot house at 34 E. 62nd St. "wasn't all that terrific."

"Someone would have bought the place and gutted it," he said.

So how much is the property worth?

Most experts put the value, with or without the intact four-story brownstone, at between $7 million and $9 million.

The average price of a townhouse on the Upper East Side is $7 million, real-estate experts said. But because Bartha's lot is slightly wider - 20 feet, rather than 18 feet - it could bring more.

Appraiser Jonathan Miller, who valued the property at $4 million in 2002 - during the Barthas' contentious divorce proceedings - agreed that similar-sized townhouses in the area are "worth nearly twice as much today."

And, with a new 8,000-square-foot house built on the site, it could sell for about $15 million, real-estate agent Toni Simon of Halstead Properties told Bloomberg News.

Doctor’s Isn’t the First Marriage to Be Reduced to Rubble

By Anemona Hartocollis and Cara Buckley
New York Times
July 12, 2006

As her lawyers tell it, the man suspected of blowing up the house was the personification of evil. The ex-wife hid from the Nazis as a child; he drew swastikas all around their house. Their children tried to call him, but he sputtered curses and hung up the phone: he accused them of siding with their mother. Finally, the authorities suspect, he destroyed the house so she wouldn’t get it.

His former lawyer tells a different version: that he was hounded by aggressive lawyers who stripped him of his dignity and everything he owned, taking his beloved house away when he was too depressed to defend himself.

The battle between Nicholas Bartha, 66, an Upper East Side doctor, and his ex-wife, Cordula Hahn, 64, weaves through pages and pages of court documents, but in New York, lawyers say, while blowing up a building is extreme, vindictiveness is not unusual. Divorce lawyers said they had seen pets killed and wives given theater tickets so their husbands could put their possessions on the street.

Some say such spiraling levels of anger, rage and eventually violence are a function of New York’s cumbersome divorce laws, which require one spouse to find fault with the other and thus encourage lawyers to keep the fight going as long as possible, spousal tensions rising all along. Experts noted that while the Barthas had been fighting for five years, even after their divorce became final, some epic New York divorce wars have gone on way, way longer.

Homes are most people’s most valuable possessions, and one of the most sentimental, so they are always a flashpoint. But in New York City, more than almost anywhere else, real estate is the new wealth, and the rapid escalation of prices — the demolished home rose in value from $395,000 in 1980 to more than $6 million today — has raised the stakes in the brutal parlor game of divorce.

Dr. Bartha vowed he would turn his ex-wife from "gold digger" into "ash and rubbish digger." But New York’s rich supply of wealthy spouses and messy divorces have spawned many battle cries, from the ghoulish to the girlish, like Ivana Trump’s "Don’t get mad, get everything!"

"It’s not uncommon for people to say ‘over my dead body,’ " Susan M. Moss, a Manhattan matrimonial lawyer, said yesterday. "Usually, calm and reason take over, and the spouse realizes this isn’t the end of the world and life will go on."

If Las Vegas is the capital of instant divorce, New York City is the worldwide capital of unfathomably big awards and ferocious litigation. Think of Donald and Ivana Trump, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Donna Hanover, Jocelyne and Alec Wildenstein, Ronald O. Perelman and Patricia Duff.

But even anonymous New Yorkers can find themselves in the midst of a titanic struggle.

Raoul Felder, who represented Mr. Giuliani in his divorce from Ms. Hanover, said he had seen works of art and record collections slashed by angry spouses, a puppy put in a microwave and a cat in a washing machine. "The puppy died, the cat lived," he said.

Ms. Moss recalled an opposing lawyer calling her to say that her client was standing on her husband’s driveway, about to take a sledgehammer to his Porsche.

Ms. Moss called her client’s cellphone and managed to calm her down. "I said, ‘It’s only a Porsche,’ " she recalled. " ‘If you’re calm and cool and collected, we’ll get you enough money to buy your own Porsche.’ "

During the course of her 26-year marriage to Dr. Bartha, Ms Hahn had seen her husband change from a dashing young medical student into a withdrawn, embittered and verbally abusive man, said her lawyer, Donna Bennick. When swastikas, clumsily drawn on newspaper articles, began appearing in kitchen cabinets and counters in their townhouse in the summer of 2001, her lawyer said, Ms. Hahn knew she had to leave.

The swastikas were more than symbols to Ms. Hahn. Some of her relatives died in Auschwitz, her lawyer said, and as a toddler, she was hidden from the Nazis with her parents and siblings by members of the Dutch underground.

"The swastikas were very traumatic to her," Ms. Bennick said. "She came to see me and we made a safety plan for her exit."

Ms. Hahn left Dr. Bartha and the townhouse that had become his central obsession in October 2001. Her daughters, Serena and Johanna, left with her, weary of their strict, hypercritical father who broke long bouts of stony silence only to fire insults their way, Ms. Bennick said.

Afterward, when Serena or Johanna tried to phone or visit their father, he burst into angry tirades, Ms. Bennick said. Serena Bartha is a chef in New York, and Johanna Bartha a designer at Nike in the Netherlands, but Dr. Bartha dismissed them as disappointments. His wife was "supposed to educate her children," he wrote in an e-mail message just before the explosion, "and I do not think that a cook and a seamstress is a very good result."

Neither daughter had had contact with their father in two and a half years, Ms. Bennick said. Serena was seen leaving the hospital where her father was being treated yesterday evening.

Yet others said that Dr. Bartha could be a sympathetic figure.

Mark Baum, a real estate broker who helped rent the townhouse’s apartment, said Dr. Bartha was "desperately hurt" by the split, especially his daughters’ decision to leave with their mother. As for the swastikas, Mr. Baum was mystified. Dr. Bartha called him every Rosh Hashana to wish him "a happy and a healthy" year, he said. "He was a little quirky, but he was always kind."

Dr. Bartha’s former lawyer, Ira E. Garr, said Ms. Hahn won her legal battle to get control of the house when Dr. Bartha was too depressed to try to fight back.

In the original divorce proceeding, Mr. Garr successfully argued that the house was Dr. Bartha’s separate property —not marital property. The judge agreed,. On appeal, the house was found to be marital property, and the appellate court sent the case back to be retried on financial issues.

Mr. Garr said he wanted to appeal further, but Dr. Bartha stopped returning phone calls or answering letters. "I didn’t get permission from him to do anything; he didn’t respond," Mr. Garr said.

Frustrated and owed money for legal fees, Mr. Garr said, he withdrew from the case. He said he had not spoken to the doctor for some time and speculated that he might have been heartbroken and not acting out of greed. After she won the appeal, Mr. Garr said, Ms. Bartha won a judgment against her ex-husband by default because he did not show up for a hearing.

New York is the only state that has not adopted no-fault divorce, and experts said that situation encouraged spouses to exaggerate claims of mistreatment. For lawyers paid by the hour, there is little incentive to keep the rhetoric down, because the more tied-up a divorce gets, the higher their fees.

In February, New York State’s chief judge, Judith S. Kaye, called on the Legislature to follow the recommendation of a matrimonial commission she had appointed that said that New York should join all the other states in adopting no-fault divorce.

The commission said that New York had put up some of the strictest barriers in the nation to divorce, by requiring one party to prove cruel and inhuman treatment, adultery, or abandonment for a year.

Stanford Lotwin, who represented Donald Trump in both of his divorces, said that on a scale of 1 to 10, the divorce and financial battle between Dr. Bartha and Ms. Hahn was "an 11."

Warren Adler, author of “The War of the Roses,” who heard Dr. Bartha’s town house explode yesterday from his own apartment on East 56th Street, also weighed in.

His fictional book, (he has been married for 50 years), ends with a divorcing couple dying in the wreckage of the house that both of them refused to give up. “I wrote that book 25 years ago, but wherever I travel, people will say to me, ‘You stole my divorce,’ ” to tell the tale, Mr. Adler said yesterday.

“This is what happens when possessions take the place of emotions. I know I got it right, and this is just one other vindication.”

Marriage, Home Go Up In Flames Doc Rages Before E. Side Blast Hurts 15

As the ruin of the E. 62nd St. brownstone continues to burn yesterday, firefighters searching for victims form a chain to carry rubble away from the scene.   This story was reported by: DORIAN BLOCK, KERRY BURKE, NANCY DILLON, ALISON GENDAR, DAVE GOLDINER, MELISSA GRACE, NICK HERSHONE, ADAM LISBERG, KATHLEEN LUCADAMO, CARRIE MELAGO, HELEN PETERSON, DEREK ROSE, BARBARA ROSS, MICHAEL SAUL, JIMMY VIELKIND, JESS WISLOSKI, OREN YANIV and ANNA ZIAJKA It was written by: BILL HUTCHINSON Breaking news: Gas line tampering discovered at scene of town house blast The demented doctor suspected of blowing up his $9 million upper East Side brownstone yesterday morning was on the verge of losing his beloved home in a bitter divorce settlement - and had vowed to "die in my house." Shortly before leveling the four-story E. 62nd St. building with a huge gas explosion that ignited terror fears and injured 15 pedestrians and firefighters, Dr. Nicholas Bartha sent a rambling, 14-page e-mail aimed at his estranged wife and other targets of his fury. "When you read these lines your life will change forever. You deserve it," the hulking physician ominously wrote his wife of 29 years, Cordula. "You will be transformed from gold digger to ash and RUBBISH digger." Bartha told her, "I will leave the house only if I am dead. You ridiculed me. You should have taken it seriously." The 66-year-old doctor .e-mailed the poison-pen missive to at least a dozen other people and organizations - including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Fox News Channel - shortly .before the failed suicide blast that left him critically burned and buried. The city was rocked about 8:40 a.m. when, officials believe, Bartha opened up the gas lines in his 19th century building before sparking the blast that reduced the home to rubble and sent flames and smoke high into the clear morning sky. "I thought it was a terrorist attack," said David Kovac, 23, of Manhattan, who was walking past 34 E. 62nd St. when he was suddenly covered in ash. Within minutes, the smoldering scene of devastation smack in one of the world's wealthiest neighborhoods was on TV screens around the nation - drawing the attention of the White House, which quickly put out a statement saying the explosion was not terror-related. Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said Bartha, who had an office on the first floor and lived upstairs, was the only one inside when the blast erupted. His secretary just missed being blown up because she was late for work. Shattered brick, mortar, splintered wood and shards of glass spilled across E. 62nd St., between Park and Madison Aves., injuring five pedestrians, most seriously hurting a 22-year-old Parks Department employee. Passerby Karen Morris, 37, a nurse's assistant, rushed to the woman's side. "She was young and beautiful and the whole side of her body had deep cuts and splinters," Morris said. "The poor thing, she was shaking. She said, 'Oh, my God, am I going to be disfigured?' She was bleeding a lot." The injured woman, whose name was not released, underwent surgery yesterday at Weill Cornell Medical Center. The woman called her mother from the hospital, her aunt Annmarie D'Alessandro told the Daily News. "She said, 'Mommy, I hurt so much,' " the aunt said. The other injured pedestrians suffered minor injuries, cops said. Also hurt were 10 firefighters who dug through the rubble with their hands in search of survivors, even as flames shot through the wreckage. Firefighters eventually heard Bartha yelling for help from deep under the ruins. "I just told him we were going to get him out," said Firefighter Richie Schmidt of Rescue 4 in Queens, who was able to slip an oxygen mask to Bartha, an emergency room doctor affiliated with Lenox Hill and Mount Vernon hospitals. When firefighters pulled the heavyset doctor out, he told them no one else was inside. Bartha suffered second- and third-degree burns over 60% of his body and was in critical condition at Weill Cornell. After brave firefighters plucked him from his self-made tomb of bricks and twisted metal, a portrait emerged of a disturbed, paranoid man intent on destroying the home where he had raised two daughters and now lived alone with his rage. Dr. Paul Mantia, who shared medical offices with Bartha at 34 E. 62nd St., said his longtime pal had received an eviction notice Friday. The building was to be auctioned in October as part of his divorce settlement. "I'm sure the eviction notice took him over the edge," said Mantia, who got Bartha's 14-page e-mail at 7:34 a.m. yesterday, about an hour before the blast. "It wasn't an accident." "This building is really the only asset he had," said Mantia, who added he was told that Bartha has been given only a 20% chance to survive. "He loved that place. He loved the office and he loved the building. He was still hoping it wouldn't be over." Cops were investigating reports that Bartha had tried twice before to kill himself. In a lawsuit filed in March, Cordula Bartha said that her estranged husband had declared "many times that he intends to 'die in my house.' " Cordula Bartha, 64, who is Jewish and was born in Nazi-occupied Holland, also charged that the doctor, who is part Jewish, had tormented her by placing swastikas in their home. In the e-mail, a copy of which was provided to The News by a law enforcement source late last night, Bartha railed against his wife. But he also attacked everyone and everything from co-workers to Communists to peace mom Cindy Sheehan to Franklin D. Roosevelt. He seemed particularly fixated on how his family lost their home in his native Romania when he was a boy. "I am not going to let anybody evict me as the Communists did it in Romania, in 1947," he wrote. Last night, E. 62nd St. between Park and Madison Aves. was closed as firefighters extinguished pockets of fire. Two apartment buildings near the blast site remained evacuated. Serious jail time is on horizon for M.D. Dr. Nicholas Bartha could face serious jail time if he's convicted of blowing up his upper East Side home. Prosecutors could slap Bartha with arson charges for intentionally causing yesterday's explosion. Because no one else was in the doomed building, he would likely be charged with third-degree arson or lower, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. He could also face first-degree reckless endangerment charges if prosecutors believe blowing up the E. 62nd St. structure caused a "grave risk of death" to passersby or neighbors. The charge carries a sentence of up to seven years in prison. Carrie Melago Gas Line Tampering Discovered at Scene of Town House Blast Associated Press July 10, 2006 Investigators have confirmed that a gas line leading into the basement of a landmark Manhattan town house was tampered with before the home was destroyed by a ferocious explosion that punctuated an exceedingly ugly divorce, authorities said Tuesday. Someone rigged flexible plastic tubing with a brass radiator valve to the main gas line in the basement of the Upper East Side building, said Louis Garcia, the city's chief fire marshal. With the valve left open, gas was able to flow freely into the house for hours before it was flattened by the blast. At a briefing near the scene of the explosion, Garcia said this was not an accident. "We're saying this is intentional," Garcia said, adding later "anybody who is handy could do this." Authorities have been investigating whether Dr. Nicholas Bartha, the lone occupant during the blast, might have caused the explosion Monday morning rather than sell town house as part of a divorce judgment favoring his ex-wife. Bartha, a physician who lived and worked in the four-story building, remained in critical condition after being rescued from the rubble. Detectives "want to talk to him, but haven't been able to because the extent of his injuries," said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne. Bartha, 66, became a possible suspect after police got a 911 call from his ex-wife, Cordula Bartha. She told them that shortly before the explosion he had sent her a rambling e-mail saying she would soon would be "transformed from gold digger to ash and rubbish digger." The husband went on by warning her, "You always wanted me to sell the house. I always told you I will leave the house only if I am dead." The explosion hurled fireballs high into the sky and left the upscale block covered in bricks, broken glass and splintered wood. Authorities said at least 15 people were injured, including five civilians and 10 firefighters. The 19th-century town house on 62nd Street between Park and Madison avenues — just a few blocks from Central Park — once served as a secret meeting place for a group of prominent New Yorkers who informally gathered intelligence for President Franklin D. Roosevelt before and during World War II. The building was worth nearly $5 million based on a 2004 assessment and as much as $6.4 million in today's market. It was to be sold at auction in October to pay a $4 million judgment against Bartha, though his ex-wife had predicted he wouldn't leave without a fight. "He has said many times that he intends to 'die in my house,"' Cordula Bartha said in a petition filed last year. The court records paint a picture of a bitter dispute that dragged on for five years. According to a 2005 appellate court opinion, the doctor had "intentionally traumatized" his Jewish wife, who was born in Nazi-occupied Holland, by posting "swastika-adorned articles and notes" around their home. The opinion also said Bartha had "ignored her need for support and assistance while she was undergoing surgery and treatment for breast cancer." Power company Consolidated Edison had been at the building on June 8 after a routine check found a gas leak in the pipe. The gas was shut off, and Nicholas Bartha was asked to get the pipe fixed, a spokesman said. The gas was turned back on after the utility ensured the leak was fixed. Signs of Tampering Seen in Town Houses Gas Line By John Holusha The New York Times July 11, 2006 Police and fire investigators digging through the remains of a four-story town house that exploded on Monday indicated that a gas line leading into the house had been tampered with before the blast, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said today. Investigators said that the line had been modified so a hose could be attached to it and that the hose had been stretched to the rear of the house, at 34 East 62nd Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The owner of the house, Dr. Nicholas Bartha, remained hospitalized today, as officials tried to determine whether he was connected to the tampering. One televised report said he was in a medically induced coma today as he was being treated for burns and other injuries suffered in the explosion and fire. If Dr. Bartha is charged with arson or negligence in connection with the explosion, any insurance coverage there was on the building would likely not pay for the damages , a spokesperson for an industry trade association said today. Loretta Worters, vice president for communications at the Insurance Information Institute, said, "If the explosion was caused by a criminal act like arson or negligence the policy would be void." She said the incident "raises a host of insurances issues" because people could sue the building owner for physical injuries and damage to their property. She said insurance adjusters typically work with police and fire investigators to determine the policy holder’s state of mind, looking for financial or marital problems. Dr. Bartha and his former wife, Cordula, went through a bitter divorce and a dispute over ownership of the town house dragged on for years. In April, Dr. Bartha was ordered to sell the building so he could pay his ex-wife more than $4 million. In a rambling e-mail message Dr. Bartha sent to various individuals and organizations less than two hours before the blast, he noted that he had worked as a machinist at a company in Queens shortly after immigrating to this country in 1965. He later attended medical school in Rome, graduating in 1974 and doing his internship and residency in New York. The disjointed, erratically punctuated e-mail message went to his ex-wife, with copies sent to Gov. George E. Pataki and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, and to the Fox News personalities Sean Hannity and Brit Hume, among others. In the message, he told her: "You always wanted me to sell the house. I always told you, ‘I will leave the house only if I am dead’ You ridiculed me. You should have taken it seriously." He also wrote, "When you read this lines your life will change forever. You deserve it. You will be transformed from gold digger to ash and rubbish digger." He sent the message at 7:30 a.m. Twenty-one minutes later, Con Edison received a call from employees of the private club next door, the Links Club — organized early in the 20th century to promote golf — saying they smelled gas. Michael S. Clendenin, a spokesman for Con Edison, said it sent a mechanic, who arrived at 8:20. Mr. Clendenin said the mechanic called in at 8:45 to report the explosion. The mechanic was not injured. The blast caused damage to nearby buildings, blowing out windows and inundating the area with smoke. But today most residents had moved back into their apartments in the Cumberland building, on the corner of 62nd Street and Madison Avenue, although some units were badly damaged and 13 are still cordoned off by the authorities. The blast knocked out air conditioning for the six stores in the Cumberland along a hot retail block on Madison Avenue. "I’m angry that we have to deal with this situation," said Tom Gecaj, the director of security for Lockes Diamands, one of the stores. "I’m angry that a person initiated this situation. We are the last on the chain." Jean Pierre David, the manager of the Links Club, located on the other side of the destroyed building, said the damage to his structure was minimal. "The roof has been bashed in a bit, but there is no major damage. It’s going to be just a few days to get it back into order." Some of the windows in the building were blown out by the blast and were covered by sheeting today. Alan Rogers, who operates the Land’s End store in the Cumberland said the sudden evacuation of residents of the building came as a shock. "It was very tough on some of the elderly people," he said. "Some were in their night dresses. It was very distressing." Miguel Roig, 50, a doorman at the Cumberland, said the explosion had caved in the door to the building’s garage, trapping 10 cars inside. East 62nd Street remained closed between Madison and Park Avenues, as heavy equipment dug into the rubble remaining on the building and trucks hauled it away. Firefighters remained at the scene, hoses at the ready in case any remaining hot spots were uncovered. Although a host of legal and possibly estate issues remain to be resolved, land on the Upper East Side is very valuable and the parcel will almost certainly be redeveloped. Given the 20 by 100 foot size of the lot and the fact that it is in a historic district, whatever is built at 34 East 62nd Street will probably look a lot like the building that was there before the Monday explosion, said Robert B. Tierney, chairman of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. "We would look at the size of the lot, would be a self-imposed limit on the scale and massing on any replacement.," he said "Then we would look at what was there before and ask what would be appropriate for a historic district. And it would probably something like what was there." Doctor Boom's East Side Blast By Mathew Charles, Murray Weiss and Kate Sheehy The New York Post July 11, 2006 An explosive fireball leveled an Upper East Side mansion yesterday - the suspected work of a suicidal doctor from Transylvania hell-bent on enraging his ex-wife, cops and witnesses said. "The whole building collapsed - in a few seconds, finished," said stunned coffee-cart vendor Thad Milonas, 57. The landmark, four-story building was reduced to a smoldering pile of brick rubble at 34 E. 62nd St. at 8:40 a.m. The building's off-kilter owner and sole occupant, Nicholas Bartha - a 66-year-old cardiologist - was miraculously pulled alive from under tons of wreckage in the basement after firefighters heard his feeble cries. "He was 12 feet down and to the left," said firefighter Richard Schmidt, 44. "[His] screams were faint. He was hurting." When rescuers reached the plump physician and asked him what happened, he only moaned, "I want to go to a hospital. I want to get treated." Bartha, an immigrant who survived the Nazis as a child, was fighting for his life at New York Hospital after suffering second- and third-degree burns. Amazingly, the only other seriously injured victim was a 22-year-old Parks Department worker slashed by flying shards of glass as she walked by the home. Authorities suspect a gas leak caused the blast - likely after Bartha tinkered with a heater and hookup in the basement. In a vitriolic e-mail that the doctor fired off to his ex-wife, Cordula Hahn, hours before the blast, he ominously warned: "You will be transformed from gold digger to ash and rubble digger." The heavily-in-debt doc had been locked in a brutal divorce battle that was forcing him to sell his beloved, $10 million home. "I always told you I will the leave the house only if I am dead," Bartha seethed in the e-mail. Divorce papers reveal just how toxic the pair's relationship had become. They describe one instance in which Bartha taunted his ex-wife, a fellow Holocaust survivor, with swastikas he plastered around their home. Bartha's office partner, Dr. Paul Mantia, said his troubled old friend received the final blow - an eviction notice - Friday. "He loved the building. . . . He planned to work until he was 80 and live there until he died. . . . I'm sure the eviction notice took him over the edge," Mantia said. "He did this because of the divorce . . . It wasn't an accident . . . It's very sad," added Mantia, who was bicycling to the office when he came upon the horrific scene. The shattered partner described Bartha as "an old-fashioned, great doctor," albeit with "hard edges." He said doctors have warned him that Bartha has only a 20 percent chance of surviving. Yesterday's horror came after two previous suicide tries by Bartha, an emergency-room doctor who has worked at Lenox Hill Hospital as well as Phelps and Mount Vernon in Westchester. Last year, he was discovered barricaded in his basement, nearly unconscious, after being overcome by gas, officials said. And several years earlier, he had locked himself in his office and tried to do himself in by setting off an insecticide bomb, sources said. Neighbors reported smelling gas shortly before yesterday's blast. A Con Edison worker had been called to the next-door building, but he didn't notice anything and left only five minutes before the structure exploded, sources said. Bartha's badly shaken secretary missed being caught in the collapse by minutes. "I was supposed to be in there," the woman said. A female passer-by who overheard her turned and said, "Thank God, this is your lucky day." Three other civilians and 14 firefighters also suffered minor injuries in the disaster. The 19th-century structure housed medical offices in the basement and first floor, a tenant's apartment on the second and Bartha's duplex pad above. The tenant wasn't home at the time. Bartha's mother had lived on the second floor, performing manicures and pedicures, before she died in 1997, neighbors said. The woman who initially took over the mother's apartment said Bartha seemed very upset when she arranged her furniture differently than his mom had. On at least three occasions, she said, she returned home from work and found him inside. She said he told her, "This is set up all wrong. My mother didn't have it set up like this. "I had to keep reminding him that he just couldn't keep entering someone's apartment," she said. "I left after one year. I couldn't wait to get out." Sources said investigators had talked to his ex-wife and were trying to reach their two adult daughters, none of whom was believed to have visited him in the hospital. A family representative said outside the ex-wife's house that they were all "deeply saddened" and wished "the best for Dr. Bartha." Except, maybe, his ex-sister-in-law, Erna. "He was just miserable," she said. Additional reporting by Dan Kadison, Larry Celona, Perry Chiaramonte, Jana Winter, Kenneth Kobel and Heather Gilmore                      Sick Physician's E-Mail Rantings New York Daily News July 10, 2006 Here are excerpts from Dr. Nicholas Bartha's suicide e-mail, in which he bitterly tells of losing his family's home in Romania and rants against estranged wife, Cordula, co-workers and others. A copy of the e-mail was provided to the Daily News late last night by a law enforcement source: *** WHY DID I DO WHAT I DID? My mother's death. She was trying to get back our house in Rosia Montana, Romania, for years. She was told by her doctor not to go because of her condition. She was obsessed to get back our house a life's work, my parents had to pay up my father's brother and sister for their share of the inheritance. Now I understand why my mother was unsuccessful to get back our house. The Rosia Montana Mining Co. and companies from New Jersey and Canada planned to strip-mine for gold, and several villages including Rosia Montana had to be condemned to be strip-mined and to build a huge lake filled with cyanide to extract the gold from the strip mined ore. My mother who died in Rosia Montana was buried there. Now my mother and others from my family who were buried for centuries will be moved. If we had owned the house again which is in the middle of the village would have made it very difficult to implement their plan. *** My brother died because his wife was able to divorce him with lies and help from N.Y.S., with help of the legal Aid Society, woman's shelters et cetera. Now my brother is dead and his ex-wife is enjoying his house. I do not know why he worked all his life. The same thing happened to me but I am still alive. *** On 1-0/17/01 Cordula, [and daughters] Serena and Johanna left, a few days after the 9/11 disaster Cordula filed for divorce for mental cruelty. If one is a gold digger any lie will do. She never consulted a psychiatrist or priest or rabbi or marriage counselor!!! She did it after I closed the joint account in which she never deposited any of her earnings and now she could not steal any longer money to send to her accounts in Holland. ... [A judge] decided to evict me from the house for which my mother, father and myself worked and paid. My parents and I lost out for the second time, as in 1947 in Romania when the communists expropriated our house. ... In Harlem they would say my family's hard work was "Dissed." *** I can understand if someone wants to divorce it should be easy. There should be no economic incentives in the process! The division of assets should be made, based on the contribution each person. There is no rational explanation for the present method. An automatic division is only giving more incentives to divorce. Cordula did not work for 15 years and still she is supposed to get more than 50%. When slowly she started to work I never saw her money it went to her personal account in a bank in Netherlands. ... If I had had a prenuptial agreement Cordula would have never divorced, there would have been no economic incentive. *** The anti-American politicians and others who are against the war in Iraq (the same people who [were] against the Vietnam war)... I hope they will succeed so that the terrorists will move to the states. So people here will have a taste of suffering as when the East Europeans were given to the Russians by a very sick President Roosevelt at Yalta in 1945. ... I hope most of the country realizes whom Ms. H. Rodham Clinton is and will make sure she will never be a president unless they want to suffer the consequences. I wish President Bush had been at Yalta. *** The legal system is corrupt, killed my brother and now I. I am not going to let anybody evict me as the communists did it in Romania, in 1947. ... I am not good material to be a slave I rebel easily. *** Cordula my further staying alive does not make any sense. Work ... is pure punishment. I will lose my office. Getting sick even in the most optimal conditions is not easy. Alone is certainly terrible. ... Life passed me by and I could not achieve everything I planed. I hope there will be a memorial built on the place in the memory of Eastern Europeans who were betrayed at Yalta by Pres. Roosevelt. There should be place for the Iraqi. P.S. Fascism = Communism = Politically Correct. All this political philosophies are based on minority rule over the majority. Unluckily I had experienced all three. The first not directly, only partially, indirectly. P.S.#2. Ms Cindy Sheehan is desecrating her son's memory. ... She is an opportunist trying to be famous on the back of her son.

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