PHIL REISMAN

Phil Reisman: Sam Zherka — a short history of violence

Phil Reisman
preisman@lohud.com

For nearly a decade Sam Zherka strutted across the Westchester scene in leisure gym wear, playing the part of a heavily bankrolled political provocateur.

Phil Reisman

Westchester's pols didn't know what to make of him. They seemed bamboozled by him. Some courted him and took his money. Others tried to stifle him, only to be badly outfoxed. A few tried to bring him into the fold, which was a mistake.

He only made fools of them in court and in the pages of his weekly newspaper, The Westchester Guardian.

I once called him an agent of chaos. But federal prosecutors, who want to put him in jail on charges he obtained $146 million in bank loans by submitting false loan applications, are profiling him in much scarier terms.

In a 24-page court affidavit, they say Zherka, 46, "is physically violent" and a "habitual liar." They say he is "a danger to the community at large."

Citing independent sources, the feds say his extracurricular activities have included extortion and the selling and distributing of narcotics. On page 6 of the affidavit, they detailed his alleged exploits under the heading: "Zherka's Boasts of Involvement in Violence."

One time, a dead man was found duct-taped to a chair in the basement of Vertigo, one of his Manhattan strip clubs. According to the prosecutors, he called his brother, Ali, who told him he had "roughed someone up." Zherka instructed his brother to remove the body, prosecutors say.

The feds make Zherka out to be tougher and meaner than Mafiosi. They say that at another one of his topless joints, the VIP Club, members of an organized crime family demanded protection money. Zherka supposedly asked if they were willing to die for his money because he was certainly prepared to die to keep them from getting it.

"Zherka and his associates then stripped the men of their clothes and assaulted them," prosecutors said.

When Zherka's daughter introduced him to an African-American man she was dating, Zherka reportedly waited until she left the room, and then pointed a shotgun at the man, warning him that if he didn't stay away he would "blow his (expletive) head off." That's in the affidavit, too.

Prosecutors also pointed to the case of one Robert S. Ryan, who owned a nightclub on West 20th Street, as further proof of Zherka's violent tendencies.

On April 12, 1996, the documents say, Zherka and his brother confronted Ryan in the club's basement office where "(t)hey repeatedly punched Ryan in the head until he bled, knocked him in the ribs, dragged him by the hair, and ultimately threw him into a bathroom."

Ryan testified in court that Zherka put a gun to his head and said he would rape Ryan's wife and three daughters if he went to the police.

In Westchester, Zherka has wielded power through his considerable wealth. According to a court exhibit, his net worth is $61.8 million, which does not include property he owns in Kosovo and Albania.

Underfunded candidates for office gladly accepted his money through the auspices of the Independence Party, a shady operation with vague ideologies that basically confers endorsements in exchange for patronage. It may be charitable to say that the local politicians were naïve about Zherka. However, it's a cold stone fact that there is a long list of people from both ends of the political spectrum who tried to accommodate him one way or another, only to watch in horror as he turned on them. Those he didn't ridicule in the pages of his weekly, he sued. His nuisance suits became the stuff of legend.

Several years ago, he started a Tea Party movement to abolish county government — and for a second or two it looked like the thing actually had a chance of succeeding. People were, and continue to be, fed up with high property taxes and Zherka, perceiving the zeitgeist, deftly exploited it.

It was then, too, that in a display of cynical performance art, he propped up his own hand-picked candidate to run for county executive against Andy Spano. The candidate was Spano's estranged son, who made a couple of awkward public appearances before dropping out.

Later, in one of the more bizarre chapters of the three-ring "Zherkus" (a word coined by the aforementioned Spano), Zherka was named to the county's 23-member charter revision commission, a panel established to rewrite the county's body of law. It looked like the fox was let into the henhouse, except that Zherka resigned after one day.

He called the other commission members "political hacks."

Perhaps even more unbelievable, in Mount Vernon he was named to a police advisory board.

On Thursday, Zherka pleaded not guilty to federal charges of tax fraud, wire fraud and witness tampering that could conceivably put him in jail for the rest of his life.

Reach Phil Reisman at preisman@lohud.com

Twitter: @philreisman