Judge plans Thurs. verdict in NYC crane collapse case, weighs 2 versions of small failures

Judge plans Thursday verdict in NYC crane trial

NEW YORK — As a judge weighs the manslaughter case surrounding one of the nation’s deadliest crane collapses, he’s being asked to choose between competing scenarios of a massive disaster that started small.

Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Roger Hayes plans to issue a verdict Thursday in the trial of William Rapetti, who declined a jury.

In closing arguments Monday, prosecutors and defense lawyers each framed views of small parts causing a cascade of failures that brought down the towering rig on March 15, 2008, killing seven people.

Prosecutors pointed to polyester straps Rapetti used to hold up a more than 11,000-pound piece of steel. His lawyers zeroed in on pinholes that helped anchor beams used to link the crane to the building.

The case against Rapetti and his company, Rapetti Rigging Services Inc., is the only criminal prosecution directly tied to the midtown Manhattan accident. Two dozen people were hurt, a brownstone was crushed and several other buildings were damaged in a neighborhood near the United Nations headquarters.

The collapse and others in New York and elsewhere in the ensuing months helped put crane safety under a microscope. In New York, they led to new safety measures and false-records and bribery cases against some inspectors.

Prosecutors say the crane fell because Rapetti did a reckless job of deploying the heavy-duty straps temporarily to fasten a steel collar around the crane 18 stories above the ground.

Rapetti used four straps, known as slings, when the crane’s manufacturer called for eight, included a badly worn strap although he had new ones available, and didn’t follow instructions on the straps’ warning labels to pad them to prevent them from tearing, according to trial testimony.

Under prosecutors’ theory, the worn strap broke, the others were overloaded and promptly snapped, and the collar plummeted down, breaking beams that anchored the crane to the skyscraper it was building.

“It’s so simple. All of it, all of it, began with this sling,” which would have taken Rapetti just seconds to inspect and throw away, Assistant District Attorney Deborah Hickey said in her summation.

Defense lawyers portrayed Rapetti as a safety-conscious crane veteran, saying his use of the straps conformed to industry know-how. The crane was compromised, Rapetti’s lawyers say, by other people’s engineering decisions and welding mistakes — particularly the pinholes, part of a pin assembly used to secure the tie beams to the collars.

The engineer who designed the crane testified that the pinholes weren’t made as he planned, but he said he’d ordered them fixed. An engineer hired by Rapetti’s lawyers called the repairs inadequate.

In the Rapetti camp’s scenario, one of the pinholes gave way, so a beam broke loose, and that rupture rocked and tipped the crane, which wasn’t bolted to the ground as cranes commonly are, according to the engineer who designed it.

“When you look at the complete picture, what’s very clear is that there was nothing that Mr. Rapetti did that day that was wrong,” defense lawyer Arthur Aidala told the judge Monday.

The top charge against Rapetti, 49, carries a potential penalty of up to 15 years in prison.