A Romanian national pleaded guilty Tuesday to his role in a brazen 2007 home invasion robbery at an elegant Connecticut mansion, where a billionaire patron of the arts was held hostage, injected with a supposedly lethal chemical and ordered deliver 8.5 million dollars.
Stefan Alexandru Barabas, 38, who was on the run for nearly a decade before being captured in Hungary in 2022, was one of four masked men who broke into the home of Anne Hendricks Bass, brandishing knives and facsimile firearms, according to the United States Department. of Justice.
Barabas’ plea agreement in Connecticut District Court marks the final chapter in the search for the intruders that stretched from the toniest parts of Connecticut to post-Soviet Europe. The native of Iasi, Romania, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to interfere with commerce by extortion, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
Bass, who survived the ordeal and died in 2020, was an investor known for her generous support of arts and dance institutions in New York and Fort Worth, Texas. On the night of the attack, the intruders, including Bass’s former butler who had been fired months earlier, tied up Bass and her boyfriend and injected each with a substance the intruders claimed was a deadly virus, according to court documents.
The intruders ordered the victims to pay $8.5 million or else they would be left to die from lethal injection, prosecutors said. When it became clear to the intruders that Bass did not have such a large sum of money to give them, they fled after drugging Bass and her boyfriend with “a sleeping pill,” according to court documents.
Bass’s 3-year-old grandson was in the house at the time of the attack but was sleeping in a separate room. He was unharmed.
Over the course of the next two decades, the FBI and state police in Connecticut and New York gathered evidence and convicted three of the intruders, but Barabas remained elusive. Much of the key evidence in the case came from an accordion case that washed ashore in New York’s Jamaica Bay about two weeks after the home invasion, according to court records.
The accordion case belonged to one of the intruders, Michael N. Kennedy, whose father was a professional accordionist, prosecutors said. Inside the accordion case that washed ashore were a stun gun, a 12-inch knife, a black plastic Airsoft gun, a crowbar, syringes, sleeping pills, latex gloves and a laminated phone card with the address of the Bass’s 1,000-acre property. , the court documents said.
Barabas’s conspirators were Emanuel Nicolescu, Alexandru Nicolescu and Kennedy, also known as Nicolae Helerea. Emanuel Nicolescu, the former butler, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2012 for his role in the plot, prosecutors said; Kennedy was sentenced to 4 years in 2016; and Alexandru Nicolescu was sentenced to 10 years in 2019.
The Nicolescus are not related. They all had ties to Romania.
Detailed home invasion
The intruders ran into the home around midnight when Bass was heading to the kitchen to get ice for a knee injury, according to court documents.
The men ran up the stairs shouting a “war cry,” according to the government’s sentencing memorandum for Emanuel Nicolescu.
The memo said the men told Bass and her boyfriend that they would administer the antidote to the alleged poison in exchange for $8.5 million. But neither Bass nor her boyfriend had that much cash in the house, the memo said. Bass offered them the code to his safe, but he warned them that all it contained was jewelry and chocolate.
The trio left when it became clear there was no easy way to get the cash, court documents say. They made the couple drink an orange-colored solution to fall asleep and stole Bass’s jeep. Investigators later found DNA evidence on the steering wheel that helped link the men to the crime.
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