Clubs Inspected as Cuban Is Charged in Fatal N.Y. Fire

A 36-year-old unemployed Cuban refugee was formally charged with 174 counts of murder Monday, two for each of the 87 victims of a gasoline fire that turned a Latino social club in the Bronx into a hellish tomb.

Meanwhile, in a full-scale effort to avoid a repeat of the Happy Land club tragedy, 20 teams of city investigators began scrutinizing 754 social clubs scattered throughout New York in a campaign to search for possible fire and building code violations.

Authorities labeled the crime the worst mass murder in the nation’s history. They alleged that Julio Gonzalez torched the nightclub with $1 worth of gasoline after an argument with a former girlfriend who worked there as a coat checker.

Gonzalez was charged with 87 counts of murder during the course of arson and 87 counts of murder “showing depraved indifference to human life.” The deaths were thought to be the most ever charged to a single person in the continental United States.

Grief and sorrow gripped the Bronx neighborhood containing the charred wreckage of the small, two-story club that on Sunday morning had been filled with pre-dawn revelers, most of them Honduran or Dominican immigrants. A task force of state, local and private agencies in a public school nearby helped make funeral arrangements and offer other assistance.

The Happy Land typified the low-cost clubs which serve as social centers for poor New Yorkers seeking cultural companionship. Many of these people live in apartments that are too small for large gatherings. The clubs can become firetraps because they are often located in run-down storefront buildings with few entrances and exits. The Happy Land had been ordered closed in November, 1988, and again a year later because of fire code violations, but had reopened illegally.

Bronx Dist. Atty. Robert Johnson told a news conference that the accused man, who arrived in the United States in 1980 as part of the Mariel boat lift, had “forced the occupants of the club to choose between remaining inside or breathing a wall of flame at the doorways.”

Police said that Gonzalez had no criminal record since coming to this country. He was being held without bail at Rikers Island jail under a “suicide watch” and later was admitted to a hospital psychiatric ward.

Johnson said that Gonzalez and his ex-girlfriend, Lydia Feliciano, apparently had fought over renewing their relationship. A club bouncer then ejected Gonzalez from the building with a yellow “happy” face on its facade sign.

The district attorney charged that Gonzalez vowed to return, threatening “to shut this place down.” Gonzalez then went to a nearby gas station where he paid $1 to have an attendant fill a small container with gasoline, Johnson said. He added that the station attendant was being treated as a witness in the case--not as an accomplice.

Johnson said that Gonzalez had returned to the club and stood outside for a while, pretending to make a phone call, until a potential witness had left. The district attorney added that Gonzalez tossed the gasoline into the club’s front entrance and ignited the fuel, watching it burn “for some period of time.”

Detectives said that he had made statements to at least two witnesses about his alleged role in the fire. He was taken into custody Sunday afternoon at his sparsely furnished, 10-foot by 12-foot rooming house apartment.

“The devil made me do it. The devil took me,” a remorseful Gonzalez said, according to an account in the New York Daily News.

Immigration officials said Gonzalez arrived in the United States on May 30, 1980, in Key West, Fla. They said that he apparently was not in jail at the time he left Cuba, as were some of the refugees allowed to leave Cuba at that time. Immigration officials said, however, that Gonzalez told authorities he had been imprisoned in Cuba from 1971 to 1974 for deserting the Cuban army.

Neighbors described Gonzalez as a quiet man who kept to himself and had never caused any problems or fought with anyone. “He’s a nice, quiet, clean guy,” the building superintendent told a reporter.

Only four people, including Feliciano and the club’s disc jockey, survived the inferno.

The disc jockey, identified in published reports as Ruben Valladares, was listed in stable condition at a New York hospital with extensive burns.

Fire investigators said that the windowless second floor disco, which had only two narrow staircases, was turned into a chamber of death by the blaze at the club entrance. All but 18 of the 87 victims were found on the second floor.

Death came instantly for some, who were found with drinks still in their hands or with their legs still wrapped around bar stools.

“It was a huge rush of superheated poison gas,” simultaneously searing lungs and starving them of oxygen, said Zachary Goldfarb, deputy chief of operations at the city’s Emergency Medical Service.

Others were found piled on top of each other, a sign of panic and desperation. Bodies were piled four deep by the upstairs door.

On Monday, the shock and trauma of the incident still gripped the impoverished, largely Latino neighborhood where the club is located.

“I feel so sorry and sad,” said Walter Gonzalez, 31, a supermarket worker. “I don’t know how long before things will be back to normal here. Julio Gonzalez was crazy and should be shot.”

In an effort to bring solace to the community, Cardinal John J. O’Connor of the New York archdiocese officiated at a brief outdoor memorial service in front of the club on Monday afternoon. “Our best is never good enough in circumstances of this sort, but all we can do is try,” he said.

Mayor David N. Dinkins, who had viewed the bodies after the fire early Sunday morning, was still obviously shaken as he addressed a City Hall news conference.

“Today, as the city grieves over this tragedy, we are haunted by the realization that it is a nightmare that could have been prevented,” Dinkins said.

He said that Happy Land had been ordered closed because it had violated Fire Department safety regulations. An order to vacate was first issued by the Department of Buildings after an inspection in November, 1988.

“Unfortunately, this order was disregarded and the club was reopened in violation of the law,” the mayor said.

Dinkins said that since the tragedy, the city’s special task force had visited 179 social clubs that were already under orders to vacate.

Of that number, police, fire and city building inspectors found that 165 were closed and 14 were open. The 14 were immediately shut by authorities.

Dinkins pledged that the task force would continue surveying the city’s social clubs for “an indefinite period of time.”

The words had a familiar ring to New Yorkers. Only a year and a half ago, after another fire at a Bronx social club claimed six lives, then-Mayor Edward I. Koch lamented the tragedy and announced creation of a special task force to crack down on social clubs with building and fire code violations.

But after the public outrage and clamor died down, the number of inspection teams was steadily reduced from a dozen to one or two. Faced with hundreds of clubs to inspect, the small number of teams were overwhelmed with work.

Dinkins, who took office only in January as the city’s first black mayor, promised to do better. “I am confident we can get a handle on this thing,” he said.

Sociologists and community activists say that the social clubs serve many purposes. “Some are cultural, some athletic, some are political, some are for people to just get together and have fun, operating sort of like after-hours clubs,” said Xavier Totti, professor of Puerto Rican studies at Bronx’s Lehman College.

Totti added that the clubs often serve as conduits for information for newcomers to the city who might otherwise feel lost. Frequently, the clubs are based on geography--particular hometowns or regions from where people have emigrated.

In the predominantly Italian Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, for example, many southern Italian towns and cities are represented by clubs “where the men get together and chitchat, play cards and look at television in small storefronts of empty buildings,” said Msgr. Angelo Brugli, pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Roman Catholic Church.

In New York’s black communities, such clubs are most often found among Haitians, Jamaicans and other Carribean immigrants, said Andrew W. Cooper, publisher of the black-oriented City Sun newspaper.

The clubs often begin life in shabby rented quarters. They bring in a disc jockey, chairs and tables--and little else. Some allow patrons to bring their own food and drink, including liquor.

“I don’t go to these places,” said Luz Torres, 49, a cleaning woman who came to New York from the Dominican Republic. “These places are very dangerous. You have to be on guard all the time for your safety.”

The death toll at the Happy Land was the worst in New York City since 146 garment workers--mostly young immigrant European women--were killed in a colossal fire at the Triangle Shirt Waist Co. factory in lower Manhattan on the same date in 1911.

On Monday, commemorative ceremonies were held at the site of the long defunct factory, now a classroom building at New York University.

“How ironic that, just as was true in the Triangle Shirt Waist factory fire, many of those who died in the Happy Land social club were recent immigrants to our land,” Dinkins said. “They came to America in search of a better life . . . their American dream became a fatal nightmare.”

Researcher Lisa Phillips in New York contributed to this story.