(Wikipedia Commons)
Police have yet to identify suspects in the death of Brooklyn real estate magnate Menachem “Max” Stark last week, but author Joyce Carol Oates is already endorsing a feature film about the man and the murder.
“Only a great film can do justice to rise & fall of Menachem Stark. Scorsese or Tarantino? Coen brothers?” tweeted the 75-year-old Pulitzer Prize nominee.
A Long Island gas station attendant found Stark’s body in a dumpster over the weekend. Stark was reported missing at 2:30 a.m. on Friday. Less than three hours earlier, according to surveillance footage released by the NYPD, two men in a Dodge Caravan kidnapped Stark outside of his Rutledge St. office. Today Stark’s family announced a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.
Stark is being remembered as both a philanthropist to Williamsburg’s Hasidic Jewish community and a foe against his buildings’ tenants. Over 1,000 mourners attended his funeral.
Maybe Oates herself should turn the Stark story into a novel? “Landfill,” her 2006 fictional story published in The New Yorker, was partly based on the death of John A. Fiocco Jr., a New Jersey college student whose body was discovered in a Pennsylvania landfill.