A true Jersey story of history, murder and decay
IT'S A WONDER the ship ever lasted long enough to sit here, half-sunken on the rocks, tethered to the shore by a burnt-out gangplank jutting over the cracked pavement of an Edgewater parking lot.
The Binghamton ferryboat, more than a century old, almost burned down before it ever launched. The vessel recovered to spend a couple decades crossing the Hudson River, carrying payload and passenger. Decommissioned in the late 1960s, it later found a second career as a floating restaurant and nightclub.
Then its owner, Nelson Gross -- a former state assemblyman, political powerbroker and real estate mogul -- was kidnapped and brutally beaten, left for dead on the banks of the river. The boat eventually met the same fate.
Visit the wreck of the Binghamton on a clear night and you can watch the moon hang low over its battered upper deck, New York City glimmering across the river. In the far distance, you'll see headlights blink against the suspension wires holding up the George Washington Bridge to the north.
One of the last things anybody ever saw Nelson Gross do was drive his silver BMW across that bridge with two other men in the car. The E-ZPass records helped lead investigators there, to New York, where they found his body a week later, money still in his pocket, the victim of a botched kidnapping by a couple of teenagers. One of them bussed tables at his restaurant.
Binghamton's, as the restaurant was called, limped along for a decade after Gross died. But it closed for good in 2007 and has sat dormant ever since. Efforts to revive the boat, reopen it as a restaurant or cart off what's left of it for preservation, have all failed -- stymied by financial trouble, battered by hurricanes and mired in lawsuits.
This is the story of the hulking, haggard white skeleton hunched on a mudflat next to a Trader Joe's and what brought it there.
NELSON GROSS DISAPPEARED on Sept. 17, 1997. He spent the morning in his office at the restaurant and was last seen getting into his 1990 BMW 750 with two younger men and driving to a nearby Bank of New York branch, where he withdrew $20,000.
Gross' son, Neil, told investigators he saw his father leave the restaurant's parking lot with the two men and called him on his cellphone to see if he was all right.
"It's just business," the elder Gross told his son. Then, he hung up.
Police determined early on that Gross had crossed state lines with the men and the cash in tow, so the Federal Bureau of Investigations led the inquiry into his disappearance. A Freedom of Information Act request filed with the FBI in 2014 for this story yielded more than 700 pages of documents, many of them heavily redacted, providing glimpses into the frantic search for the former political powerbroker.
"During a four-day period at the height of the investigation," one FBI agent boasted in an internal memo released with a batch of documents in 2015, "almost 400 leads were generated and tracked."
A $100,000 reward was offered for information leading to his safe return. The intensive search brought investigators to West Palm Beach, Florida; Salem, Massachusetts; and Wilmington, Delaware.
Gross, however, was found just miles from where the Binghamton was moored.
Historical photos taken sometime in the 1940s and 50s show the Binghamton in its heyday. Finished just before a boom in ferry travel in New York Harbor, when hundreds of boats crossed between New York and New Jersey every day, the 231-foot Binghamton was one of five sister ships purchased by Hoboken Ferry. Shortly after the company bought the vessels, a fire broke out in an outdated ferry house at the Hoboken terminal, damaging the Binghamton and several other ships, and destroying the boathouse.
The terminal was soon rebuilt and the ferry repaired, running continuous service between Hoboken and Barclay Street in Lower Manhattan for more than 60 years.
But with new routes to New York City cropping up -- the rapid transit lines, the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and the George Washington Bridge -- the ferries eventually fell out of favor. The Hoboken Ferry Company, which had opened in 1821, shut down in 1967, putting its boats up for sale, including the Binghamton.
A local developer bought it in 1969 and eventually towed the ship north, to Edgewater, to convert it into a restaurant. But beset by mishaps and financial trouble, the restaurant never opened. Gross bought it in the early '70s and had better luck, opening the converted floating restaurant, Binghamton's, in 1975.
The ship soon became a popular dining spot and discotheque, known for fine seafood and raucous disco nights that occasionally brought the police calling to the Hudson's shores.
Raymond Bateman, a former Republican state senator from Somerset County, says he was last on the ferry in 1977, when Gross hosted a fundraiser for Bateman's gubernatorial campaign. The affair brought out some of New Jersey's political elite -- as well as Elizabeth Taylor, who was then married to Virginia Sen. John Warner.
"She was the star of the show," recalls Bateman, who lost to Brendan Byrne later that year. "I was an also-ran."
The vessel was also a popular spot for weddings. Valerie Seefelt and her husband, Kenneth, had their reception there in October 1989.
"We could see the New York skyline and the pictures were breathtaking," she says. "The Binghamton, the skyline and the George Washington Bridge in the background. It was beautiful."
There were some wedding day mishaps -- the cake was the wrong flavor and the flowers weren't quite the right color -- but Seefelt says her relatives still talk about the reception on that palatial, floating banquet hall.
"The guests had an absolutely fantastic time. It was just great. I wish it would still be the way it was. I wish they could do something, but it's too far gone."
A missing poster for Nelson Gross offering a reward posted shortly after his disappearance. LIKE HIS FERRY, Gross had reinvented himself a couple times.
Born in 1932 in Teaneck and educated at Yale, he worked for a time as an assistant U.S. attorney before getting involved in politics. He served a term as an assemblyman, headed the state Republican committee and was credited with helping Richard Nixon win the 1968 presidential nomination. He also managed Gov. William Cahill's successful 1969 campaign.
"He was a gregarious, interesting guy," Bateman recalls. "Back in those days, Bergen County was very heavy in the Republican party. They were the heavyweights, so everybody paid attention."
Gross also served in Nixon's administration, taking on two special appointments in the State Department.
"He was absolutely captivated by politics," Bateman says. "I think he was looking for something, maybe running for governor. They probably did him in before he was done."
What did him in, politically, was a federal investigation into illegal donations funneled to Cahill's campaign. Gross was convicted in 1974 on tax fraud and perjury charges, eventually serving several months in prison for the crime.
When he got out, Gross fell into real estate development, buying up a 12-acre stretch of waterfront in Edgewater and properties in Hackensack. While his wife, Noel, remained active in politics -- serving on the state Racing Commission and launching her own Senate bid in the late 1970s -- Nelson Gross was living a life of semi-retirement when he went missing.
Investigators commandeered the Chart Room, a floating banquet hall attached to the Binghamton, as a makeshift interrogation room in which they questioned employees about their boss' mysterious disappearance.
It wasn't immediately clear that he'd been kidnapped, and as they tracked down leads in the case, police pieced together a timeline of Gross' activities in the weeks before he went missing.
Mostly, it seemed, he had been playing golf.
"GROSS buys the latest model Callaway clubs and his game has improved as a result," an investigator from the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office noted in one report, recounting an interview with an employee of a golf club on Long Island. "NELSON uses these clubs exclusively and will carry them in the trunk of his vehicle."
An excerpt from a Federal Bureau of Investigation investigatory record from the search for Nelson Gross. After investigators canvassed the area, an informant led them to Christian Velez, a 17-year-old former busboy at the Binghamton who lived in the neighborhood. He quickly took police to a wooded area along the Hudson River, where Gross' body lay.
Velez and two co-defendants -- 17-year-old Miguel Grullon and 18-year-old Tony "Alex" Estevez -- soon confessed to what they'd done. It was hardly the work of criminal masterminds.
For one, the gun they used was not loaded.
They said Velez confronted Gross inside his office at the restaurant with an empty .38 revolver and led him out to his BMW in the parking lot at gunpoint.
There, he and Grullon forced Gross to drive to the bank, initially demanding $100,000 but settling for $20,000 when the old man told them that was all he could withdraw on short notice.
Estevez accompanied them down a concrete embankment off the West Side Highway, where the two minors, worried Gross would recognize Velez from the restaurant, bludgeoned him with a rock and stabbed him several times.
According to the FBI's investigatory records, they also left Gross to die with $1,130 in his pants. They evidently never thought to check his pockets.
Anthony Estevez, right, apears in court on Thursday, Sept. 25, 1997 in this artist rendering. Because the two main perpetrators were under 18, prosecutors sought a plea deal, and the three pled guilty to federal kidnapping and conspiracy charges.
"I'm sorry," Estevez, who was present for the killing but denied participating, said during a court hearing, according to an account in The Star-Ledger. "But I know that being sorry won't bring him back."
BINGHAMTON'S CLOSED down in 2007, but like a lot of old, nearly forgotten things, has found another life online. A Facebook page devoted to the vessel provides periodic updates on its plight and, more frequently, old photos from its heyday. Former employees and patrons have also organized an annual reunion over the past few years.
Efforts to revive the boat, however, have not fared well. Soon after the restaurant closed, Gross' estate, managed by his wife, signed a 99-year lease with a group called the Mi & Sun Corp. that was looking to reopen a floating restaurant in its place.
But Daniel Kim, a Palisades Park attorney who served as chief financial officer of the company, said in a telephone interview they had underestimated how much the vessel had deteriorated over the years.
"From day one, we never got to operate it," Kim says. "We never got to run the boat."
They began racking up environmental and safety code violations from the borough and had to sell their liquor license to pay off debts, Kim says. Things got worse from there. Hurricane Irene caused significant damage to the vessel in 2011, and a mysterious fire left the covered walkway connecting the boat to the mainland badly damaged a year later.
Hurricane Sandy, which sent a swollen Hudson into properties along the Edgewater riverfront, was perhaps the final blow, Kim says.
"I hit the wall," Kim says. "When you have two hurricanes in a row, without ever being able to open the business, naturally, you can't survive."
Noel Gross and her family brought a civil suit in 2013, claiming Kim and his investors owed them more than $350,000 in back rent -- and arguing Kim had fraudulently commingled personal and company assets. A jury trial awarded damages, but Kim appealed, court records show, bringing the case before a state appeals panel, which sided with the Gross family, ordering Kim's companies to pay nearly $400,000 in damages.
Kim, who declined to comment on the specifics of the case, says he wasn't sure how he'd pay.
"It was something beyond my control, and I regret it every day," he says. "I feel terrible every time I see the boat. There are some things about the Binghamton that can be saved. You just need somebody who can come in with money and a vision, and build it again."
Roger Gross, Nelson's nephew -- who spent a couple of summers on the Binghamton shucking oysters as a prep cook -- is now handling the property for his aunt. He says, at this point, the boat's too far gone to restore it.
As for the Binghamton's future? "We're uncertain as to what's likely to happen."
S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter.