SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. -- Arson and utility experts Sunday investigated a blast that leveled the $2.5 million summer home of a former Manhattan art dealer acquitted last year of charges he sexually tortured a Canadian man.
A Suffolk County police spokesman said the investigation centered on reports from neighbors that they smelled natural gas in the vicinity of the beachfront home of Andrew Crispo prior to the Saturday blast. Long Island Lighting Co. investigators were cooperating in trying to locate a possible gas leak, he said.
Crispo is currently serving a five-year prison term for tax evasion, and police said no one was home at the time of the blast that leveled the single-story stucco home on the exclusive Gin Lane in Southampton and engulfed it in flame about 1 p.m. Saturday.
The caretaker of the property, whose identity was withheld by police, was also located and brought to the explosion site, police said, adding that he did not live on the property and was not there at the time of the blast.
Police said there were no reports of injuries in the explosion that was heard throughout the posh resort community on the South Fork of Long Island.
'It was a basic Hampton's summer home in the $2.5 million range,' a Southampton Village police officer said. 'It had lots of antiques and artworks. I know from answering previous alarms.'
Other sources said the destruction might total as much as $4 million.
Crispo, 44, was at one time the proprietor of a leading East 57th Street art gallery in New York, dealing in American and contemporary art. He was the agent for several of the world's top collectors including Swiss Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Crispo was acquitted last November by a state Supreme Court jury of kidnapping and terrorizing a male Canadian graduate student as part of a sadomasochistic sex game that allegedly ended in a torture session at Crispo's gallery.
He also had been implicated but never charged in the sensational 1985 slaying of a male Norwegian fashion student whose face was covered with a type of leather 'desk mask' that was sold as an art object in the avant-garde New York market.
A former Crispo employee, Bernard LeGeros, is serving a life sentence in that slaying.
