The last of three masked men pleaded guilty to a failed attempt to extort $8.5 million from a wealthy Connecticut arts patron and her companion by threatening them with a deadly virus during a 2007 home invasion.
The 38-year-old Romanian national, Stefan Alexandru Barabas, had been on the run for around 15 years before he was finally arrested as a fugitive in Hungary in 2022. He pleaded guilty last week to conspiracy to disrupt commerce through racketeering, federal prosecutors said.
Barabas will be sentenced on Sept. 11 and could face six to seven years in prison if the court accepts a plea agreement, prosecutors said.
Three additional men in the case have already been convicted, including the two other masked intruders who prosecutors say entered the South Kent home with Barabas brandishing fake weapons. The men then bound and blindfolded millionaire philanthropist Anne Hendricks Bass and abstract artist Julian Lethbridge, injected them with a substance they claimed was a deadly virus and demanded that the couple pay the $8.5 million or else they die.
After it became clear that Bass and Lethbridge could not meet their demands, the men drugged the couple with a sleeping pill and fled in Bass’ Jeep Cherokee, prosecutors said.
The SUV was found abandoned the next morning at a Home Depot in New Rochelle, New York. Days later, an accordion case containing a stun gun, a 12-inch knife, a black plastic replica gun, a crowbar, syringes, sleeping pills, latex gloves and a laminated phone card with South Kent’s address was found washed up in Jamaica Bay. New York.
The accordion case and knife were eventually linked to the men, as was a partial Pennsylvania license plate seen by a witness near Bass’ estate the night of the home invasion, among other evidence.
Bass, who is credited with helping to raise ballet’s profile in the US, died in 2020. She was 78.
In a statement to The Associated Press, Lethbridge said: “This has been an extremely long and difficult process. I am grateful for the professionalism and dogged work of various law enforcement agencies to bring these individuals to justice.”
“That said, I remain convinced, based on the sophistication of the crime, as well as other facts, that there are others who participated in the planning and financing of this crime and who have yet to be brought to justice,” he said. “It is my continued hope that one day all those involved will be known and that they too will be held accountable.”
In 2012, during the trial of Emanuel Nicolescu, one of the intruders and Bass’ former house manager whom she fired, Bass tearfully described thinking she was going to die the night the three men burst into the house she shared with Lethbridge.
Bass said she was caring for her 3-year-old grandson that weekend and had just put the boy to bed when the burglary occurred, according to news reports.
“I heard war cries, a terrifying sound. I saw three men dressed in black rushing up the stairs, almost as if they were in military formation,” she testified.
She said the intruders then grabbed her, threw her to the ground and tied up both she and Lethbridge. The men then injected the couple with a substance that turned out to be a benign fluid, according to news reports. Bass said the men had guns and knives, but she never saw their faces during the hours-long ordeal.
Bass testified about how she was traumatized for months by the attack, noting how she and Lethbridge previously enjoyed spending weekends at the mansion.
“Before the break-in,” she said, “I felt pretty comfortable being there alone. I can’t stay there alone anymore.”