Long Island, NYC cops, crime briefs

PORT JEFFERSON STATION / Police: Unconscious man rescued from blaze dies

A 52-year-old man pulled from his burning Port Jefferson Station house by Terryville firefighters earlier this week was pronounced dead at a hospital, Suffolk police said Tuesday.

Police said Gerald Berberich was unconscious when volunteers pulled him from the home on Davis Avenue after responding to the call at 10:07 p.m. Monday. Police said the cause of the blaze does not appear to be suspicious. Police said Berberich lived alone.

- John Valenti

BROOKLYN / Prosecutors: Queens imam weighs plea deal

Ahmad Wais Afzali, the Queens imam caught up in the investigation of the Najibullah Zazi bomb plot last year, is talking to federal authorities about a plea deal, prosecutors revealed Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn.

Afzali, charged with four counts of lying to federal agents, has said he was recruited by the NYPD intelligence division to approach Zazi and then got caught up in a dispute between the NYPD and the FBI over disclosure of the investigation.

"Hopefully, we may be able to resolve this short of a trial within a short period," Prosecutor Berit Berger told U.S. District Judge Frederic Block during a request for a two-week continuance to allow further plea negotiations.

Afzali's lawyer, Ron Kuby, joined in the request, but cautioned, "Hope is an elusive quality."

Zazi, a Denver airport shuttle bus driver who became acquainted with Afzali while growing up in Queens, has been charged with acquiring chemical ingredients to make a bomb that he planned to set off in the city subway system.

Officials have said he traveled to Pakistan with two high school friends from Flushing and received training in an al-Qaida camp. One friend is charged with conspiracy to murder U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and the other with lying to federal officials. Zazi's father is charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Afzali, who has aided police in the past as an intermediary to the Muslim community in Queens, was asked to reach out to Zazi last fall, Kuby has said, but when he did the FBI became convinced he was blowing its investigation prematurely. Afzali, the lawyer says, has been charged with lying about conversations that he knew were being monitored.

- John Riley

COMMACK / Jury selection begins in murder-for-hire trial

Jury selection began Tuesday in Suffolk County Court in Riverhead in the murder-for-hire trial of a Nesconset man charged with arranging the killing of his attorney and business partner.

About 60 potential jurors for the trial of Ronald Thornton filled a fourth-floor courtroom after noon. About half were excused due to hardships. Prosecutors say Thornton, 38, enlisted a woman he met at a strip club to hire two men to kill James DiMartino, 44, of Nesconset, in the parking lot of a restaurant on Jericho Turnpike in Commack on Oct. 20, 2008.

Thornton and DiMartino were partners at JMB Funding on Wheeler Road in Central Islip, and the men lived in the same Nesconset neighborhood, prosecutors said. DiMartino represented Thornton when he was charged with grand larceny in March 2008. Prosecutors have said Thornton was involved in fraudulent mortgage deals.

Thornton became a cooperating witness for the district attorney's office while he was held on the grand larceny charges and offered to provide incriminating evidence against DiMartino before he was killed, according to a pretrial hearing in December. Thornton provided the gun used to kill DiMartino and paid his alleged accomplices $8,000, prosecutors said. He is charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Jury selection is expected to last through Friday.

- Carl MacGowan