In the early hours of an April morning in 1975, New York landlord Imre Oberlander and his associate, Yishai Webber, donned disguises — wigs and blackface — and set out in their car from Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
They planned to burn down one of the six buildings Oberlander owned, but their illicit efforts were thwarted when a police officer pulled them over for a broken taillight, only to find firebombs in their car. Both men were promptly arrested.
“Oberlander became one of the first landlords charged in connection with the decade’s epidemic of arson,” writes historian Bench Ansfield in “Born in Flames – The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City”(W.W. Norton).
The book disputes the long-held notion that tenants were responsible for many of the notorious fires that burned in NYC in the ’70s and ’80s, many of them in The Bronx. Instead, Ansfield places the blame on flawed and inadequate legislation and greedy landlords…