Paul Garrison vividly remembers the last time he spoke to his lover and longtime companion Michael Lorge, the Norwood resident who was brutally and mysteriously murdered on Valentine’s Day 2009.

At 4:30 a.m., after a long night of playing video games, Garrison, a Michigan transplant, went to wake Lorge, who got up early most mornings to drive to his job as a taxi dispatcher in Yonkers.
While Lorge rose to face the day, Garrison sat down to check his e-mail. “Go to sleep,” Lorge told him.

Garrison obliged. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he told Lorge. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Lorge replied. “Now go to sleep.”

The next time Garrison would see his lover’s face was five days later at Lorge’s open-casket wake. Friends who attended said Lorge looked remarkably good for a man who had been shot in the head at close range as if he had been executed. He was 42.
More than 14 months later, the murder remains unsolved, leaving Garrison and others struggling to make sense of Lorge’s sudden, violent death.

‘Everybody knew Mike’

Lorge grew up an only child in the same five-room apartment at 3228 Decatur Ave. that he shared with Garrison. (Lorge was murdered just across the street from the building.) Like many kids in the area, he attended St. Brendan’s School, a couple of blocks away. “Everybody knew Mike,” Garrison said.

“I knew him since he was 3 years old,” said Anna Galvin, a longtime local resident. “He was a great guy. It’s horrible what happened to him.”

Lorge’s cousin, Joanie DiBella, who lives in Massachusetts, is a year younger than Lorge. She grew up in Manhattan, but spent summers in the Bronx. The two filled hours on end, just hanging out, laughing, she said. “We always had a lot of fun together,” DiBella said.

Bob Anderson lived nearby, but met Lorge over the CB radio wire. “We talked all the time and stayed friends for years and years,” said Anderson, who eventually married and moved upstate. “He protected me like a big brother.”

Anderson said Lorge lavished his three kids with gifts. He called his heavyset friend — “he was pushing four bills,” he said — a “giver” and “the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off of his back.”

Besides being a CB radio buff, Lorge loved music, trains (one of the few pictures of Lorge shows him smiling in front of one) and was a “huge Trekkie,” Garrison says. He taught himself how to play a variety of instruments and started a couple of Web radio shows. The latest effort was called Freedom One, which he worked on with a group of kids in Duluth, Minnesota. He called himself “The Dispatcher.”

Lorge’s last job was as a dispatcher for Millennium Cab Company in Yonkers, where he worked for the last few years. Milos Roganovic, the owner of the company, called Lorge a “very good dispatcher” and said he was a “good employee, a good person” who “people got along with.”

Garrison met Lorge through a chat line in 1995. The two quickly fell in love and Garrison moved into the Decatur apartment in January 1998. Both cared for Lorge’s elderly parents. His father died in 2001 and his mother was put into a nursing home with dementia in 2003. On Christmas day in 2006, Lorge and Garrison exchanged wedding rings in an informal ceremony in their apartment. 

Most people who knew Lorge didn’t know he was gay. He often introduced Garrison as his cousin. Anderson said he knew, but that Lorge never actually told him. “Mike thought it was nobody’s business,” Garrison said.

Before he died, Garrison said Lorge, a diagnosed diabetic, had quit a 25-year smoking habit and was on a diet. “He’d really turned things around,” he said.

‘Rock bottom’

At about 7 a.m. on the morning Lorge was murdered, Roganovic called his usually-punctual employee’s home to see why he hadn’t shown up for work. Garrison picked up the phone.

After the call, Garrison was concerned, but decided to get up and head to the store to play the Lotto numbers Lorge had picked out the night before. When he walked out of the building, his stomach dropped. Dozens of cops, emergency workers and onlookers lined the streets. Police met him as he walked down the building’s front steps. He could see police circled around the red Mitsubishi sedan he and Lorge shared. Its front driver door was open.

Garrison began walking toward the car, but police stopped him. “What’s going on?” he demanded. There had been “an incident this morning,” the cops said. He watched as medical workers placed a white sheet over a body obscured by the gathered police. At that point, he knew.

Two detectives asked him to go down to the 52nd Precinct on Webster Avenue to answer a few questions. Garrison, a former military policeman, spent most of the day answering them politely. Garrison said the detectives let him know they didn’t consider him a suspect. But when they dropped him off, they checked his apartment for signs of a struggle. There were none, he said.

That afternoon, several reporters stopped by. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Finally, he took the phone off the hook and fell asleep.

For months afterward, Garrison would have trouble sleeping. He lost 40 pounds. In May, he said he took 127 sleeping pills with alcohol in an attempt to never wake up. The next thing he knew, he was in the Montefiore Intensive Care Unit. He still doesn’t know how he got there.

“I had hit rock bottom,” he said. A doctor told him “he was lucky to be here.”

The Investigation

Meanwhile, the investigation into Lorge’s murder, as far as anyone could tell, had stalled. Garrison and Lorge’s cousin both said the precinct didn’t return their repeated phone calls. An NYPD?spokesman said 52nd Precinct detectives “continnue to investigate this homicide and the case remains active.” Lorge’s case is the only 2009 murder case in the precinct that wasn’t solved, the spokesman said.

Those who knew Lorge said they couldn’t think of any reason someone would want to kill him, but the shooting appears to be premeditated. He was shot in the back of the head six times, according to the medical examiner’s report, and nothing was stolen from Lorge’s person or his car.  The shooting occurred at 5:30 a.m., the exact time Lorge left for work nearly every day.
“Somebody knew his pattern,” Anderson said. “He had his issues, man. But Mike wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Lorge did have at least one skeleton in his closet. In 1998, he went to prison for nearly three years for possessing child pornography and was a registered sex offender. Garrison and Anderson both said the charges and sentence were unfair and dismissed any notion that it might have had something to do with his murder.

Several residents who knew him didn’t find out about the prison stint until the New York Post reported it in an article a day after the murder.

The Landlord Conflict

One constant in Lorge’s life was an ongoing conflict with his landlord, Ndue “Tony” Gelaj, who owns Lorge’s building and two identical buildings connected to it. For several years, after Lorge’s mother moved into a nursing home, Gelaj’s company, Fleishman Realty Corp., tried unsuccessfully to evict Lorge from the apartment he had lived in since childhood, according to Garrison’s lawyer and court documents.

Lorge was paying $257 for a five-bedroom apartment, a steal at least five times below market rate. In suing for eviction, Fleishman’s attorneys refused to acknowledge Lorge as the successor to the apartment and accused him of not paying rent, according to court documents. Lorge’s attorney, in response, said Fleishman was refusing his rent checks.

On top of that, Lorge had discovered — backed up by a February 2008 finding by the Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) — that Fleishman had been overcharging his family $111.12 a month since 1991. Based on this, Lorge was counter-suing for $23,001.84 and court fees, court documents say.

Lorge found himself in court a couple of times a year. Garrison said Lorge wasn’t interested in the money. He just wanted to stay in his apartment. He kept a red bag filled with all of his court documents and filings with him at all times. It was in his car when he was murdered. Garrison said Lorge kept him out of the fight in order to protect him. In instant message exchanges, Anderson said Lorge would often make morbid jokes, such as, “If anything happens to me, it’s my landlord’s fault.”

In April of 2008, nine months before he was murdered and three days before he was scheduled to appear in housing court, Lorge was viciously attacked near his apartment by two silent assailants while he was getting into his red Mitsubishi. It was early in the morning. He was on his way to work. “They beat the snot out of him,” Anderson said. The NYPD?confirmed that Lorge filed a report for felony assault on April 4.

Lorge was scheduled to appear in housing court for his case on Feb. 17, three days after his murder. 

The Fight Continues

A month after Lorge’s murder, Fleishman dropped the case against him. Twice, after the murder, Garrison came home to find glue in his lock. A couple of months later, Gelaj’s lawyers began trying to evict Garrison on the same grounds as in Lorge’s case. Garrison, who is on public assistance for disabilities, retained a lawyer, Brian Sullivan, from MFY Legal Services, a nonprofit.

During the trial in December, Gelaj’s brother, Miter, who did maintenance at the building, claimed he had never seen Garrison before and the landlord’s lawyers said he had no right to live there. Sullivan said the landlord’s lawyers “offered a comically low buyout.”

Garrison sees the case as something Lorge would have wanted him to keep fighting. “I’m just as stubborn as he was,” Garrison said.

Sullivan argued that Lorge and Garrison were partners and had lived together in the apartment for more than a decade. Proving the couple’s closeness was crucial to Sullivan’s argument.

The Norwood News made several unsuccessful attempts to contact Tony Gelaj at his office on East 208th Street in Norwood and on the telephone. Last summer, the office’s front door had a glass window marked with a single National Rifle Association (NRA) sticker. No one was there.

There is now a heavy steel door in front of the glass door. Last week, the steel door was open, as was the office. When approached about the building and the murder, an older man sitting at a back room desk who refused to give his name said he knew nothing about either the building or the murder and added that he didn’t have to tell this reporter anything. “Go away,” he said.

Several tenants interviewed for this article did not want to be identified, some saying they didn’t want to start trouble with the landlord. One longtime tenant said the landlord could be vindictive and mean, but didn’t know him to be violent. Others said they never had any problems.

The ‘Smell of a Hit’

Wilford Pinkney, Jr., a criminal justice professor at Monroe College and a former detective with the Bronx District Attorney’s office, said the clearance rate (how often someone is arrested) for murders is somewhere around 30 to 40 percent. “The further and the farther out from the crime, [the rate’s] going to be lower,” Pinkney said.

Homicide is the one crime where police work especially closely with the district attorney’s office before making an arrest, Pinkney said. Even if investigators have good leads or know who did it, there’s still the matter of proving it in a court of law. “There’s a time when you know who it is, but you can’t get the evidence,” Pinkney said. “I’m sure we could go to some precincts where you could find some cases sitting there that have been there for 20 years.”

When briefed on the few facts of Lorge’s case, Pinkney said, “How many people roll up on somebody at five in the morning? That would smell of a hit.” 

In a recent interview, Garrison said he is feeling better, but still thinks about Lorge all the time. “Now whenever I think about him, I think about good memories,” he said. Like others, Garrison would like to see some closure in the murder investigation.
 While waiting for the housing court decision, Garrison spent his days in the apartment, which is still filled with Lorge’s stuff. At night, though, he stayed with a friend. “For my safety, I’m staying away,” he said.

In late March, the court ruled in Garrison’s favor. In his opinion, which was published in the New York Law Journal, Judge Jaya K. Madhavan wrote: “Although [Garrison] has lost the only family he has ever known, he need not also lose his family home.”