Sold! Slumlord’s Central Park South Condo Goes for $3 M.

In 1990, The Village Voice named Yonkers-born Steven Green one of the city’s 10 worst landlords, and he spent almost a month in jail after not providing Queens tenants with hot water. Then he became a loathed landlord in Florida; started a charter airline (with pilots in Prada); and early last year failed to get back a $780,000 divorce settlement from his partner, who cited cruelty.

A few weeks later Mr. Green was sentenced to nearly three years in jail for fraud and tax charges. Little Richard played his going-away party, and then in May, a month before jail, he was leaving a West Side club called Posh, crossing toward his Rolls-Royce, when a hit-and-run put him in a coma. Mr. Green is recovering from brain damage, and won’t have to report to prison for another few months.

But he won’t be recuperating in his 1,084-square-foot apartment at the Essex House on Central Park South. The condo was sold off last month for $3 million, city records show, to a limited liability corporation managed by Ira Saferstein, a mortgage specialist based in Westport, Conn.

Do the buyer and seller know one another? Mr. Saferstein said he would not comment, then told this reporter: “If you mention I’m the buyer, you will have a problem, sir. Is that clear?” Afterward, he hung up.

After Mr. Green pleaded guilty last year to using a phony Social Security number to get a loan from Wells Fargo to buy a 212-unit Florida apartment complex (which then caught on fire, revealing hundreds of code violations), he was also forced by a U.S. District Court to pay $4.11 million in restitution.

Even though his net worth was pinned around $77 million, he hadn’t paid anything as of mid-December. His attorneys said restitution was assured because of the value of his apartment, but, as the judge pointed out, nearly $3 million in mortgages had been taken out.

So is there any money from the sale to help pay Wells Fargo back? “We have a federal lien on the property and we are aware of the sale,” a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney general’s office said. “However, at this time, we cannot go into the specifics.” Records show that Mr. Saferstein’s L.L.C. assumed Mr. Green’s mortgages—totaling $2,813,689.59—but it isn’t clear why, or what effect that might have on the court-ordered restitution.

Meanwhile, New York authorities have fared better with Mr. Green. Neill Coleman, the spokesman for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, told The Observer that the city’s attorneys reached a record settlement with Mr. Green’s lawyers over civil housing charges. It happened while he was in the hospital, resulting in, Mr. Coleman said, “Green paying half a million dollars—and that’s actually the largest amount in civil penalties paid by a landlord in HPD history.”

But what was the Essex apartment like? In 2002, The Observer’s George Gurley took a stripper named Miss Kitty there for a “Green Air” launch party. Rick and Kathy Hilton, Irina Pantaeva and Lorraine Bracco came, too, and Bobby Short performed.