Attempted Robbery Update

Via NY Daily News

A masked man rushed into the home of a 61-year-old woman and beat her on her kitchen floor after she opened the back door to let her cats inside, police said yesterday.

Meredith Dworkin’s husband heard her screams Thursday night, ran downstairs and tackled the intruder in the Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn, home.

Howard Seidler, 61, an immigration lawyer, pulled the man’s mask off during the scuffle, which spilled out onto his deck. But Seidler, a former NYPD highway cop, couldn’t get a look at the guy in the dark.

The thug scurried off and jumped into a getaway car.

“He grabbed me and threw me on the floor,” Dworkin said from her bed at Lutheran Medical Center, where she was recovering from a collapsed lung and broken ribs.

“He just started to pound away.”

“I was yelling, ‘Help me! Please help me!’ Screaming as loud as I can for anybody to help me.”

Her husband believes the attacker is a low-level Albanian mobster who had threatened him over a green card.

“So the idea is, ‘I want my green card or give me my money back,’” Seidler said. “He told my secretary, ‘I’m going to come back Friday and kill him. I’m gonna mess up his wife.’”

Dworkin said she was in the kitchen about 10 p.m. when she saw something through the storm door.

“I went to close the storm door, but his hand was on the handle on the outside,” she said.

Seidler chased the man down Gerritsen Ave. before he hopped into a Mercedes. “I couldn’t see what the SOB looked like,” Seidler said. “That’s what kills me.”

Seidler, who records show has had run-ins with creditors and Uncle Sam over taxes, said Eastern European gangsters have sought his services ever since he freed an Albanian national from immigration detention years ago.

“Then all of a sudden here comes a guy from the Russian mob, arrested 25 times and they want me to get him out,” he said.

Police were investigating the attack yesterday. No arrests had been made.