Police suspect that robbery is the main motive in the murder of Felix Brinkmann, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor who was found beaten and bound in his Upper East Side apartment on Thursday night. Brinkmann's apartment was ransacked and a man and a woman left his building's garage in a Honda Civic belonging to the victim. The car, with the license plate "FELIX B," was found abandoned in the Bronx last night.
Brinkmann was asphyxiated—he was found with his hands tied behind his back and his face down in bed—and police removed evidence from his 65th Street and York Avenue apartment, including a computer. According to the Post, Brinkmann had a "penchant for prostitutes" and "investigators are looking into whether the female suspect was a sex worker, the sources said." The Daily News spoke to Brinkmann's son, who suggested that a hooker could have killed him in order to rob him; Rick Brinkmann added, "He was very charming" and still "sexually active...It was a natural part of his being."
Brinkmann had apparently pulled a gun on a man back in April—Newsday reports that the 26-year-old and Brinkmann had an argument at the Bronx building Brinkmann managed and "police sources said detectives were also trying to locate" the young man but "It was not clear if that man is the same person who Brinkmann let into his East 65th Street apartment, along with a woman."
Much is being made of Brinkmann's colorful past: He managed the Adam's Apple, a popular club in the 1970s and survived the Holocaust. The Times reports that back in the disco heyday, "While others would boast of their money, sexual prowess and dancing skills, he could speak of having avoided death four times at Auschwitz, according to a close friend," and the Daily News explains, "Although Brinkmann was Lutheran, the Nazis considered him a Jew because of his Jewish mother and imprisoned him first in the Lodz ghetto in occupied Poland, where he met his future wife, Simone. Brinkmann's son said his dad told him that after the war a Russian soldier gave him the chance to execute a Nazi and even handed him a machine gun. 'My father couldn't do it,' Rick Brinkman said. 'Even after all he had gone through.'"
