A real estate agent was caught on video repeatedly calling a bouncer the n-word outside a Bushwick bar last week, while phoning the cops to warn that if they didn't come soon he'd "end up burying this black guy."
The racist outburst happened early Friday morning outside House of Yes, a bar and performance venue by the Jefferson Street L stop. The man has since been identified by the NY Post as 29-year-old real estate agent Chris Giardina. He was fired from his job at MySpace NYC on Sunday night, according to principal broker Shawn Mullahy.
The six-minute clip shows the man drunkenly berating the bouncer, claiming that he was roughed up while leaving the club, and apparently calling the police to try to get the man arrested.
"Touch me again you fucking n-gger," he can be heard shouting. As a few people in the area jeered, Giardina turned to the man filming and said, "Yeah I said it, because he’s punching me you fucking sp-c."
"What is this, Harlem?" Giardina, who is originally from Boston, wondered aloud at one point. Later, he informed the police dispatcher, "Get somebody here or else I'm going to kill somebody."
Pointing at the cameraman and bouncer, he exclaimed, "I hate ignorant people. Sp-c—ignorant. Black—ignorant. You're the n-gger."
Both men on the receiving end of Giardina's racist tirade remained unmoved throughout the ordeal. "This is America," said the person filming. "We're better than this."
Reached for comment, Jacqui Rabkin, a marketing director at House of Yes, told Gothamist, "We are deeply appreciative of the way [the bouncer] kept his composure while the aggressive patron was hurling racial slurs at him, and we feel he acted fully within his rights throughout the interaction.
"We feel we made the right move escorting this patron out of our venue when he became aggressive and engaged in name-calling towards a different security guard indoors, and that decision was validated when we saw how his behavior escalated outdoors," she added.
The video ends shortly after police arrive on the scene, seemingly in response to Giardina's call. According to Rabkin, the cops asked the bouncer if he wanted to press charges, and "he replied that his only desire was for everyone to get home safely and he did not want to waste the emergency unit's valuable time."
On Sunday, Giardina told the Post that he is not racist. "The word that I used, that I’m embarrassed by using, was being thrown around the entire time," he explained to the tabloid. “It doesn’t make me a racist. It makes me an idiot." He also claims the video was manipulated, and the crowd was "actually on my side."
An NYPD spokesperson said there was no record of any arrests at the location at the time of the incident. We've reached out to Giardina and we'll update if we hear back.
