New Jersey Man Is Killed in Midtown Poker Game

A mathematician and former professor was shot and killed when masked men with guns broke into a floating poker game on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan late Friday night, the police said.

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times

The commercial building on Fifth Avenue where a man was shot to death during the robbery of a poker game Friday.

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The shooting occurred in an unmarked office on the seventh floor of a commercial building at 251 Fifth Avenue, at 28th Street, the police said.

There were dozens of people, mostly middle-class or well-to-do, playing poker, with a guard posted on the ground floor in the lobby, other players said yesterday. Three or four men in ski masks and dark clothes entered the room after 11 p.m. to rob the players, the police said. The police would not say how much, if any, money the robbers had taken.

There was a gunshot, and the victim, Frank DeSena, 55, of Wayne, N.J., was struck in the torso, the police said. He was pronounced dead at St. Vincent’s Hospital shortly before midnight.

There were no arrests yesterday. Detectives watched surveillance camera footage and questioned other poker players and people from various offices and floors of the building. One man said he overheard an officer say, “It’s like Atlantic City up there.”

It was unclear who was in charge of the poker games.

Meanwhile, poker players, including young financiers and retired accountants, wearing track suits and carrying cups of coffee, arrived throughout the afternoon, only to learn of the shooting. Some stared in amazement at the streaks of blood still in the elevator and on the sidewalk.

The police did not say whether the poker game was legal. Generally, it is legal in New York to play poker for money, but illegal for the organizers to profit. A player who gave his name only as Robert K., a retired businessman in his 60s, said yesterday that the house charged players for every half-hour at the table.

Several players said the stakes were not particularly high, with pots ranging from a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars. One young woman who arrived ready to play compared the poker games to a book club. “It was friendly, and everyone knows each other,” said the woman, who would not give her name.“I am a devoted poker player, but this is quickly changing my mind.”

Mr. DeSena was an avid poker player, those who knew him said.

“He was one of these people who were interested in games of chance,” said a former landlord, who knew Mr. DeSena and his wife, Kristine, when they lived on the Upper West Side some years ago. A brother-in-law of Mr. DeSena’s said he used to compete in tournaments.

But both said they were surprised that Mr. DeSena, a gentle husband and the father of a teenage son, had been involved in the shadowy, sometimes dangerous world of poker games, where locations are spread by word of mouth and e-mail.

“This is so out of character. This is like if the doctor next door was murdered,” said the brother-in-law, Martin Jones, 52. “He’s not the type who would have put up a fight. As far as I know, the poker was a hobby. I’ve never seen him play it, and I’ve known the man 20 years. He was certainly not involved in anything illegal.

“Once or twice a year, they’d go to Foxwoods,” Mr. Jones said. Mr. DeSena had taught at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, Mr. Jones said.

At the office building in the Flatiron District where the shooting occurred, little was known of the mysterious tenants on the seventh floor, who arrived just 10 days or so ago, said the building’s superintendent, Pisha Mithab.

“There are about four to five people that say they do work up there,” he said. “I don’t know which one is in charge.”

He said he asked one of them what sort of business they were conducting. “He said, ‘club,’“ Mr. Mithab said. The men told him that they had hired their own security guard to work when the building’s regular man left at 6 p.m.

According to Mr. Mithab, the tenant said, “We need someone to check who is going in and out.”

Robert K. said a guard frisked people entering the office on his earlier visits last week. He said the same operators were shut down by the police at another Manhattan location recently.

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Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

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