Reyes: ​“I’m Not #3”

Angelo Reyes moved through the back of his Grand Avenue laundromat rescuing motors from Speed Queens that were destroyed by arson. He wasn’t hiding.

Reyes knows some people think he ordered the arson last July that destroyed those 90 washers and dryers along with a laundromat he spent 10 years building up nearby on Lombard Street.

He’s heard that directly from people since late last Friday, when the feds announced they’ve arrested two men on charges of setting the fire. The indictment by a federal grand jury charged that a third person ordered the fire. It didn’t name person number three. ​“Another person known
to the Grand Jury but not named in this Indictment,” he was called in court papers.

No officials have suggested Reyes is that man. But given that he owned the business, and given that he has a troubled past, he drew speculation.

Reyes repeated on Monday that he in no way set the fire — which he said has destroyed his finances. And he vowed that neither rumors nor financial hardship will deter him from his quest to rebuild the Fair Haven neighborhood.

“I’m not the third person,” he declared, in between working on the motors in the back of the Grand Avenue ​“People’s Laundromat.” He opened that shop seven years after he built the now-destroyed Lombard Street outlet.

“People were saying, ​‘Ange. Are they [the feds] looking at you?” That’s bullshit. How can they look at me as number three?”

Reyes said he’s ​“still trying to make sense of number one and number two” — the two men arrested on the federal arson charge, a father and son known as ​“Baldo” and ​“Baldito.” They’re in federal custody pending a Thursday court appearance. The federal indictment says Baldo drove Baldito to the laundromat the night of July 30 and carried gasoline cans inside. While Baldo served as lookout, Baldito lit the fire, then showed up at Yale-New Haven Hospital later that night with severe leg buns he claimed he suffered while working on a car that caught fire, according to the indictment.

Baldo worked for Reyes, delivering people laundry to their homes on Sundays. He’s not ready to believe the charges, Reyes said.

“People say, ​‘Ange, he’s your friend. You’re in denial.’ But I’m going to leave it alone for a while. I’m shell shocked,” he said.

Reyes recalled watching the fire burn his laundromat last July — and Baldo watching with him. That’s part of what confuses him about the arrest, he said. The indictment alleges that Baldo carried in the gasoline used to torch the place.

“He was there. The [accelerant-sniffing] dogs were. My employees never saw him there that day.”

So who does he think did it?

“I don’t have a list of enemies. There are people who don’t like me. But I’m not giving up. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to rebuild and go forward.”

He had no financial incentive to burn down his own laundromat, Reyes claimed: He had no insurance on the $575,000 of equipment he lost (along with all his records and potential business). And he had failed to update his insurance on the building itself, meaning he owed more on his first mortgage than the $400,000 to $450,000 he potentially could collect, he said. That lender, the Fishman Group of West Hartford, can foreclose on the property now if it chooses.

“I’ve lost 60 percent of my clientele,” Reyes said. The arson, he argued, cost him far more than he could ever hope to get back from insurance.

On Monday Reyes was poking through a bank of washers and dryers stashed in the back of his surviving Grand Avenue laundromat. He retrieved the machines from the detritus of the Lombard laundry’s arson. The wiring’s shot; he plans to sell the machines for scrap metal. But first he was removing motors that remained intact. He can use the replacement parts for the 40 Speed Queens — soon to be 90 Speed Queens — cleansing and drying Fair Haven’s clothing in the Grand Avenue store.

For 14 years, Reyes hasn’t stopped moving, hasn’t stopped building his business empire.

The arson cloud over Reyes’ head is the latest setback in what has been one of New Haven’s most public and poignant tales of personal and neighborhood renewal.

Reyes (shown in this video reacting to last July’s fire soon after it occurred), who’s 44, grew up in Fair Haven. He went to jail for dealing drugs. In prison, he learned about navigating mortgage markets from a fellow inmate doing time for financial fraud.

Once released, he went straight. He worked construction jobs during the day. At night he rehabilitated rundown Fair Haven homes; then he helped working-class Fair Haveners obtain mortgages to buy them. The jailhouse lessons in the mortgage business helped.

In that way, Reyes stabilized a stretch of Lombard Street. There he bought and built up his first People’s Laundromat. Over 10 years, he expanded it four times, to 4,000 square feet.

Then he set his sights on Fair Haven’s main commercial drag, Grand Avenue. He has renovated a series of buildings there, too. Meanwhile, he helped organize a business district with public improvements, community events for families such as an annual Halloween night out, and safe Friday night dance parties for teens. When a car smashed into the Rodeo Shop, Reyes arrived on the scene to help repair the damage so the store could reopen right away. When a crew from New Haven rescued Guatemalan immigrants from a slave-labor arrangement in northern Connecticut, Reyes gave them a place to live.

In between he’s had his continued run-ins with people, including a confrontation with a man accused of harassing one of his employees, a confrontation that ended in Reyes’ arrest. But overall Reyes made the transition from ex-con to community leader.

Still, Reyes said Monday, the past always dogs an ex-con, especially when trouble hits the way it did with the arson and suspicion focused on him.

“They’re still calling me a drug dealer. I work 18 hours a day. I don’t listen to rumors,” he said. But he did spend time reading the personal attacks and allegations of criminality lodged against him over the weekend by commenters on the New Haven Register’s site, calling him the arson’s mastermind ​“without question.”

Fueling the speculation is the fact that authorities brought a federal arson charge against Baldo and Baldito, rather than a customary state charge. The U.S. Attorney’s Office offered no explanation for the federal charge. (Baldo and Baldito were charged under Title 18, United States Code, Sections 844(i) and 2.)

Sometimes the use of a federal charge in what seems a more routine state matter can signal a broader investigation of a central target. When lower-level accused participants in a scheme are charged first, that’s sometimes a sign that authorities hope to pressure them to finger the alleged mastermind as part of a plea deal.

But the use of a federal charge can also mean that local authorities wanted the feds to help them solve a case, to bring in more money and staff time to devote to it. That was the case here, New Haven Fire Marshal Joe Cappucci said Monday. He said that unlike local residential arson, commercial arson falls under the federal statute. That’s why the federal investigators were called in, he said. ​“Now we have more resources.”

Meanwhile, Angelo Reyes (shown in the video reacting to the July fire shortly after it occurred) is hustling to build up his own resources again. Like any developer, whose entire holdings can teeter on the precipice of the latest transaction, he’s continually working on the next project.

So while a federal grand jury has spent months investigating the arson, Reyes has spent months building out the back half of his Grand Avenue laundromat. He’s scraped together money to buy some 50 new Speed Queens. In an effort to reclaim some of the past year’s lost business, he’s planning a grand reopening on June 26 to celebrate what’s now an 1,800-square-foot laundromat. Customers can wash and dry their clothes for free all day.

And if a motor breaks on one of the machines, Reyes will have a replacement on hand.