It was all Greek — or Chinese — to them.
A former longtime mechanic for New York Crane testified yesterday about the many communications problems he had with a Chinese company while procuring cheap knockoff replacement parts for a crane that would eventually collapse on East 91st Street, killing two people.
Those problems included the overseas company, RTR Bearing, sending over a diagram of the key piece they were making — a bearing — with several notes on it in Chinese, said the mechanic, Tibor Varganyi.
New York Crane owner James Lomma, 65, is on trial for manslaughter for allegedly cutting corners to get the crane back in service, leading to the 2008 collapse.
Lomma signed off on the diagram, and never asked an engineer to check the proposed work, Varganyi testified.
Varganyi, 64, said he found RTR on the Internet in 2007, and the company said it could get the work done faster and cheaper than a US company they’d spoken to. But Varganyi’s contact at RTR, Joyce Wang, quickly had second thoughts about taking the job. She said she’d spoken to their chief engineer, and “he said because in the crane it is a very important part, and we are afraid the weld [technician] we had is not good, because normally we didn’t do like that. And honest speaking we don’t have confidence on this welding,” Wang wrote in a July 6, 2007 e-mail to Varganyi.
Varganyi said he never forwarded that e-mail to Lomma “because I didn’t think it so important.”
He said he thought they had simply misunderstood what he was saying, so he forwarded them some more information, along with two diagrams of the piece he wanted them to build.
“Sorry I really confused by these two drawings,” was the e-mail he got back.
Varganyi, who speaks with a thick Hungarian accent, said that had him confused. “I don’t know what she means by that,” he said.
Varganyi said they kept pressing forward, and he forwarded Lomma their invoice and their diagram of the proposed work, complete with notes in Chinese.
“Did you know what they meant?” prosecutor Deborah Hickey asked.
“No I did not,” Varganyi said.