An MTA engineer turned an actual transit-system boiler room into a brutal workplace right out of the movie “Boiler Room” by forcing underlings to do his bidding with mob-style threats, sources say.
Chief Engineer Nicholas Jezina created a high-pressure atmosphere at the Coney Island Rail Yard boiler facility, allegedly hurling racial invective and insults at staffers and then threatening to retaliate if he was demoted or fired.
“He’s threatened all of us, so he should be fired,” said one engineer, Dominick Hudyberdi. “I fear for my life and my family’s life.”
According to an MTA investigator’s report, Jezina routinely ordered subordinates to leave the workplace to buy him cigarettes and lunch and verbally abused them with curse words.
Hudyberdi, who is Muslim, also said Jezina routinely told him to “take [his] turban off [his] head.”
Jezina also allegedly told a veteran who served in Afghanistan and Iraq that all military “are baby killers,” before beaning him with a crumpled piece of tin foil.
Another worker, Rayazul Juma, told probers that Jezina routinely acted like a “tough guy” who had “a mobbish personality” and regularly displayed on his office wall a picture of Al Pacino’s iconic Michael Corleone character from “The Godfather.”
Although investigators did not find the picture, they found cigarette butts in a makeshift ashtray — proving Jezina illegally condoned smoking at the facility — and “copper piping welded and shaped like a gun,” the report states.
The investigation ended with Jezina being bumped down in title to stationary engineer and transferred to an agency facility in The Bronx.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Jezina recently returned to boast he would someday be back running the boiler room — and wouldn’t forget who had complained to MTA investigators, Hudyberdi said.
Jezina did not return messages, but he told agency probers that “no one had ever placed an objection” to buying his lunch and cigarettes and denied most allegations besides occasionally cursing.