Middlesex Fire Inspector Said He Was In The Mob, Made Threats, Feds Say

MIDDLESEX, NJ — A fire inspector for Middlesex borough and other New Jersey towns has been charged with conspiracy to commit extortion using threats of force, violence, and fear, Acting U.S. Attorney William E. Fitzpatrick announced Thursday.

Billy A. Donnerstag, 49, lives in Hackettstown but is the part-time fire subcode official/fire inspector for the town of Middlesex. According to the feds, from December 2016 and through June 2017, Donnerstag and another man, Joseph P. Martinelli, 64, of Kenvil, conspired to extort the owner and operator of a real estate development and construction company. For his part-time job with the town of Middlesex, Donnerstag worked six hours per week at $40 per hour.

Martinelli and Donnerstag allegedly wanted the victim to pay Martinelli because he had not paid Martinelli enough money for the sale of a property a decade earlier. The victim was allegedly threatened with physical harm if he did not pay thousands of dollars to Donnerstag and Martinelli, both of whom intimated that they had connections to organized crime, prosecutors said. In a series of telephone and in-person conversations with the victim, Donnerstag and Martinelli told him that, in addition to being a fire inspector for Middlesex borough, Donnerstag also collected debts.

Donnerstag allegedly described himself to the victim as “the guy that you don’t want to see,” “a problem for you right now,” and “someone that you need to deal with about this issue.”

Federal prosecutors allege: Donnerstag explained that he was a collector of debts who operated outside of the legal system and was “not somebody who’s in the yellow pages.” Donnerstag further explained that people who did not want to deal with lawyers would “rather deal with somebody like me, who’s just very cut and dry” because “I get the job done . . . and I get it done fast. Don’t ask me . . . how I get it done fast, cause you already know how I get it done fast.”

Donnerstag told the victim to ask others about Donnerstag’s father, whom Donnerstag referred to as “Jerry the Jew,” because, according to Donnerstag, “that’s what I do.” According to publicly available information, in the 1970s, Gerald Donnerstag of Belleville, a/k/a “Jerry the Jew,” reportedly was connected to organized crime, and was convicted of murder in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and theft in Essex County.

Donnerstag made a series of threatening statements to the victim regarding the consequences of failing to pay, including:

• “if you were in front of me right now, you’d be on the floor. Okay? Cause I don’t talk—I don’t get talked to like that. You don’t know who I am.”

• “You need to iron this out with Joe. Again, if, if I have to come meet you now— again, it, it, it, it’d become, it’s gonna be a problem.”

• “What I do, is I make sure that people don’t take advantage of other people. Do you understand that? Now I also do other things, but this is one of the things that I do. Now, again if you’re not figuring wh, what my business is by now, you’re either, and again I, I say this with as much respect as I can, either an idiot, or you’re just lying because you don’t want to, to, to understand that I come from somewhere that most people don’t wanna see.”

During the conspiracy, over two separate meetings (both of which were lawfully recorded), Donnerstag and Martinelli obtained $15,000 in cash from the victim. The cash had been provided by law enforcement officials.