Thomas Gilbert Jr. Not a Stranger to Local Police

The son of a New York hedge fund leader with a house in Wainscott was charged with murder Monday in the shooting death of his father at the elder man’s apartment in Manhattan the day before.

Thomas Gilbert Jr., 30, of Wainscott and Manhattan was arraigned Monday night and is being held without the possibility of bail for the alleged murder of his father, Thomas Gilbert Sr., 70. He is expected to be indicted by a grand jury by tomorrow.

According to the complaint filed by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the elder Mr. Gilbert was killed by a single shot to the head in a bedroom in his apartment on Beekman Place Sunday afternoon. His wife, Shelly Gilbert, had left him alone in the apartment with their son while she ran an errand. When she returned 15 minutes later, her son was gone and her husband was dead on the floor next to the bed, with a .40-caliber Glock handgun lying on his chest. Police said Monday that the younger Mr. Gilbert had attempted to make his father’s death look like a suicide.

Detectives of the 17th Precinct immediately sought out the son in connection with the death. According to Officer George Tsourovakas of the New York Police Department’s public information bureau, when officers arrived at the younger Mr. Gilbert’s 18th Street apartment late Sunday night, he quickly surrendered. He was taken into custody by police as a person of interest, and was questioned by detectives at the 17th Precinct, which covers the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The official arrest was made early Monday afternoon, Officer Tsourovakas said.

Mr. Gilbert faces life imprisonment without the possibility of parole if convicted as charged.

Along with the murder charge, he is facing 24 additional felony charges. Two are for possession of a loaded weapon, with the balance being for possession of instruments for forgery, stemming from a skimmer device and 21 blank credit cards found in Mr. Gilbert’s Chelsea apartment.

The younger Mr. Gilbert has had several brushes with the law the past few months in both Southampton and East Hampton Towns. He also has an outstanding criminal contempt charge in Southampton for violating a court order of protection for Peter Smith Jr. on Labor Day. The order required him to stay away from Mr. Smith, but despite that, according to records, he approached him and attempted to talk with him on Sagg Main Beach that evening.

According to a friend of the Gilberts, the Smiths and the Gilberts had been close. “The Smiths were friends of the Gilberts and the son  had even lived with them for a while,” the friend said in an email, asking not to be identified. She did not know what caused the falling out that led to the order of protection.

The Smiths’ historic house on Sagg Main Street was destroyed by a fire two weeks later. Detectives suspected arson; police are still investigating the cause of the blaze.

Mr. Gilbert was arrested by Southampton Town Police on the criminal contempt just days after that fire. Several publications have reported that he was a suspect in the arson investigation, but the Southampton Town Police would not comment Tuesday on that case.

When he was arrested in East Hampton recently on the unlicensed driving charge, the younger Mr. Gilbert gave police his father’s Georgica Association Road address as his home address. He has several other charges pending in East Hampton Town Justice Court.

East Hampton Town police were called to the Gilberts’ house in Wainscott last March after the elder Mr. Gilbert arrived from the city to discover that someone had been staying in the house. Nothing was reported stolen, and no arrests were made.

Thomas Gilbert Sr. was the founder of Wainscott Capital Partners, which he described on his Linkedin page as “a long-short hedge fund that I have formed based on a 25-year track record of investing in public equities as well private equity transactions.” The fund’s value varies widely, depending on the source, from a high value of $200 million to a low of $5 million. He was in the news locally in 2012 when he fought a losing legal battle over the positioning of a barn on a neighboring property in Wainscott owned by William Babinski.