DARRYL LITTLEJOHN--A MENACE TO SOCIETY

Newest information:

An ex-con bouncer being questioned in the murder of Boston native Imette St. Guillen worked as an enforcer for a notorious New York City drug kingpin and was once probed by federal authorities investigating multiple gangland slayings, according to federal court records and a source.

Darryl Littlejohn of Queens, who remained in custody yesterday in New York for parole violations, was yanked out of his jail cell in September 2002 to speak with federal officials probing murders allegedly committed by associates of drug lord Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols, the source said.

Court records show that Littlejohn, 41, a career criminal with seven felony convictions, was even appointed counsel to defend him against possible “death penalty-eligible charges” in 2002 as feds began to turn up the heat.

While the investigation did not produce additional charges, a source said authorities were probing Littlejohn’s work with Nichols in the South Jamaica neighborhood where Nichols’ gang violently ruled the drug trade in the 1980s. Nichols, once accused of ordering hits on NYPD cops, is now serving 25 years-to-life on a federal drug conviction.

“The word on (Littlejohn) was that he had been invovled in committing murder-for-hires for the South Jamaica drug crews,” said the source. “We had gotten some evidence, but we couldn’t make a case on him for murder.”

Littlejohn is now facing intense scrutiny in the slaying of St. Guillen, a 24-year-old Mission Hill woman whose brutalized body was found in Brooklyn Feb. 26.

Police said Littlejohn was one of the bouncers in The Falls bar who escorted St. Guillen outside after the Soho hot spot’s owner Dan Dorrian asked her to leave the establishment at about 4 a.m. The petite woman’s body was found 17 hours later.

Littlejohn began working at The Falls after his 2004 release from prison following a four-year stint on an armed robbery conviction. Court records show he was found guilty of separate armed robberies by state and federal prosecutors and served concurrent sentences for those convictions.

In a 1995 armed robbery, court records state, Littlejohn, using the alias Jonathan Blaze, vaulted over the counter of the NatWest Bank in Farmingdale on New York’s Long Island, while accomplices pointed a .357-caliber hand cannon and a .38-caliber Colt at customers and employees. The trio made away with $61,759 that Littlejohn snatched from the cash drawers, the records state.

The incident was one of several violent crimes committed by Littlejohn, who has been jailed for much of the past 20 years on drug and robbery convictions. In the intervening years, he fathered a son and daughter who were not living in the Queens home police searched Monday in connection with St. Guillen’s murder.

A source said he was also a close associate with several members of the gang led by “Fat Cat” Nichols, whose infamously violent reign over the Queens crack-cocaine trade has become part of crime lore and woven into movies, rap songs and the novel “Bonfire of the Vanities.”

Nichols “is one of the the baddest guys we’ve ever come across,” one New York law enforcement official said.

Previous News:

The managers of a trendy Soho bar are coming clean about an argument that erupted with Boston’s Imette St. Guillen as she was removed from the bar by an ex-con bouncer now being questioned in her rape and murder, sources said.


Dan Dorrian, whose family owns The Falls bar, has told investigators that he pressed St. Guillen to finish her rum and Coke and leave in the hours before she was murdered. Bar managers had initially said the Mission Hill woman left on her own, law enforcement officials said.


“(Dorrian) tried to take her drink from her and she got argumentative and said she wanted it,” one source told the Herald.


Moments later, St. Guillen was escorted out by two bouncers whose efforts to remove her caused a commotion in the hallway of the empty bar, police officials said. One of the bouncers, Darryl Littlejohn, 41, is now a suspect in the horrific attack that killed St. Guillen, 24.


Law enforcement sources also revealed yesterday that Littlejohn wore a gun and bulletproof vest to work at The Falls and submitted a false resume to bar managers claiming he was a bounty hunter.


Owners of New York security firms said yesterday such conduct would be unheard of for guards who are licensed and trained by the state to handle security in such establishments.


“Bouncers obviously are not supposed to be using guns,” said Gerard Kane of Excel Security in New York City. Kane added that many nightclubs are skirting a state law that requires bars to conduct background checks on bouncers and hire security personnel from licensed firms.


Littlejohn, a career criminal with seven felony convictions, would never have qualified for a state license, and yet he still managed to land a job at The Falls, a fact some officials pointed to as evidence of huge loopholes in the state’s security guard law.


“Obviously the law needs to be clarified and strengthened because it’s just not working,” said Peter Vallone, chairman of the New York City Council’s public safety committee.

Other information:

NEW YORK - NYPD investigators are probing whether jailed parolee Darryl Littlejohn, the Manhattan bar bouncer being eyed in the slaying of Imette St. Guillen, is connected to the rapes of three New York women who were brutalized by a van-driving man posing as a federal agent, law enforcement sources told the Herald.

“There is a serial rapist posing as a federal agent, grabbing women, who has struck at least three times” in the New York City area, an official source said yesterday.

“Littlejohn has been known to impersonate law enforcement. He has a van. We are taking a very close look at those cases,” the source said.

In the three attacks, the rapist identified himself as an immigration officer before pulling the women into the van and throwing a blanket over their heads so they could not identify him, the sources said. He then drove to an underground garage, where the women were raped and sexually assaulted.

No DNA evidence was recovered from the three attacks. The victims told investigators their attacker wiped them down after the rape with some sort of disinfectant swabs, the police sources said.

Investigators who searched Littlejohn’s residence in Queens from Monday evening into yesterday morning recovered alcohol swabs and plastic ties in his home, the sources said. They also took sections of his carpet, hair samples and fibers, a law enforcement source said.

Sources said they would seek to match those samples to hairs and carpet fibers taken from the floral comforter St. Guillen, 24, of Mission Hill, was wrapped in before she was dumped in the East New York section of Brooklyn Feb. 25.

The king-size comforter is identified as a high-end model sold by Macy’s and Gimbel’s department stores in the 1990s, sources said.

Sources said Littlejohn asked for a lawyer and was moved to the city’s Rikers Island prison. He is being held on parole violations.

Yesterday, cops located a 1992 blue-gray minivan that Littlejohn registered on Jan. 27, the same day he turned in the plates for the immobile blue van outside his house. The blue-gray van, with temporary plates, was ditched less than a half-mile from his home. It was ringed with tape as cops sought a search warrant.

Littlejohn said he let friends use the van in New Jersey but did not recall who those friends were or where they lived, sources said. Sources said police found a seat from the van in Littlejohn’s house.

Two of the three unsolved rapes that preceded St. Guillen’s assault and murder occurred around Forest Hills, Queens. Another took place in Long Island. All took place between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m.

One victim was Japanese. Sources say a busboy at The Falls, the Soho bar where St. Guillen was last seen alive, told them he heard Littlejohn ask the exotic-looking St. Guillen, “Are you Japanese?” just before he walked her outside, a law-enforcement source said.

Dan Dorrian, one of the bar’s owners, said he asked Littlejohn to escort St. Guillen from the bar at 4:05 a.m. At that time, she was the lone patron of the trendy hot spot.

Littlejohn and another bouncer walked St. Guillen outside. The second bouncer took a cab to the Staten Island ferry and went home, telling cops he last saw St. Guillen and Littlejohn “standing together” on Lafayette Street. At around 4:10 a.m., Dorrian told investigators, he heard an argument and a commotion of some sort, sources said.

St. Guillen’s naked body was discovered on a desolate block 17 hours later. Her head was wrapped in plastic tape. A sock was shoved in her mouth. Her hair had been chopped to her neck. Her ankles were bound with shoelaces and her hands with plastic ties similar to those recovered at Littlejohn’s home, sources said.

Police were summoned to the dumping ground where her body was found after an anonymous male caller used a pay phone outside a Brooklyn diner to call 911.

Detectives questioning Littlejohn, 41, and others tracked down via his cell phone records have been digitally recording their voices, sources said. Those recordings are being analyzed by the FBI to see if any match the voice recorded during the 911 call.

Several of Littlejohn’s Queens neighbors described the ex-con as a strange man who was often spotted wearing black jackets with the words “Marshal” emblazoned on the back. He was also seen sporting a badge around his neck.

The NYPD has also recovered a resume that Littlejohn gave to The Falls that stated he worked for a “federal fugitive recovery team” as a federal marshal, sources said.

Co-workers at The Falls said Littlejohn came to work several times wearing a gun and bulletproof vest, in violation of his parole. Littlejohn, a career criminal, was called a “menace to society” by the New York State Parole Board two months before he was set loose.