NYC- A creepy custodian busted hiding a camera in a pal’s bathroom also made hundreds of secret rest room videos at two Brooklyn city schools where he worked, authorities said yesterday.
Michael Conte, 46, of Staten Island was nabbed Tuesday night – just two days after he was charged with planting cameras at a Long Island friend’s house. News that his video library contained as many as 1,000 tapes from Brooklyn Technical and Westinghouse high schools, dating back as far as 10 years, sent a shudder through students and faculty.
“Oh, my God!” said Helene Harris, a social worker at both schools. “I hope I’m not on one of those tapes. That is so sick.”
In addition to the videos at Brooklyn Tech and Westinghouse, Conte taped his mom and sister, a law enforcement source said.
The disturbing family footage was recorded from fixed cameras at homes in Staten Island and in Pennsylvania, the source said.
Conte stood silent in slacks and a T-shirt last night as he was arraigned in Brooklyn Criminal Court on charges of felony unlawful surveillance, weapons possession and endangering the welfare of a child.
He pleaded not guilty and was held in lieu of $75,000 bail.
Conte’s lawyer, George Vomvolakis, told the court his client has cooperated with police and that much was being made of the case because “it has so-called sex appeal, no pun intended.”He added, “Most of these tapes are innocuous.”
After Conte admitted to Suffolk County cops that he had also made tapes at the Brooklyn schools, NYPD detectives got a search warrant Tuesday for Conte’s Staten Island home, on Jerome Ave., sources said. There, they found “a library of tapes on girls,” camera equipment and a shotgun, a police source said.
Conte has been fired from his janitor’s job at Westinghouse, where a police source said he filmed the teachers’ bathroom through a hole in an adjacent closet between September and December of last year.
Images from Brooklyn Tech, where he once worked as a roving, part-time city Education Department machinist, were captured from a girls’ bathroom.
School officials said Conte had not been assigned to Brooklyn Tech for 10 years. He has been suspended from that job, but the Education Department plans to fire him, officials said.
“This outrageous conduct is just plain wrong and has no place in our schools or society,” said Michael Best, Education Department counsel.
At Conte’s South Beach house, near a Catholic church, his sister declined to comment. “The lawyer told me not to say anything,” she said.