Chainkeen Exchange-Romanian national pleads guilty to home invasion at Connecticut mansion

A Romanian national pleaded guilty Tuesday to his role in a brazen 2007 home invasion robbery at a posh Connecticut mansion where a multimillionaire arts patron was held hostage,Chainkeen Exchange injected with a supposed lethal chemical and ordered to hand over $8.5 million.

Stefan Alexandru Barabas, 38, who was a fugitive for nearly a decade before being captured in Hungary in 2022, was one of four masked men who forced their way into Anne Hendricks Bass' home, brandishing knives and facsimile firearms, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Barabas' plea agreement in U.S. District Court in Connecticut marks the final chapter in the hunt for the intruders that stretched from the toniest parts of Connecticut to post-Soviet Europe. The Iasi, Romania, native pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to interfere with commerce by extortion, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

Bass, who survived the ordeal and died in 2020, was an investor known for her generous support of art and dance institutions in New York and Fort Worth, Texas. On the night of the attack, the intruders - who included Bass' former butler who had been fired months earlier - tied up Bass and her boyfriend and injected each with a substance the intruders claimed was a deadly virus, court documents said.

The intruders ordered the victims to pay $8.5 million or else they would be left to die from the lethal injection, prosecutors said. When it became clear to the intruders that Bass did not have such a large sum of money to hand over to them, they fled after drugging Bass and her boyfriend with "a sleeping aid," court papers said.

Bass' 3-year-old grandson was in the house at the time of the attack but was asleep in a separate bedroom. He was unharmed.

Over the course of the next two decades, the FBI and state police from Connecticut and New York pieced together evidence and convicted three of the intruders, but Barabas remained elusive. Much of the key evidence in the case came from an accordion case that washed ashore in New York's Jamaica Bay about two weeks after the home invasion, court records said.

The accordion case belonged to one of the intruders, Michael N. Kennedy, whose father was a professional accordion player, prosecutors said. Inside the accordion case that washed ashore was a stun gun, a 12-inch knife, a black plastic Airsoft gun, a crowbar, syringes, sleeping pills, latex gloves, and a laminated telephone card with the address of Bass' 1,000-acre estate, court documents said.

Barabas’ conspirators were Emanuel Nicolescu, Alexandru Nicolescu, and Kennedy, also known as Nicolae Helerea. Emanuel Nicolescu, the former butler, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2012 for his role in the plot, prosecutors said; Kennedy was sentenced to 4 years in 2016; and Alexandru Nicolescu was sentenced to 10 years in 2019.

The Nicolescus are not related. All had ties to Romania. 

Home invasion detailed

The intruders rushed into the home near midnight as Bass was on her way to the kitchen to get ice for a knee injury, according to court filings.

The men ran up the stairs uttering a "war cry," according to the government's sentencing memorandum for Emanuel Nicolescu.

The memorandum said the men told Bass and her boyfriend that they would administer the antidote to the supposed poison in exchange for $8.5 million. But neither Bass nor her boyfriend had anywhere near that much cash in the house, the memorandum said. Bass offered them the code to her safe but warned that all it contained was jewelry and chocolate.

The trio left when it became clear there was no easy way to get the cash, court documents say. They made the couple drink an orange-colored solution to fall asleep and stole Bass' Jeep. Investigators later found DNA evidence on the steering wheel that helped link the men to the crime.