Metro

Crane widow’s haunting grief

For all the 20 years she knew her husband, he was a crane operator, a professional so careful he’d refuse to go in the cab of his rig if there was so much as a crack in the window.

“He loved doing what he was doing,” Denise Bleidner remembers. “And he was the type of person who was so safety conscious, beyond what I’d ever seen in anybody else.”

But tomorrow, Bleidner will sit in a Manhattan courtroom and watch opening statements in the trial of the man prosecutors say killed her husband, Wayne, and six other men — by skimping on safety in the most egregiously careless manner.

Two years ago, during a condo construction job on East 51st Street, Wayne Bleidner plummeted 18-stories through a clear March sky, trapped inside the cab of his collapsing tower crane.

Prosecutors will argue that he and his fellow victims died because less than an hour before the collapse, master rigger William Rapetti chose to rely on four pre-used and worn-out yellow polyester straps — called “slings,” — to secure a five-ton metal brace to the crane’s mast.

New, the slings cost $50 each.

Old, the slings cost seven lives, prosecutors say. The slings were so worn, and so improperly positioned, they snapped into pieces, prosecutors say, setting off a chain reaction of falling metal braces that rocked the crane so violently, it tipped.

The crane’s boom and its cab — with Wayne Bleidner, 51, helpless at the controls — broke off from the rest of the crane and literally catapulted onto the roof of a four-story brownstone on East 50th Street, pancaking the building to the ground.

“It’s been difficult,” Denise Bleidner, of Westchester County, told the Post last week. “Life as I knew it has ended.”

It’s been especially hard on Robert, 13, their only child, the mother said.

Wayne loved to sail with his son, just as he’d sailed himself as a boy growing up in City Island. And though he worked long hours six days a week, he’d squeeze in the special moments.

Their last memories of Wayne are of dinner, the night before his death, at their favorite pizza place — Denise laughed as she remembered Wayne getting shooed out of the busy kitchen for asking for extra olives. That last morning, he’d lent his son a pair of his nylon socks, so the boy’s ice skates would slide on easier when he went skating with his friends.

“Now, he’s wearing his father’s shoes,” Denise said.

“He misses him terribly,” she said. “He’s a boy. You know, with boys, the mother takes care of the baby years, and then when they reach their teenage years their fathers are supposed to take over.”

In fighting seven manslaughter charges — one for each fatality — Rapetti, head of Rapetti Rigging Services and a crane professional with a safety record as clean, before this, as Wayne Bleidner’s, is now pointing a finger at Bleidner.

“It is our position that nobody knows why the crane went down,” defense lawyer Arthur Aidala has argued in court.

Any wrong move on Bleidner’s part, the lawyer has argued, and the crane could have pulled away from the building. The lawyer has asked to review photos of Bleidner in his cab, along with his autopsy report, just in case he’d suffered some ailment while at the controls.

“It really cries of desperation,” says Bleidner’s lawyer Howard Hershenhorn, who is handling the family’s suit against Rapetti’s company.

“There have been four separate entities that have looked at this accident objectively — OSHA, the Department of Buildings, an engineering firm hired by the Department of Buildings, and Lehigh University, where the slings were sent,” Hershenhorn said.

“They have all said clearly and unequivocably that the accident was caused by the slings,” Hershenhorn said.

“To make matters worse, they are with this defense blaming the victim, who has never been involved in an incident before in 25 years as a crane operator — and who is not around to defend himself.”

The trial — at which Denise has been called to testify, along with more than 40 other prosecution witnesses — is expected to last up to six weeks. Rapetti faces up to 15 years prison.

laura.italiano@nypost.com