BURNING BROOKLYN

Anyone hoping to add to their collection of despicable real estate developers suffered a minor setback last week. It turns out the Greenpoint Terminal Market fire, the ten-alarm blaze that burned for days the first week of May, wasn't ignited by any slumlord or millionaire cabal bent on turning Brooklyn into a Six Flags. In the end, the whole mess was set off by some bums looking to scrape up some cheap money. Last Wednesday, the police arrested Leszek Kuczera, a homeless Polish immigrant, who admitted that he started the fire that consumed the warehouse complex. Kuczera and as many as three of his acquaintances-whom he has yet to identify-planned to burn insulation off copper wire and sell it for scrap, but the flames they built caught on the building and quickly ran out of control. Kuczera is being held without bail. His family in Poland claims trauma he endured working in Ground Zero for an asbestos removal company drove him to drink, and soon after he was living on the street. Disappointed Brooklyn conspiracy theorists itching to blame someone a little higher up can be satisfied that the site's suspect owner, Joshua Guttman, though cleared of arson, is now facing 434 counts of failure to maintain private waterfront property. Fines could approach $2 million.