By Christina Santucci
A five-alarm fire with flames shooting two to three stories high burned for hours at a South Jamaica scrap metal yard owned by Victoria Gotti’s Three Sons Real Estate Group Monday morning, according to fire officials and city records.
A spokesman for the Fire Department said a call reporting the blaze in Liberty Scrap Metal at 95-49 Tuckerton St. in South Jamaica came in at about 9 a.m., but it took until about 1:15 p.m. before the fire was considered under control.
However, the FDNY spokesman said at 2:45 p.m. that the area was still “an active scene.”
Records with the City Register show the property is owned by the Three Sons Real Estate Group. The company shares an address that several websites identify as the Westbury, L.I.,, home of Victoria Gotti, daughter of the late Gambino family mob boss John Gotti.
In total 44 units with about 200 firefighters were brought in to fight the fire, fire officials said.
Thick white smoke could be seen as far away as 150th Street and Liberty Avenue at about 10:30 a.m.
Workers from the Liberty Scrap Metal and other surrounding businesses said they heard several explosions, and one man said a police officer broke his ankle after one of the explosions.
The spokesman for the FDNY said three people had been injured in the blaze — two police officers and one firefighter — but he did not have details of their injuries.
One worker described the flames as between two and three feet high, reaching to almost the height of the storage facility next door.
“It was just horrific. The flames were out of control,” said Liberty employee James Gray, who said he arrived at the scene after the fire had already started. “It was a lot of flames, a lot of black smoke.”
Gray said no one had been at the business when the blaze began, but he thought it might have started with a car battery in the yard.
Rich Bockmann contributed to this story.
