A contractor who bombed the house of a Mount Kisco business adversary has been sentenced to prison for five years.
U.S. District Judge Cathy Seibel also ordered Damjan Stanivukovic, 53, to pay a $25,000 fine, on Oct. 1 in White Plains federal court, and submit to three years of supervision after he release from prison.
Stanivukovic operated Adria  Industrial Piping Ltd., a Queens HVAC company that was involved in an 8-year legal dispute with a Long Island City HVAC contractor who lived in Mount Kisco.
A year ago, shortly before a scheduled court date, a masked man handed the Mount Kisco businessman a note: “Be smart, do not appear on Court on Monday. Better for everybody.”
On Jan. 11, Stanivukovic and an associate placed a bomb in the driveway of the Mount Kisko businessman. Two hours later, it detonated.
Then the businessman received a text message: “Knock knock, show up and what do you think is next. This is your final warning.”
Investigators quickly linked Stanivukovic to the blast. Bomb technicians found pieces of a box with a shipping label addressed to his home in Closter, New Jersey.
He has been jailed ever since, and this past April he pleaded guilty to unlawful possession of a destructive device and conspiracy to commit stalking.
Defense attorney Edward V. Sapone recommended a prison sentence of time served for the nine months his client has been jailed, in a letter to the judge.
Stanivukovic makes no excuse for his outrageous behavior, Sapone wrote, but “when Damjan made that terrible choice he was in the darkest, lowest place in his life. He was smothered by the suffocating grip of opioid addiction.”
He said Stanivukovic self-medicated to relieve the pain of his mother’s recent death and a wrenching divorce, the pressure of a single parent supporting a teenaged daughter, the imminent reality of a multi-million court judgment, financial collapse, and the imminent loss of his business after a lifetime of hard work.
Now he is sober and clear-minded, Sapone said. He wants to rebuild his life, open a new business, pay off his debts, and mend his relationship with his daughter.
Assistant prosecutors Michael D. Lockard and Kate Wheelock recommended 37 to 46 months in prison, the nonbinding sentencing guideline calculated by the federal Probation and Pretrial Services.
A significant sentence is necessary to reflect the seriousness of the crime, they wrote in a memo to the judge.
Stanivukovic was sentenced in 1999 to time served, 89 days, for trafficking in firearms and drugs. Investigators in the bombing case found a small armory of firearms, ammunition and accessories at his home, “which the defendant could not lawfully possess.”
Stanivukovic was persistent. He planned the crime for several months and escalated his conduct. He collected bomb-building manuals and made a bomb. He recruited an individual to deliver a threatening message months before the bombing, another to help deliver the bomb, and a third to procure a burner cellphone to threaten the victim after the blast.
His ultimate purpose was to obstruct a lawsuit and interfere with the administration of justice.
He intended to make the victim fear for his life and the life of his family. The bomb was placed on the driveway where the victim’s child waited for the school bus and was detonated around the time the child would leave for school.
“Indeed, the security camera that captured the bomb’s placement and explosion recorded a school bus drive by shortly before the blast,” the prosecutors’ memo states. “The fact that no one was, in fact, injured, was completely fortuitous.”
