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One Department of Correction captain and three officers have been suspended amid an investigation into an Eastern European gangster’s daring escape from New York City’s floating jail barge, law enforcement sources told The Post Sunday.
David Mordukhaev, 30, busted out of the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Facility, a barge in the Bronx across the East River from Rikers Island, sometime during the night of July 9 or morning of July 10.
It wasn’t immediately clear what role the four unidentified jail employees played in the daredevil escape — during which Mordukhaev used bedsheets tied together to form a rope to flee from a window.
Sources said jail guards failed to check if the prisoner was gone — even after federal investigators called asking them to check on him at 1 a.m. the night of his flight.
The feds called a second time, at 4:35 a.m., and jail staff realized the inmate was gone.
An investigation is underway into how Mordukhaev got his hands on the bedsheets, sources said — and why guards at the short-staffed facility neglected to actually check that he was in his cell.
The escapee left a note taunting guards for not catching him before his getaway, and was caught on a wiretap claiming it would be a week before police knew where he was.
But cops managed to arrest Mordukhaev in Brighton Beach the day of his escape following a five-borough manhunt while the fugitive was en route to home of the mother of high-ranking fellow KavKaz Nation gang member Roman Nikoghosyan.
Nikoghosyan, who has also been arrested, was heard on wiretaps pushing his mom to take up the fugitive while he tried to set him up with a car to get out of New York, according to federal prosecutors. He also pressured her to send $2,000 to Mordukhaev.
Mordukhaev was sentenced in December 2013 to 65 months in prison for his involvement in a plot to burglarize a pharmacy in Marlboro Township, N.J., and sell the stolen narcotics for cash, then-US Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced at the time.
Mordukhaev later allegedly impersonated a cop, police said.
He was arrested in April 2020 after he and another suspect, flashing badges and a police radio, approached a man in an SUV in Brooklyn and took off with $340 and a stash of marijuana. When the victim realized the two weren’t cops, he tried to follow them in his car, cops said.
KavKaz is an enterprise that engages in drug trafficking, extortion and other crimes, prosecutors claim.
The group allegedly has ties to the Caucus region, including Armenia, Uzbekistan and parts of Russia.
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