08/18/08 This Just In - Former Valbella Chef Is A Murder Victim

Valbella's reputation as the Greenwich area's premier Italian restaurant may soon be known for having hired a recently murderered and temperamental chef

Nephew charged in killing of Vuli restaurant partner

By Ethan Fry

Stamford Advocate

Staff Writer

DA NBURY - More than four years after investigators found the dismembered corpse of Stamford restauranteur Zef Vulevic in a wooded area in New York, Vulevic's nephew stood accused of the execution-style murder for the first time in Superior Court Tuesday.

The nephew, Marash Gojcaj, 32, was arraigned on a single charge of murder in the case. A judge doubled his bond and continued the matter to next month.

Vulevic ran Vuli, the rotating restaurant that once occupied the 17th floor of Marriott Hotel & Spa in Stamford. His body, shot twice in the back of the head and cut into seven pieces, was discovered in a wooded area of Bedford, N.Y., during an Earth Day cleanup three weeks after he was last seen. Gojcaj, whose last known address is in Ossining, N.Y., was arrested Tuesday morning at police headquarters. Police announced in March that they had obtained a warrant to arrest Gojcaj in the case, but had to wait for him to finish serving a jail sentence for drunken driving in New York to formally charge him in the 2004 murder....

...Details of the state's murder case against Gojcaj are unclear. The warrant charging him has been sealed for 14 days, a Superior Court clerk said. Those who knew him called Vulevic, 41, a gifted but temperamental chef who honed his talents in both restaurants owned by his family and other premier establishments in Fairfield County, among them Valbella in Greenwich....

...Gojcaj's lawyer, Mickey Sherman, asked Sommer to leave the bond at the $2 million amount set by the warrant in the case. He said Danbury police took Gojcaj's passport and that his client would have fled the country before if that were his intention.

"This happened about four years ago," Sherman said. "His uncle was killed, he was the prime suspect, he's always been the prime suspect. He hasn't gone anywhere. If he was going to go to Montenegro he would have gone a long time ago."....

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