Man Charged With Murder Two Years After SoHo Art Collector's Death
The NYPD says Larry Powlis, 60, was arrested Sunday and charged with murder in the 2024 death of Egizio Panetti, 67, of Spring Street — and the department is not yet saying where or how Panetti was killed.
A SoHo death from two autumns ago has a defendant now. Larry Powlis, 60, was arrested on Sunday at 1:11 p.m. within the Midtown North Precinct and charged with murder in the death of Egizio Panetti, a 67-year-old art collector who lived at 156 Spring Street, according to the New York Police Department. The department listed Powlis as undomiciled — without a fixed address.
What the police have released is the frame, not the picture. Panetti died on Sunday, September 22, 2024, the NYPD said, and the arrest followed an ongoing investigation. The department did not say where Panetti was killed, or how — and this newsroom is not going to guess: those details, when officials release them, will update this story. A murder charge more than two years after a death usually means the evidence arrived slowly; the NYPD has not described what it consists of.
The man at the center of the case was a fixture of the downtown art world his street helped define. Panetti owned Egizio's Project, a gallery space at 596 Broadway that showed work in the early 2000s, and he was once described by NBC News as a private art dealer from Italy. After his death, a New Jersey auction house included items from his estate in a February 2025 sale — among them more than 20 paintings by Hunt Slonem, several inscribed by the artist, who had been Panetti's partner.
Powlis is charged, not convicted, and is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court. No court date or attorney information was in the police release the Village Reader reported. The case now moves the way these cases move — slowly, on paper, in a courtroom — two years after the death it answers for.
