VILLAGE CORPSE TWIST
'HALLOWEEN' SHOCK
By LARRY CELONA, DAN KADISON and CYNTHIA R. FAGEN
September 28, 2006 -- Only in the West Village, kids . . .
The body of a man clad in a kinky black leather mask and decked out head to toe in S&M gear was hanging from a chain-link fence on Hudson Street yesterday - as many passers-by ignored it, thinking it was a Halloween display.
The slightly built, fair-skinned mystery man may have been choked to death by a dog collar around his neck, it's other end strapped around a 3-foot-tall fence post, police sources said.
The 40ish, tattooed man was found kneeling, braced face-first against the fence in front of 424 Hudson St. at around 6:45 a.m.
In a bizarre twist, the body had been there for at least an hour, dismissed by some who walked past as a quirky seasonal display in an area scattered with S&M and gay bars.
"The body was covered with a black suit and he had a mask on his face," said deli owner Indra Patel, who first spotted the strangely posed corpse when he opened next door around 5:30 a.m.
"I thought it was a dummy. It looked like a dummy, because every year they do decorations like that. I was wondering why they put up the [Halloween] decorations early."
Patel said at least an hour went by before a woman walking her dog realized the sidewalk exhibit of a man wearing a pair of leather spiked gloves, chaps and a vest was a real person and called police.
Cops were investigating if the man had committed suicide or died during some sort of bizarre auto-erotic sex game.
An autopsy will be performed today to determine how the man died. Police sources said there was no sign of a struggle and they don't believe he was a victim of foul play.
Another witness, Kevin Samuel, 50, a porter for a building across the street, said he had looked at the body several times but it just never clicked that it might be a real person.
"I'm staring at him and I think, 'Is that a prop or a real person?' His legs looked like he was twisted on an angle and that he fell in it [the fence]. It looked like he was stuck there and couldn't get up, like he lost his balance," Samuel said.
"He didn't look like a person. I think he had a black mask on; I couldn't see his face.
"I was looking at him for a while. I've never been stumped before trying to identify people. I'm ashamed of myself in a way because, I didn't realize it was a human being."
A worker repairing a gas leak at Hudson and Leroy Street said "I thought it was a decoration for Halloween. I thought it was a scarecrow."
Another passer-by, Ralph Constanza, 31, said, "It looked like he had a bad night, I can tell you that."
larry.celona@nypost.com
