MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — A Manhattan subway slashing victim who still bears scars on his skull from a run-in with madman Maksim Gelman last year faced down his attacker in court on Wednesday, lambasting him as a "coward."
Joseph Lozito, 40, a 6-foot-2, 275-pound mixed tattooed martial arts fanatic, helped stop a knife-wielding Maksim Gelman, 24, on Feb. 12, 2011, as Gelman entered an uptown No. 3 train near Times Square after murdering his stepfather, ex-girlfriend, her mother, and a pedestrian during a day-long murder spree in Brooklyn.
On Wednesday, Lozito showed up in court to urge a judge to give him the maximum sentence allowed under law.
"I've waited over a year to look into those eyes again [to see] the soul of a coward," Lozito said Wednesday, the pink scars on his head and neck still visible more than a year later.
"When you attacked me and I took you down, you went down real easy," Lozito added.
Gelman, who has expressed no remorse about the incident, shouted from his place behind the defense table, "You didn't take me down, jerk off!"
Lozito shot back, "What'd you say, moron?" He shook his head in disgust and cracked that Gelman was trying to be the "funniest Russian since Yakov Smirnoff."
Gelman was hauled into court in handcuffs and a bright orange Department of Correction jumpsuit. He made faces, yawned and laughed loudly during the proceeding.
Lozito told the maniacal killer that after considering the circumstances, he's glad Gelman chose him, instead of a victim who would have been helpless.
"Maybe if you'd continued your extreme cowardice, you would have picked on another [victim], a woman who maybe couldn't defend herself, or a child," Lozito said.
Gelman pleaded guilty in November to killing his ex-girlfriend, Yalena Bulchenko, her mother Anna Bulchenko, his stepfather Alexander Kuznetsov and Steven Tannenbaum and a pedestrian he ran down with the car he'd stolen from Kuznetsov in Brooklyn.
Speaking to reporters afterward, Lozito said he regrets not being first on Gelman's morbid list, considering he may have taken Gelman down before he could slaughter the rest.
"I want [him] to know that [he] hit me with his best shot and I'm still here," Lozito said.
Gelman, who has already been sentenced to 200 years to life in prison on the Brooklyn killings, was given an additional 25 years in Manhattan at Wednesday's proceeding.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Richard Carruthers noted that the new sentence was esentially an "academic exercise" because "this wicked man" will was already guaranteed not to be freed in his lifetime.
"We've been subjected today to some of this man's evil unrepentant nature," the judge added.
