A man has been charged with murder in the death of a 67-year-old SoHo resident who died more than two years ago.
Larry Powlis, 60, was arrested on Sunday, November 1 at 1:11 p.m. within the Midtown North Precinct and charged with murder, according to the NYPD. The department listed Powlis as undomiciled. It identified the victim as Egizio Panetti, of 156 Spring Street.
Panetti died on Sunday, September 22, 2024, according to the NYPD, and his close friend Melissa Levis, a Vermont innkeeper, mourned him in an Instagram post at the time. The post didn’t say how he died. The NYPD said the arrest followed an ongoing investigation but didn’t say where or how Panetti was killed.
Levis wrote that Panetti was her downstairs neighbor when she moved downtown in 2014 and that he became her very best friend. She called him “part Merlin, Auntie Mame and Kramer.”
Panetti was an art collector and owned Egizio’s Project, a New York City gallery space, according to Willow Auction House. The New Jersey auction house included items from his estate in a February 2025 sale. It said Panetti was at one point the partner of the artist Hunt Slonem, and the sale included more than 20 Slonem paintings, many inscribed by the artist.
Egizio’s Project was at 596 Broadway, according to artist-info, which lists exhibitions there between May 2000 and January 2003. Panetti and Levis once appeared together in a Valentine’s Day segment on NBC News, which described him as a private art dealer from Italy.
We’ll update this story as more information becomes available.
