Rich New Yorker among protesters arrested in Atlanta ‘Cop City’ violence
A rich-kid New Yorker is among the nearly two dozen “violent agitators” charged with domestic terrorism after a protest at the site of a future Atlanta police training facility descended into chaos.
Mattia Luini, 30, and his fellow protesters are accused of carrying out Sunday’s “coordinated attack” on the under-construction Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, which saw cops pelted with Molotov cocktails and fireworks.
Luini, whose late father, Ivan Luini, helped popularize high-end plastic furniture in the US, was still stuck behind bars as of Tuesday afternoon, online court records showed.
His mother, Micaela Martegani, who is involved in the Big Apple’s art world, told The Post Tuesday that she’d only spoken to her son briefly since his arrest — and that he’d insisted the violent incident was “completely random.”
“We haven’t been able to talk in much detail. He doesn’t know much of what happened,” Martegani said.
“(Mattia) said it was completely random. I don’t know more than that.”
Luini had said he was heading to Atlanta over the weekend only to attend a concert and “protest the development of the forest,” according to his mom.
Police, however, say he was among those who allegedly staged an attack to protest the $90 million development of the training center — dubbed “Cop City.”
It wasn’t immediately clear what Luini, who appears to have been raised in New York City, does for a living or if he still calls the Big Apple home.
His businessman father, Ivan, was president of the New York-based Kartell US — a high-end Italian furniture company that specialized in plastic design.
The elder Luini was killed in a small plane crash near the Colorado-Wyoming border back in 2006, the New York Times reported at the time.
Meanwhile, Luini’s mom is the founder and director of More Art — a nonprofit organization that helps create public art projects across the city.
Martegani told The Post on Tuesday she wasn’t sure if she would head to Atlanta to meet with her currently imprisoned son.
“He’s doing okay. I spoke to him recently but I’m not sure yet if I’m going to go down to Atlanta,” she said.
Cops have accused Luini and his fellow protesters of using the “cover of a peaceful protest” at the proposed training center to unleash havoc.
“They changed into black clothing, entered the construction area, and began to throw large rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks at police officers,” cops said. “The agitators destroyed multiple pieces of construction equipment by fire and vandalism.”
Among the others arrested was 28-year-old Thomas Webb Jurgens — an Atlanta-based attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The majority of those arrested hail from outside Georgia, including as far as France and Canada, police said.
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