In a Manhattan neighborhood filled with shops, restaurants and luxury housing, Maria Hrynenko saw an opportunity to expand her family’s real estate empire.

But, prosecutors said, she cut corners to do so and the consequences proved deadly: In March 2015, a gas explosion leveled half of an East Village block, killing two young men at a sushi restaurant and injuring 13 others.

After more than two months of testimony, a jury in Supreme Court in Manhattan on Friday found Ms. Hrynenko, a general contractor and an unlicensed plumber guilty of manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and related offenses when they installed an illegal gas line, causing the explosion.

Relatives on both sides wept as the verdict was read.

The blast left New Yorkers worried about vulnerabilities in the city’s infrastructure, coming almost exactly a year after a crack in a gas main caused an explosion in East Harlem that leveled two buildings and left eight people dead.

But, prosecutors said, the explosion in the East Village was the result of something else: a landlord’s greed.

“What was it that made these three defendants circumvent all the rules they were aware of?” the lead prosecutor, Rachana Pathak, said in her closing remarks this week. “Money, money, money.”

But Ms. Hrynenko’s lawyer, Michael K. Burke, blamed the general contractor and the plumber, saying that his client had not tapped the line herself.

“She is not the person who is responsible for anything that happened that day,” Mr. Burke said.

Ms. Hrynenko who had taken over her husband’s housing stock after his death in 2004, hired Dilber Kukic, a general contractor, to renovate apartments at 121 Second Avenue in 2013. By the summer of the following year, Ms. Hrynenko had leased the apartments to 16 people, but Con Edison had not yet approved a new gas line.

Prosecutors said Ms. Hrynenko risked losing tenants and $24,000 in rent per month if she could not provide gas. That is when, prosecutors said, she devised a plan to siphon gas from Sushi Park, a ground-floor restaurant in the building to provide gas to the apartments above.

“I just spoke to the restaurant owner no problem for you to hook up gas to his line,” Ms. Hrynenko said in a text message to Mr. Kukic who hired Athanasios Ioannidis, an unlicensed plumber, to attach four flex hoses to the restaurant’s gas meter.

Over the next year, Ms. Hrynenko would pay Mr. Kukic nearly $1 million, and Mr. Kukic gave Mr. Ioannidis over $88,000 for work on the properties.

Before lamenting about having to pay for college, mortgages and needing money to fend off legal challenges from tenants and various city agencies, Ms. Hrynenko sent a text to a restaurant employee: “Yes in the future please remind me not to think with my heart but $$$ to pay my bills.”

Two months later, in response to a rash of complaints about the smell of gas, utility workers discovered the makeshift tapping apparatus and turned the gas off to that building for nine days. Service was restored after the hoses were removed.

As pressure mounted from tenants who were again without gas, the defendants came up with a new plan, prosecutors said. This time they would tap gas from a meter at 119 Second Avenue, a neighboring building also owned by Ms. Hrynenko to provide gas to the tenants next door.

Eric Pacheco, another unlicensed plumber, who pleaded guilty to one count of second-degree manslaughter, testified that he was present for a meeting in which Ms. Hrynenko peppered Mr. Kukic with questions about how soon the illegal gas line would be installed.

The defendants hid the illegal system, which was constructed by Mr. Ioannidis and located in the building’s basement, behind locked doors.

Over the next several months, Ms. Hrynenko tried to install a legal gas line, but Con Ed would not approve it because of a number of construction and design issues.

On March 26, 2015, Con Edison returned for a final inspection.

Before the inspection, Mr. Kukic and Mr. Ioannidis turned off the secret gas line. Mr. Kukic also warned a tenant that if anyone asked, “you don’t have gas.”

Inspectors again found fault with a proposed meter location in the basement.

Mr. Kukic and Ms. Hrynenko’s son, Michael Hrynenko Jr., turned the gas back on, but did not close several valves in the basement of 121 Second Avenue that had been opened for pressure tests by Con Edison.

Ms. Hrynenko was later alerted to the smell of gas by a restaurant employee. Her son and Mr. Kukic investigated the matter. Surveillance video captured the two men running out of the building without notifying patrons in the restaurant or calling 911. They ran into a basement entrance on East 7th Street where the rigged gas system was set up.

A minute later, a massive explosion shook the neighborhood. A monstrous blaze quickly engulfed the two buildings and badly damaged a third. Two people inside the sushi restaurant — Moises Ismael Locón Yac, 27, a busboy, and Nicholas Figueroa, 23, who had been on a lunch date — were killed.

Mr. Hrynenko, 31, was charged for his role in the scheme, but he died in 2017 while awaiting trial. A fifth person, Andrew Trombettas, a licensed plumber, pleaded guilty to lesser charges in March. Prosecutors said Mr. Trombettas sold the use of his credentials to Mr. Ioannidis, who had submitted work permits to the Department of Buildings and Con Edison.

At trial, lawyers for the defendants sought to discredit the prosecution’s case by noting that the fire marshal had determined the fire ignited on the first floor and suggested that was evidence it was unrelated to the illegal gas hookup. They also argued that the police bungled the investigation by discarding or not locating important pieces of evidence, including a main valve.

“This is an awful, terrible accident,” said Mr. Ioannidis’s lawyer, Roger Blank. “It is not a crime.”

Mr. Figueroa’s father, Nixon Figueroa, 56, testified that he and his family rushed downtown to look for his son. They checked for him at nearby hospitals before waiting for updates at a local library. Three days later the bodies of the two men were found.

“That’s the day I died,” a tearful Mr. Figueroa said.

Mr. Locon’s brother, Zacarias Locon, 25, testified through a translator that investigators told his family that they could not see him because “we wouldn’t be able to recognize him.” Mr. Locon’s body was so badly burned that DNA had to be used to identify him.

Jose Gomez, a cook at Sushi Park, said he had to crawl out from underneath a pile of debris. He said his eyes and ears are permanently damaged. A firefighter who had been injured while responding to the scene was forced to retire because of his injuries.

Randolph Clarke Jr., an assistant Manhattan district attorney, said the defendants “took a chance, they rolled the dice, and the cost was paid for by Mr. Figueroa and Mr. Locon and 13 others.”

In the days after the explosion, prosecutors said, Ms. Hrynenko did not tell investigators about the illegal gas line and she shredded nine garbage bags full of documents pertaining to her real estate business.

Emily Palmer contributed reporting.

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