Crime Blotter
Police arrested Vidal and Pujols last week after what, in most any other instance, might've been just another boring, run-of-the-mill robbery spree. This one, though-this one was different. This one had a little spice to it. Vidal, 32, did indeed meet the 16-year-old Pujols at a bus stop on Ave. D last December. She lived in the neighborhood, and he was there visiting his parents. The two quickly became a hot item.
The pair celebrated their new love on Christmas by jabbing a gun into the ribs of a 75-year-old man on the 7 train and demanding cash. Then a few days later they rang in the New Year by robbing a woman on Queens Blvd.
In a strange twist, police picked up Vidal on Jan. 4 after Pujols' mom, who was starting to think the older man's intentions were sort of icky, accused him of statutory rape. But the cops, having no idea that this less eloquent Humbert Humbert was leading the teen down the path of iniquity in more ways than one, released him some time later.
Before you could say "directed by Arthur Penn," Vidal and Pujols robbed a bodega in the East Village. Then, sticking around the same neighborhood, they did it again and again and again. Sometimes Pujols acted as the lookout, other times she'd get in a few licks of her own.
By the end of the month, the pair had pulled off 10 armed robberies together, netting an untold amount of cash.
Shortly after the first of February, however, Pujols vanished. Her mom called the cops again, and they found the girl a few days later hiding out at her aunt's house, with Vidal nowhere in sight. That's when she started blabbing.
Pujols' mom blames the schools and the cops for the things her daughter did-both the robberies and her confession. But as the girl's step-grandfather told the Post, "She was under his love spell." Which makes it all the more appropriate-especially for such holiday-conscious outlaws-that Vidal was picked up on Valentine's Day.
It really was the kind of mini-crime spree that would never make it as fiction. And to be honest, with the exception of that chick in the suitcase, not much else this week could hold a candle to the antics of this low-rent Bonnie and Clyde, this less-murderous Charlie and Caril Ann.
In other boring, unsexy crime news, some guy got shot somewhere maybe, probably in the leg. And another guy killed his brother after a family discussion about the estate of their cancer-ridden mother devolved into gunplay. He's not being charged for it, though. Guess everyone pretty much agreed afterward that the dead brother was kind of a paranoid freak anyway.