Crime Watch

BY JERRY DANZIG

Haber-dashersTwo area stores were hit by a team of shoplifters in a two-day period. At 12:15 p.m. on March 18, six men entered the Patron of the New shop at 151 Franklin St., took nearly $15,000 worth of clothes off hangers and left. One of the men told a store employee, “You don’t think we going to pay?” Another thief left behind his hat. Police searched the neighborhood but could not find the shoplifters or the stolen merchandise. The items taken included Balmain jeans, black jeans, blue jeans, white jeans, beige jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts, and more totaling $14,570.

The following day at 3:15 p.m., six men — possibly the same crew — entered the American Apparel store at 140 West Broadway, took clothing valued at about $3,700 from several racks and a display table and walked out of the store without paying. Again, the bad guys could not be found in the vicinity. The stolen items included denim shorts, tank tops, skirts, jackets, denim shirts, Hyperion shirts, ponte tanks, hoodies, Sofia bodysuits, sweaters, turtlenecks, and more.

You Forget, You RegretOne Broad Street resident paid a high price for absent-mindedness. At 8:45 p.m. on March 17, a 28-year-old woman entered the Dig Inn restaurant at 80 Broad St., ordered food, sat down and placed her bag on a chair. She then left, leaving her bag before realizing five minutes later what she had done. Her bag was no longer on the chair when she returned. The items stolen included a Prada Slim bag valued at $2,785, a Lenovo Yoga computer priced at $1,798, a pair of headphones worth $129, an Apple phone charger valued at $40, and more. The total of the items in the stolen bag came to $4,752.

Big-Bucks Loss at StarbucksA visitor from Los Angeles had no guardian angels when she came to the Big Apple recently. At 2:15 p.m. on March 14, an unknown man took a 64-year-old woman’s bag from behind her chair in the Starbucks at 195 Broadway. He subsequently tried to use a credit card from inside the bag at a nearby Subway ATM. Items stolen included the Louis Vuitton purse valued at $1,500, a pair of designer glasses priced at $1,600, a Louis Vuitton wallet tagged at $900, an iPhone 6 Plus worth $800, along with $200 in cash, making a total of $5,000.

Hoods in HoodiesOne area resident might wish she had an attack dog. At about 8 p.m. on March 18, a 30-year-old woman walking her dog and texting on her cell phone at the southwest corner of Pearl Street and Maiden Lane was approached from behind by two men — one of them in his mid-teens and both wearing hoodies. The thief wearing a black hoodie pushed her, while his companion, in a beige hoodie, snatched her cell from her hand. Both thugs then fled eastbound on Maiden Lane before turning southbound on Water Street. A tracker on the phone showed the device’s last location as Whitehall and State Streets before the signal was lost. The stolen cell was a gold iPhone 5S valued at $250.