Maybe if we can get the cops to stop issuing lame parking tickets they’ll start to crack down on some real assholes.

A buffalo wing riot in Brooklyn last week (”Councilwoman Letitia James [. . .] pointed the finger at the management of the sports bar for recklessly promoting its 50-cent ‘Wing Tuesdays’ to students”), and now video game characters jacking cabbies:

The cabbie beat up by thugs dressed as Super Mario Brothers spoke out about his ordeal Sunday and demanded tougher laws against assaults on taxi drivers.

“I was really scared. . . . At the time, I really think I’m going to die,” said Ndiaye Serigne, 48, of Harlem, who was robbed and pummeled by four men dressed as Mario, Luigi and other characters at a gas station.

The bad old days are still hanging on:

Manhattan prosecutors on Thursday accused the Luchese crime family of infiltrating the Buildings Department, saying that three of the family’s associates found jobs as building inspectors and that others in the family, including top bosses, committed a wide range of crimes.

In all, six building inspectors were accused of taking bribes to grant building permits, expedite inspections and overlook building violations. The three inspectors said to be Luchese associates were also accused of more traditional mob-related offenses, including bribery, gambling, drug trafficking, extortion and loan sharking.

That whole “as-is” disclaimer is an important part of the fine print:

Jovan Ming, 32, of the 300 block of Clove Road, shattered the front and rear windshields of a silver Acura in the lot of Forest Avenue Motors, at 2141 Forest Ave., on Sept. 11, a law-enforcement source said.

Not content with that, the 6-foot, 2-inch, 200-pound Ming allegedly telephoned the salesman “multiple times” four days later and threatened to kill him and torch his business.

Lest you think stealing copper from buildings is strictly for tramps, vagabonds and drifters:

They came to clear overgrown brush from the yard in what they might have thought was an abandoned building in Tompkinsville.

But the building’s owner says workers from the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene were filching copper pipes, tools and whatever else they could grab from the former American Legion post at 43 Van Duzer St.

One Health Department worker, Edwin R. Torres, 54, of Queens, was arrested this morning, according to a law enforcement source, after building owner John Galarza called police when he said an employee saw the men begin hauling their alleged booty into a private van as well as a city Department of Health vehicle.

Three other Health Department workers were questioned as well.

“All the copper pipes are gone,” said Galarza as he walked through the building, which smelled of urine, where the toilet and boiler had pipes removed. He pushed his toe against a buckled wood floor, showing how it had sustained water damage after the pipes were removed. “I’m going to talk to the legal department of the Health Department.”

You need a license? Seriously? Apparently so:

Their comic-book adventure went awry when cops approached the dynamic duo on 43rd Street to see whether they had the required license to perform in costume in public . . .

There are probably too many police officers.

I have no idea how heavy 37 bundles of cardboard is — but $5,000 isn’t bad:

Cops arrested Toure Mahamadou, 25, Sadabe Sekou, 39, and Latil Serge, 21, all of Newark, whose truck allegedly continued 37 bundles worth $5,550 when sold to recycling centers.

“I wasn’t scared when they pulled the knife,” [Milton Williams Supermarket manager Milton] Rivera said.

No, literally! And there is data:

Still, the prime time for murder is clear: summertime. Indeed, it is close to a constant, one hammered home painfully from June to September across the decades. And the breakdown of deadly brutality can get even more specific. September Saturdays around 10 p.m. were the most likely moments for a murder in the city.

The summer spike in killings is just one of several findings unearthed in an analysis by The New York Times of multiyear homicide trends. The information — detailing homicides during the years 2003 to 2008 — was compiled mainly from open-records requests with the New York Police Department, and a searchable database of details on homicides in the city during those years is available online for readers to explore at nytimes.com/nyregion.

. . .

Summer is when people get together. More specifically, casual drinkers and drug users are more likely to go to bars or parties on weekends and evenings, as opposed to a Tuesday morning. These people in the social mix, flooding the city’s streets and neighborhood bars, feed the peak times for murder, experts say.

And the trend occurs in other cities, in places like Chicago, Boston and Newark, according to criminologists.

Some of the same trends are on display around Christmastime and are believed to be behind the slight increases in murder that occur then, criminologists say.

It’s like The Warriors meets West Side Story:

A subway dance troupe turned militant on May 25 when the dancers viciously mugged a 22-year-old straphanger on the J train.

The violent attack began when the victim started conversing with the dancers after they finished an acrobatic performance near the Lorimer Street stop at around 3:40 am.

That’s when one of the perps asked the victim if he would like to “see something mesmerizing.”

The victim said yes, so the perp pulled himself into the air on the train’s metal bars and unleashed a powerful kick to the victim’s chest. Two other dancers then joined in the attack and started punching and kicking the victim in the head and body.

The victim called out to the other two dancers for help, but his pleas only convinced the other performers to join in the walloping.

Eventually, one of the perps demanded that the victim hand over his belongings.

In honor of Bike Month, the police have started to crack down on bicyclists running red lights:

Police cracked down on rule-breaking bicyclists in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill last Friday, issuing tickets for running red lights and then slapping offenders with additional summonses for minor infractions, including one bicyclist who didn’t have a bell.

The dragnet snared 36 bicyclists on the popular DeKalb Avenue bike lane that links the two neighborhoods with Downtown Brooklyn.

Cops said the crackdown was long overdue.

“It was targeted towards enforcing traffic laws,” said a police source from the 88th Precinct. “Running a red light is not safe for the cyclist or anyone else in the street.”

The ticket blitz is a bitter irony for bikers who have complained since the lane’s creation last year that vehicles, including officers at the 88th Precinct stationhouse near the corner of Classon Avenue, but especially delivery trucks, regularly block the lane with parked cars along the busy corridor.

Or are bike lanes actually a backdoor way to balance the budget? Hmm . . .

He’s back:

Alerted by the incessant growling of their pint-sized “hero” pooch, the Emerson Hill couple said they came face to face with a black-suited burglar Monday night, who escaped from their mansion by leaping from a second-story balcony and exiting the back door without missing a beat.

“He was a ninja in a black suit, only his eyes were showing,” said Russ Irarey, 55. “He got to that railing and just made a jump like you wouldn’t believe.”

Earlier: Speaking As Someone Who Makes The Most Of His Balaclava . . ., Great Pizza . . . And Now Throwing Stars, Too

“If you have been stopped and were not involved in any criminal activity the NYPD regrets any inconvenience”:

The NYPD has begun handing out informational cards to pedestrians they stop, question and frisk, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Thursday.

Cops in sections of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx have given those people 4 X 2 1/2-inch white cards that explain a so-called stop, question and frisk encounter.

“We know that the whole stopping and question procedure is a difficult one for us,” Kelly told reporters at Police Headquarters.

“People are, at the very least, losing time, and we’re taking time away from them. We’re hoping to . . . give people a little more information about what the procedure is and why it’s being done.”

. . .

The two-sided card cites common reasons for stops, such as carrying what appears to be a weapon, sights or sounds that suggest criminal activities, or reports of suspicious behavior.

The mayor’s aggressive approach to gun control reaps results:

In 2008, even as gun killings fell, the number of killings committed with knives or other “cutting instruments” rose 50 percent in New York City, the Police Department said: to 125 from 83. Some other large cities saw no such increase last year, and police officials and experts are at a loss to explain what is either a new trend or a spike.

“It is hard to say with certainty what accounts for the increase,” said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York Police Department.

It was possible, but hard to document, Mr. Browne said, that measures like undercover gun-trafficking investigations and interrogations, in which people arrested for lower level crimes are asked to provide information on gun cases, had led to the rise in knife killings and the drop in gun slayings.

In 2008, 292 people were shot to death in New York, down from 347 the year before, continuing a longtime slide in deaths by firearms.

Over all, homicides of all kinds rose slightly last year, to 523 from 496 in 2007, which was a 45-year low. So far in 2009, about a quarter of killings in the city have been committed with knives or other cutting instruments, about the same percentage as in 2008. But the overall homicide rate is down: 97 through April 16, the Police Department said, compared with 135 in the same period in 2008.

“We may have made it harder for killers to get their hands on guns,” said Mr. Browne. “Knives are still easily and legally acquired.”

Is that really the coordinated message?

But in the end, threatening to torture your landlord can only get you so far:

Manhattan prosecutors described yesterday how two Greenwich Village restaurateurs allegedly set the stage for extortion this past January — kidnapping their landlord’s agent, taking him to a nearby apartment, and showing him some hardware decidedly not meant for a home-improvement project, they said.

The unidentified victim took one look at the tarp and the wicker chair on it — alongside a table full of sinister-seeming tools — and agreed to forgive $250,000 in back rent, prosecutors said.

“They showed him a chair, placed on top of a tarp with a table holding pliers, a hammer, a screwdriver, and a candle,” said prosecutor James Meadows. “A burning candle.”

It hadn’t helped that one of the suspects, Vasileios Giamagas, 35, bragged he was a former mercenary and an accomplished killer who’d slain his own brother.

“He told the managing agent that he was in the Chechen army and had blown up a building with more than 80 people in it,” said Eric Seidel, chief of the DA’s rackets bureau.

Giamagas, an illegal alien from Greece, and co-defendant Ekkehart Schwartz, a 70-year-old German architect here on a green card, had fallen behind on their rent at their never-opened bar and nightclub, Restaulounge-Bar De’Vill, at 68 W. 3rd St.

Wow, it goes from beleaguered dog owner to full-blown Charles Bronson in just five paragraphs:

She never had a chance.

A vicious pit bull belonging to Japanese hip-hop star DJ Honda made mincemeat of a fluffy Yorkshire terrier owned by a celebrity facialist when the pooches squared off on the Lower East Side.

The brutal attack — which left the smaller dog needing her face sewn back together — is part of a pattern of bullying by the musician’s three nasty canines, residents said yesterday.

The pit bull, Boss, was walking off his leash on Orchard Street the evening of April 3 when he pounced on Christine Chin’s 12-pound pooch, Bebe.

“My pet was almost shredded to pieces,” Chin said. “I feel so bullied and so helpless. I said to my husband, ‘Should we get a gun now?’”

But unless you’re a celebrity I think it’s supposed to be kind of difficult to get permission to carry a weapon around with you.

Oh my god, it’s like Bill the Butcher will be standing around the corner! Grifters are back:

You’ll never see them coming.

A handful of clever grifters have been scamming unsuspecting passersby in midtown with just a pair of broken glasses, cops warn.

The con artists bump into their mark, flash a pair of prebroken glasses to the ground and then begin angrily demanding cash to pay for the “smashed” specs.

The scam has become so widespread that cops from Manhattan’s Midtown North Precinct put out flyers with the photos of some of the worst scammers — known as “fraudulent accosting recidivists” — for the sheer number of times they have run their schemes.

“The scam is an oldie but a goodie. The victims get flustered and sometimes turn over the cash just to get the suspect to shut up and leave them alone,” a police source said.

Nair (Naim) Jabbar had two pairs of broken eyeglasses in a bag when cops arrested him last month. The ex-con bumped into his latest victim on W. 53rd St. and Fifth Ave., court records show.

“You broke my glasses! You own me $125!” Jabbar, 41, yelled.

But when his victim asked him to come back to his office to figure out a solution, Jabbar slunk off, court papers said.

Jabbar’s 29-year-old lookout, Jshawn Lewis, had $1,478 in cash in his pockets, police said.

Jabbar, who had just been charged in December with an eyeglass scam, was sentenced to 90 days in jail for this last hustle. He gets out April 18.

With more glam, and za-za-zoo:

A thugged-out pack of transvestite teens has been targeting women walking into a star-studded West Village building, snatching their purses and using stolen credit cards to buy wigs and women’s clothes, sources said yesterday.

Jubril “Dominic” Faggins, 19, and Jhirad “Shanese” Powell, 18, both of Brooklyn, have been charged with attacking woman in The Archive on Greenwich Street on two occasions.

The apartment building is the onetime home to Monica Lewinsky, designer Michael Kors and actress Jennifer Connelly.

The first attack came at about 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 29.

“It was Destiny [another transvestite] that told me to rob the white bitch,” Powell told cops, according to court records.

Faggins and Powell then followed the woman, 36, into the lobby and wrestled her purse from her.

. . .

The attackers then fled, and over the following two days charged $3,639 to the woman’s credit cards on wigs and women’s clothes and jewelry at stores at the Fulton Mall in Brooklyn.

Things your lawyers don’t want a jury to hear include “So I killed someone — that makes me a bad guy?”:

Murder suspect Keith Phoenix confessed to the hate-crime slaying of Jose Sucuzhanay with these shockingly callous words: “So I killed someone — that makes me a bad guy?”

Police sources said Phoenix showed no remorse for beating the 31-year-old victim in the mistaken belief he was gay because he was walking arm-in-arm with his brother.

“He kept saying, ‘What’s the big deal? The guy’s dead,’” a police source said.

The first rule of graft is never being improbably flashy with your loot:

An NYC Transit supervisor allegedly “living large” with luxury cars and five flat-screen televisions in her house is suspected of looting the cash-strapped agency with a bogus billing and kickback scheme, the Daily News has learned.

The MTA inspector general and the Brooklyn district attorney’s office are investigating whether Jacqueline Jackson, 50, inflated bills submitted by a Brooklyn company and then shared in the ill-gotten gains, law enforcement sources said.

The scope of the suspected fraud isn’t yet known but the early signs are alarming, sources said.

NYC Transit is believed to have used the company, AJI Records Retrieval, to do pre-trial tasks for at least a decade, paying the firm about $1.5 million, sources said.

. . .

Jackson earned $83,000 a year as director of legal support for the tort division in NYC Transit’s legal department.

Yet, Jackson had a flat-screen television in just about every room — including the bathroom — of her two-story brick house on E. 46th St. in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, a source said.

She also had five or so fur coats in her closets, according to the source.

Outside, a Mercedes-Benz S430 luxury sedan was in the driveway. Jackson also drives a Lincoln Navigator.

. . .

“She’s living large,” one of Jackson’s neighbors said. “Inside the house is so beautiful.”

The gargantuan NYPD uniformed police force may get up to 900 new officers through the federal stimulus package, a number higher than the entire Buffalo police force*:

Police commissioner Raymond Kelly said Wednesday he would welcome the 900 extra cops that could come from President-elect Barack Obama’s proposed stimulus package.

“Any program that increases the number of police officers in the city, especially in a time of terrorism and at no cost to us, is good news,” Kelly told the Daily News.

The incoming President’s latest $800 billion plan to jump-start the nation’s imperiled economy would earmark $1 billion to hire more than 13,000 cops across the nation.

City police forces must apply for the money, which will be doled out in three-year block grants.

The federal money likely will cover 75% of the cost of a new hire, said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn/Queens), who fought for extra police funding.

*See, for example.

You don’t need a YouTube stunt to see that the economy is bad and getting worse:

In what may be the latest sign of the harsh economic times, five banks in four boroughs were robbed on Monday, four of them within an hour and a half.

But if the robberies, in their frequency and timing, were startling, so too was their brazenness. Most of them occurred in heavily trafficked areas in broad daylight, including one that took place steps away from Lincoln Center in the middle of the afternoon.

Bank robberies in the city are up by 54 percent this year, the Police Department said, to 431 as of Monday afternoon, from 280 at this time last year. Robbery statistics over the past 20 years suggest that the robberies may have been fueled in part by the financial desperation that sets in during a recession and the added pressures of the holiday season.

The authorities took notice in early September, when the number of bank robberies for the year reached 268, compared with 183 during the same period in 2007.

. . .

“It’s well documented that during a recession, bank robberies go up,” [Michelle Renee, a former banking industry executive who tracks bank robbery trends] said. “But also, this time of the year is the busiest time for bank robberies. So you combine those two together and it becomes a dangerous time for bank employees.”

As John Wayne once said, “Talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much”:

The NYPD is making an unusual move to ensure no one notices a decline in the number of cops on the streets — decking out the vehicles used by traffic-enforcement agents, auxiliary police and school-safety agents so they look like regular cruisers.

The move will be phased in slowly with the special units — who have typically used cars painted dark blue — to be given the white cars that are taken out of use from the main fleet.

The only difference will be in the decals affixed to the sides of the vehicles that indicate which unit they are from.

“This is to make this look like there are more cops on the street,” said a law-enforcement official familiar with the decision.

In all, there are about 100 cars used by the auxiliary wing of the department and 200 used by each of the school-safety and traffic-enforcement divisions.

. . . the bad old days have officially returned:

The economy made me do it.

That’s the excuse a brazen Queens burglar gave his victim while robbing her of $100 in a knifepoint home invasion, police say.

. . .

Michael Green, 47, delivered the inventive cop-out after pushing his way into Anne Heidt’s apartment in the former Edgemere Houses around 2:15 p.m. Sunday, cops said.

“Sorry — it’s the economy,” Green said as he held a knife to the 56-year-old woman’s throat, authorities reported.

Green, who lives in an apartment in the same housing project, grabbed the woman from behind and threatened her with the knife, before making off with the contents of her wallet and a wad of cash, authorities said.

Then again . . .

Green also bragged in court about his ability to beat lie-detector tests, and about how he milked defense lawyers for $6,000 and a trip to Vegas.

Remnants of the Gambino crime family have been reduced to shaking down hot dog vendors:

Three men — two of them Gambino crime-family associates — have been charged with shaking down a Bronx hot-dog vendor and beating him, cops said yesterday.

The men — also suspected of torching his truck — allegedly demanded $200 a week in “protection” money from the vendor and attacked him when he refused to pay.

Reputed Gambino associates Robert “Bobby Fingers” Francella, 49, and Patrick Lombardo, 47, along with Gregory Monzeglio, 44, met with the victim several times in a restaurant.

When they couldn’t collect, they beat him with a hammer on Aug. 14, and assaulted him again on Sept. 8, cops said. The vendor suffered cuts and lacerations.

The truck, parked in a vacant lot near the restaurant, was burned on Sept. 28.

You attract the wrong kind of guys:

Cops say a New Jersey man wooed a 30-year-old woman from New Dorp Beach online, but then, after she paid for lunch at the end of their date, stole her credit card.

Jared W. Winans, 28, of Old Tappan, is accused of using the card to make about $100 in purchases in New Jersey and Massachusetts.

The ill-fated date started on May 21, and ended at about 12:30 p.m. the next day at the Applebee’s restaurant in New Dorp, according to court papers.

She paid the check, though it’s unclear if the two ever went on a second date, a law enforcement source said.

A few days later, the woman noticed her credit card missing, and filed a report. The investigation led to Winans, who made several small purchases a day after the date, the source said.

The NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau got involved not long after, the source said, because Winans puffed up his dating résumé by falsely claiming to be a cop.

What are you going to do, make me pay? Why yes, yes they will:

Fare-evaders who brazenly board buses without paying would be targeted in a crackdown being developed by transit and police brass, officials said Tuesday.

Approximately 130,000 riders a week board buses without dipping MetroCards, or plunking change into fare boxes, according to new transit data, suggesting the cash-strapped agency is losing millions of dollars annually.

“We’ve identified the worst routes, including the worst bus stops or hot spots,” said Joseph Smith, NYC Transit vice president in charge of buses.

Smith said he hoped the crackdown would start in a week or two. An NYPD spokesman, however, said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has yet to sign off on a final plan. The two sides are in talks about how the Metropolitan Transportation Authority could defray costs.

Fare-beaters enter via rear bus doors that are opened by exiting passengers or by helpful riders on board. Some simply saunter past the driver and fare box up front. To reduce the risk of being assaulted, drivers are instructed not to confront or accost fare-beaters.

Above-ground fare-beating is most prevalent on 10 routes in Brooklyn and the Bronx, according to NYC Transit. The worst is the B46 in Brooklyn where drivers have reported “theft of service” at a rate of about 4,000 a week. The route runs the length of the borough, between Williamsburg and Marine Park, through Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant and East Flatbush and Flatlands.

Smith wouldn’t speculate on why some routes have rampant fare evasion while others have none. But the agency now has a better understanding of where evasion is taking place, officials said.

Enough said:

He would have gotten the job — if only he hadn’t stolen the interviewer’s wallet.

And Marco Marabotto, 31, would have never gotten caught if he hadn’t listed his name and address on the job application.

Now Marabotto faces up to four years in the slammer after lifting Carly Miller’s wallet from her purse during an Aug. 15 job interview, sources said.

“This is one of the dumbest criminals alive,” said Bill Clinger, Miller’s boss at Revolution, a pedicab courier service on Ninth Avenue.

Clinger advertised for a driver on Craigslist and Marabotto, who lives in Manhattan, made an appointment for an interview.

Miller, 22, did the interview from behind a desk as Marabotto sat across from her. Her purse was on a chair next to him.

Miller got good vibes from Marabotto.

“I would have hired him, absolutely,” she said yesterday. “I had a good feeling about him. He was very friendly and warm.”

Interesting defense:

A young woman woke up in her Central Park West sublet in July 2007 to find her fire-escape window open and two 15-year-old boys standing over her bed. One of them was pointing a handgun at her head.

Over the next few hours, the boys took turns raping the bound, gagged and terrified woman. They left, taking her laptop, cellphone, iPod, digital cameras and credit cards.

Now the boy with the gun — Steven Vasquez, according to DNA and his own police confession – is hoping for a break.

Vasquez’s lawyer says his client is mentally retarded due to childhood lead exposure, and she wants him tried in Family Court as a juvenile.

Lead paint in the West 129th Street home he grew up in left Vasquez so brain damaged he is unable to read.

“He’s basically the mental age of a kindergartner,” says his lawyer, Elsie Chandler, senior trial attorney with the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem.

See also: “Lead exposure in children linked to violent crime,” LA Times, May 28, 2008.

Sounds like the premise to a modern urban tragedy. And fortunately Al Sharpton is nowhere near this horrible story:

A grand jury has decided not to indict a Queens man who fatally stabbed a 15-year-old girl who he said was part of a mob of teenagers attacking him after an argument on a bus.

It was the final stage of a rolling confrontation that began when the man, Winston Alladin, exchanged words with a woman who he said had cut in line to board the Q85 bus the night of June 25. Several miles later, the argument, now involving some young passengers, spilled onto a street in Springfield Gardens, where more teenagers joined in and Mr. Alladin stabbed Keyanna Jones in the chest.

“He broke down in tears because I told him he is going home,” Kevin P. O’Donnell, Mr. Alladin’s lawyer, said on Thursday.

But Mr. Alladin, who is from Trinidad, may not be able to return to his home in Queens. He was still in jail Thursday and was expected to be turned over to federal custody at the request of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, said a Rikers Island spokesman, Stephen J. Morello.

The agency did not say why it wanted Mr. Alladin detained, though it typically does so when a person’s immigration status is in question. Mr. O’Donnell said he believed Mr. Alladin, who has been in the United States for at least about 10 years and was engaged to be married, was in the country legally.

But he wants to return to Trinidad anyway, Mr. O’Donnell said.

“It is awful; he has never been arrested before,” he said. “He is a hard-working guy. One of the things he kept saying was, in his Trinidadian accent, ‘Why did these people want to hurt me? I did nothing.’”

. . .

“He had a very, very legitimate self-defense argument,” said Mr. O’Donnell. “He had been chased by 10 or 12 kids for no reason for an argument that happened half an hour earlier that did not involve any of them. It was like a pack of wolves.

“He was running up and down the street screaming for people to call the police,” he said. “He was being hit by rocks, punched.

“He goes into the street and these kids surround him,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “One at a time they are stepping in and punching him.”

His back against a wall, Mr. Alladin pulled out the knife, he said.

“He had a knife in his bag, he was hoping they would see the knife and back off,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “It just so happened that the next person that stepped up to hit him happened to be this young girl. He did not know if it was a girl, he did not know if it was a boy, he just stuck the blade out to protect himself and she happened to get cut. Unfortunately it was a lethal stabbing.”

“‘Why did these people want to hurt me?” It’s a much, much better last line than Eric Bogosian’s final lines in subUrbia: “What is wrong with you . . . You throw it all away!” People, this is A Raisin in the Sun meets subUrbia! Pitch now!

Next time you’re escaping the police and some buttinsky, keep in mind that this ploy does not seem to work:

The pajama-clad super of a ritzy lower Manhattan high-rise chased a burglar but was mistakenly grabbed by security guards when the wily thief screamed for help, police sources said.

“The guy was yelling at no one in particular, ‘Stop this crazy guy. He’s trying to kill me!’” said super Bobby Gardocki, who admitted he looked somewhat bizarre running barefoot in his jammies after the burglar Saturday night.

Gardocki was grabbed by Manhattan Community College police, who thought he was the culprit.

A building tenant convinced the guards they had the wrong guy and cops arrested the suspect, Michael Estrada, 38, of Queens, nearby.

He allegedly looted a woman’s apartment of more than $3,000 in jewelry before trying to get into the super’s flat.