A Friend In Need Is An Easy Mark For A Purse Snatching

And now the man has the largest stock of pocket-sized tissue packages of anyone I know:

A wake-crasher who waits for mourners to leave their valuables unattended has snatched at least five purses from three funeral homes on Staten Island over the past several days, police sources said.

“He’s actually sitting in the room with the mourners. He waits for somebody to leave, and he takes the purse,” said one police source, characterizing the thief as “somebody desperate who found a niche and who’s looking for cash.”

Police recovered two of the purses yesterday morning — emptied of cash and dumped outside the Staten Island Motor Lodge in Rosebank, according to Vienna Profeta, a 2002 Advance Woman of Achievement.

Ms. Profeta is a longtime friend of the purses’ owners, the sister and widow of schoolboy sports legend George Baumann. Their purses were lifted during his wake at the Hanley Funeral Home in New Dorp Tuesday night, as reported on the front page of yesterday’s Advance.

And it turns out they weren’t the shameless crook’s first victims. On Saturday, a Westerleigh woman found her purse pilfered as she mourned her aunt at Matthew Funeral Home in Willowbrook.

Later that night, the thief dropped in on the Harmon Home for Funerals in West Brighton to grab another purse, police said, then returned Sunday afternoon to strike again.

While there’s no consensus description of the heartless criminal, Claire Henderson, Mr. Baumann’s sister, recollected that a hard-looking man in his late 40s or early 50s elbowed past family at the wake and left quickly with his head down. Another Baumann relative noticed a bottle blonde, a thin woman in her 30s, who seemed to act suspiciously.