Damn Those Toll Increases!

Bronx teen steals car, ends up in toll lane of Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, falls short of required $4.50 to get through, gets arrested by Bridge and Tunnel police and ends up having the Post tag him as one of the dumbest criminals of all time:

A Bronx teen nabbed yesterday for an alleged carjacking deserves an E-ZPass into the NYPD’s hit parade of dumbest bad guys.

That’s because everything that Darwin David Guity, 18, did — from the moment he set eyes on Vuong Minh’s 2003 Isuzu to when he encountered a cop named Robert Denaro — backfired, sources said yesterday.

It was 5 a.m. when Guity approached Minh walking to his car on Lexington Avenue and East 63rd Street, brandished a plastic, metallic-colored toy gun and demanded his car keys, police said.

After driving around until about 6:50 a.m., the teen found himself in the E-ZPass lane on the Brooklyn side of the Battery Tunnel, cops said.

The car had no pass. And Guity found he only had $3.70 — 80 cents short of the $4.50 toll, a law-enforcement official said.

“If he had had the $4.50, they probably would have allowed him to go through without stopping him,” the source said.

Instead, he faced Bridge and Tunnel cop Robert Denaro, pronounced like the actor. When the teen couldn’t produce a driver’s license, registration or an insurance card, cops ran the plate. And the registrant’s name came back Vuong Minh — but Guity is black and of Honduran ancestry, cops said.

“He tried to tell the cops it was his mother’s car, but the problem was this guy really had trouble passing for an Asian,” chuckled one official.

When cops got a stolen-car report on the Isuzu, they busted Guity and found the plastic gun on the back seat, sources said.