Funny, I Was Just Thinking About Pitching An Updated Dog Day Afternoon

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.

In A Word, Yes

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.

Even In The Era Of Obama, People Still Unclear About “The Tempering Qualities Of Humility And Restraint”

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.”

Less Stimulus Than Stun Gun

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.

The Economy Stays Cool, This Is A Robbery

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.”