One Word: Pedicabs

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.”

Paging Steven Levitt

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.

Is Arthur Miller Still Alive?

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!

I Don’t Think That Worked In The Movies, Either

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.

Times Square More Like Toronto, Less Like Reality

The Bad Old Days or a Law & Order set? What the MOFTB hath wrought:

Times Square tourists were stunned yesterday when a 23-year-old Manhattan man was stabbed, leaving a blood-splattered crime scene that had some wondering whether it was real or a movie set.

Police said the victim, Juan Garcia of Riverside Drive, was stabbed in the back on 46th Street at about 7:20 a.m. Garcia managed to get away, but his knife-wielding assailant pursued him on foot to 45th Street and Broadway, where he stabbed Garcia again.

Witnesses said they saw Garcia collapse to the ground and then saw police running to the scene where they quickly handcuffed Antoine Poprilo, 37, of Manhattan, who they said was still holding the knife.

. . .

Scattered on the corner of 45th Street was blood-stained medical gauze, the victim’s breakfast sandwich and coffee, as well as his broken headphones and shirt. Confused tourists walking by did double takes, and some stopped when they realized they were walking by a real New York City crime scene that was cordoned off by yellow tape and uniformed police officers.

Marianne Wedgeworth, 43, of Lake Charles, La., said she heard emergency vehicles’ sirens as she was leaving her hotel.

“I wasn’t sure. I thought they were shooting a movie,” said Wedgeworth, who stopped to take a closer look at the scene.