If They Concoct Entire Terror Plots In Order To Nab Would-Be Bombers, Then Why Not Also This?

So paranoid:

A graffiti crew called “Made U Look NYC” — or MUL NYC — is boasting to have spray-painted a piece spanning 10 subway cars last month, according to a Web site madeulooknyc.com.

The site is selling T-shirts featuring a photo of an R train with the Monopoly character painted on it, and promoting a 60-minute documentary about the piece’s creation that they plan to auction on eBay Mar. 1.

Some bloggers, however, speculate that the NYPD may be behind this stunt as a way to lure the culprits.

“If you were thinking of buying a T-shirt commemorating Made U Look’s painting of 10 whole NYC subway cars, you may want to reconsider now,” warned city blog RazorApple.com. Its recent posting of an explainer showing how the NYPD might be monitoring the site’s visitors got picked up by various blogs such as Gawker and Gothamist.

“It seems illogical that [MUL] would incriminate themselves in this way, with a Web site selling T-shirts,” Razor Apple’s editor Will Sherman told Metro yesterday, “but stranger things have happened.”

Sherman doesn’t doubt MUL was behind the “staggering feat” of painting the 750-foot-long piece — “Nothing this large was put on the subway since Easter Sunday 1988,” he said — but the site’s photos, which appear to have been taken at a rail yard on Dec. 26, seemed fishy, he thought. “It’s hard for me to believe they were able to film and take all those photos in daylight.”

He grew more suspicious after an e-mail exchange he had with “Frank,” who responded to the e-mail address listed on MUL NYC’s site. “He talked about other members in his crew, calling them ‘gentlemen,'” Sherman said. “I wouldn’t think you would describe the people in your crew like that.”

“Frank” denied allegations of police involvement in an e-mail to Metro.

Not Really Biting The Hand That Feeds You So Much As Jumping Over The Counter And Shooting It Off

Despite how they make it sound, Bedford-Stuyvesant really is a tight-knit neighborhood:

There are video cameras watching the counter all the time. The monitors are wrapped in clear plastic to keep them clean. Most of the other Chinese restaurants nearby also have thick plexiglass shields between the cashier and the customer, like a gas station or a liquor store, but not Happy House. Longtime customers, presumably the very people who would be the most offended by beefed-up security, tell [Gigi] Wong they need more.

“They need, like, a partition here with a window,” said a matronly woman who gave only her first name, Lorna. “People are stupid. They always kill the ones that help them.”

To Ms. Wong, she said, “If that was you they shot, I would have cried.”

So new was the cashier that, after the shooting, no one in the Wong family seemed to know her full name, only her last name, Lin. Before the shooting, when Gigi Wong had tried to speak to her at work, they would be constantly interrupted by customers.

And the kicker:

The man, Raymond Wiliams, 21, was identified on the security video tape as the gunman leaping over the counter, according to a criminal complaint filed in court. The police are looking for another man who may have been involved, the complaint says.

Mr. Williams has been charged with attempted murder, assault, menacing and harassment, and remained in jail as of yesterday. He admitted he leaped over the counter and fired two shots, according to the complaint.

Ms. Wong did not recognize his name.

But she was stunned to learn of his address, 210 Stuyvesant Avenue, right around the corner from the restaurant.

“We deliver to that address,” she said. “Every single day.”

Robbing a Chinese takeout is not particularly smart. Robbing your neighborhood Chinese takeout . . . nice.

What’s This Generation Coming To?

Heartless scam artists responsible for bilking Staten Islanders out of hundreds of dollars turn out to be 12 and 14:

The search for two scam artists who traded on tall tales about dead relatives and needy families came to an end in West Brighton last night.

Not with a whimper, or a high-speed police chase.
But with the young suspects knocking on a door.

A cop’s door.

A brother-and-sister team from the neighborhood — the boy just 12 and the girl 14 — were arrested on charges they have been duping Staten Islanders for months, police said.

The middle-school miscreants were roving Davis Avenue in West Brighton at about 5:40 p.m. when they unwittingly arrived at the cop’s home, according to a police source familiar with the case.

Sensing something was amiss, the cop’s wife called her husband, and officers from the North Shore’s 120th Precinct were immediately dispatched, the source added.

The kiddie culprits were caught a few houses away, with a professional-looking ledger stuffed of falsified donation receipts from two funeral homes for about $150, the source continued.

The duo reportedly confessed to concocting various tall tales, saying that money was tight at home and they were trying to help out their mom.

However, when their mother was notified of her children’s capers, she was shocked, the source said.

. . .

Apparently, the small scam artists coaxed their victims out of cash with the promise that the funeral homes — and even the Advance — would match any donation made toward a burial.

The suspects told cops their inspiration for the sick swindle was the Advance’s coverage of the decomposed body of an infant found Sept. 24 inside a plastic shopping bag in the grass of Luis R. Lopez Playground in Clifton, according to the source.

Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash . . . Because I Spent The Afternoon Robbing Banks!

You’re forgiven for feeling like a huge fuddy duddy after reading about the 16-year-old girl nabbed during a bank-robbing spree:

A 16-year-old girl walked into the Commerce Bank branch at 31-09 Ditmars Blvd. shortly before 1 p.m. on Friday afternoon and passed a note to a teller demanding cash. When the teller walked away from the counter, the girl fled. A few minutes later, the same girl entered the First Central Savings Bank branch at 37-28 Ditmars Blvd. and again passed a note to a teller demanding cash. The teller complied and the girl fled the bank and passed the money off to a white male who fled the scene on foot. The girl was detained until the police responded.

Chrystie Almestica, who lives on 28th Street in Astoria, is charged with attempted bank robbery, bank robbery, and menacing. As of press time the male suspect had not been arrested. According to reports, Almestica allegedly claimed the male suspect had coerced her into committing the robbery. The investigation is ongoing.

Just Imagine How Long We Could Have Put Him Away For Had He Actually Come Up With The Idea On His Own

The NYPD’s vaunted anti-terror arm justifies its existence with a collar’s thirty-year sentence:

Yesterday, the courtroom was crowded, largely with news reporters and law enforcement officials. Mr. [Shahawar Matin] Siraj’s parents, appearing stunned when the sentence was dispensed, were also in the courtroom, and his uncle sat in the last row. His mother, Shahina Parveen, dressed in a patterned light blue tunic and pants, and a white head scarf, clutched a string of pale green prayer beads that she had carried during the trial.

After the proceeding, she began to cry as she sat on a bench outside the courtroom and talked to one of her son’s lawyers, Khurrum B. Wahid, slipping a tissue behind her glasses. Later, she spoke briefly to reporters, maintaining her son’s innocence and saying he would appeal.

“The N.Y.P.D., through a paid informant, tricked my son and got him stuck in this,” Ms. Parveen said, as Mr. Wahid translated from the Urdu. “He didn’t do anything. I didn’t get any justice. It was not a fair sentence.”

But the Police Department, which investigated the case, the first in which a terrorism inquiry by its Intelligence Division led to a prosecution in federal court, hailed the sentence, calling it “a milestone in the safeguarding of New York City.”

“It says that those who conspire against New York will pay a severe price,” Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in a statement, praising the Intelligence Division, saying it “uncovered a murderous plot in its infancy and stopped it before lives were lost.”

Actually, that last quote should probably read “devised and uncovered a murderous plot in its infancy and stopped it before lives were lost.”

Earlier: Spies Like Us!