Don’t smoke
Two knife-wielding scumbags slashed a man on Third Street on Aug. 5 after asking him to bum a smoke.
The 26-year-old victim told cops that he was heading near the corner of Fourth Avenue at around 11 pm when one of the thugs approached and said, “Can I have a cigarette.”
When the man refused, the man made the demand a bit more expensive.
“Give me your money,” he said, grabbing the man’s Yankee cap and then pulling out the knife.
That’s when the victim handed over $70, but that wasn’t enough, apparently, so the thug slashed the man in the upper arm.
Both men fled towards Third Avenue and the victim walked himself to New York Methodist Hospital.
A big byte
A thief broke into a 12th Street apartment on Aug. 7 and stole a computer and a fancy gaming system.
The tenant in the unit, which is between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West told cops that he was not in the apartment from 1:30 until 10:30 pm, giving the thief ample time to break in through a rear window and take the Apple laptop and the xBox game.
Dean scream
A resident of Dean Street came home on Aug. 6 to find that a thief had broken in and taken a $2,000 leather jacket and lots of tools.
The tenant told cops that he was not in the building, which is between Fourth and Fifth avenues, from 2:30 to 5:30 pm that day.
Inside jobs?
A construction company lost tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment when a thief broke into a job site on Third Avenue sometime between June and August.
The construction crew apparently didn’t notice the crime for two months, but the owner of Staten Island-based Condor Construction Company told cops that he believes an ex-foreman looted the work site.
Here’s how he apparently did it: After closing up one night, the foreman returned, opened up a locked storage area and took two generators, a pressure washer, a boring machine, a Bobcat front-end loader and $10,000 in hand tools.
He then changed the lock on the storage area, which is at the corner of 13th Street.
In an unrelated, though thematically similar, crime, a marketing company on 10th Street and Second Avenue told police that an ex-employee let himself into the office overnight on Aug. 8 and stole nearly $17,000 in equipment.
Highway robbery
It wouldn’t be Park Slope without lots of car thefts and break-ins. Here are last week’s grisly details:
• A thief stole all four tires off a Honda Fit that had been parked on 10th Street between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West overnight on July 10. The crime was in the blotter this week because the victim, who lives on 13th Street, finally got the bill for the missing wheels — and it exceeded $2,000, making this a grand, not petit, larceny case.
• Two men tried to steal a man’s Suzuki motorcycle from a spot on Lincoln Place on Aug. 2, but gave up before snagging the fancy rice-burner.
The would-be victim told cops that he watched the men try to pilfer the two-wheeler on the block between Sixth and Seventh avenues at about 3:30 pm.
• Five days later on the same block, a thug smashed through the front window of a 2003 Volkswagen and stole a video iPod.
• The sound of a car alarm alerted the owner of a Mitsubishi that someone had just smashed the window of the car that he had parked on Second Street.
The man told cops that he heard the alarm go off at around 3:55 am on Aug. 4, sending officers scurrying to the block between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West. The cops discovered a broken window and the two fancy bucket seats — valued at $10,000 — gone.
— Gersh Kuntzman
