The Bobster
Senior News Editor since 2004
NYC migrant pickpocketing teams are the newest headache for NYPD as trio busted for string of West Village bar thefts
Teams of pickpocketing migrants have been working the Big Apple, including targeting bustling Greenwich Village bars in recent hits — with nearly 100 asylum seekers now on the NYPD radar.
nypost.com
NYC migrant pickpocketing teams are the newest headache for NYPD as trio busted for string of West Village bar thefts
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Published Jan. 29, 2024, 6:14 p.m. ET
The NYPD is honing in on migrant pickpocketing crews that are now working the Big Apple — with nearly 100 asylum seekers already popping up on the NYPD radar, law enforcement sources tell The Post.
One particularly sticky-fingered trio was nabbed over the weekend after allegedly picking pockets at three separate Greenwich Village watering holes in under 30 minutes, according to the sources.
“It’s been happening all the time here,” one staffer at the Red Lion on Bleeker Street told The Post. “The last few months it’s been intense. Maybe they spread the word, I don’t know. It’s on Friday and Saturday when it’s busy.
“They work as a team,” she said. “It’s creepy.”
Oscar Tarazona, Sebastian Baez and alleged ringleader Lina Jacome-Bedoya, all migrants from Colombia, were charged with grand larceny and possession of stolen property at Bosco on Bleeker, Wicked Willy’s and the Red Lion between 1:30 and 2 a.m. Saturday, authorities said.
Jacome-Bedoya, 23, has been arrested four other times in Manhattan since July, including for allegedly stealing cellphones from handbags and pockets, according to the police sources.
4 Bosco on Bleeker in Greenwich Village is one of several watering holes targeted by teams of migrant pickpockets. Google Maps
4 Wicked Willy on Bleeker Street was targeted early Saturday by a migrant team of pickpockets, police sources said. Zandy Mangold
Baez, 25, and Tarazona, 26, were allegedly working in tandem with Jacome-Bedoya in the three new larceny incidents over the weekend, the sources said.
“We have a hard enough time going after actual New Yorkers committing crime,” one frustrated cop told The Post. “Now we have to deal with a whole different subset of people who arrive here with no means of support, no legal means of working or opportunity.
“So, I don’t see how this should come as any surprise,” the cop said.
More than 172,000 migrants from the US border with Mexico have arrived in the five boroughs since the spring of 2022, with about 67,500 now housed in more than 200 city shelters and hotels.
A small percentage of the asylum seekers have run afoul of the law, including after the fatal stabbing of a 24-year-old migrant at a city shelter on Randall’s Island on Jan. 7.
Also this month, residents near Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, where a 2,000-bed migrant tent shelter was erected, complained about “lawlessness” by the occupants there.
4 More than 172,000 migrants flocked to the city the since spring of 2022 — and a handful have run afoul of the law. G.N.Miller/NYPost
4 Among the most serious migrant crimes was the fatal stabbing of a 24-year-old at a city shelter on Randall’s Island. William C Lopez/New York Post
By September, more than 40 migrants had been arrested at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, the city’s intake center for the thousands arriving in the city.
“I’ve seen some things,” a bartender at the Wicked Willy’s said of the pickpockets Monday. “Something happened last week. Someone complained — they lost their phone.
“One hundred percent it’s bad for business,” he said. “People don’t feel safe and even us employees, we have to tell the customers, ‘Hey, things are increasing. Don’t leave your stuff on the table.'”