This brazen bandit made even the judge say, “Wow!”
A smooth-talking ex-con got slammed with a $50,000 bail by a judge who apparently couldn’t believe the charges — that the suspect had conned his way into Police Headquarters yesterday and stolen two laptops and seven BlackBerry’s off a lieutenant’s desk, right down the hall from the commissioner’s office.
“All I can say is ‘Wow!'” Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Anthony Ferrara said. “Is this after 9-11?”
Meanwhile, Commissioner Ray Kelly brushed off alleged thief, Jermaine Sweet, 30, as just another routine “office creeper.”
“He was observed going out the building and he was arrested,” Kelly said. “This was his 18th arrest. It’s called in the trade an office creeper. He goes into office buildings and they take what they can take.”
Sweet, 30, was charged with burglary and criminal possession of stolen property.
He had gone to headquarters yesterday morning on the ruse that he needed to pick up stolen property from the property clerk’s office on the sub-lobby level, according to the criminal complaint against him.
Turned away for lack of a property voucher, he tried two other tacks — first claiming he needed to use a bathroom, then, when that didn’t work, claiming he needed to pick up a good conduct letter.
He showed his driver’s license, and was allowed inside, according to the the complaint.
Once in the lobby, Sweet then told a different officer that he was there to pick up stolen property, and was given a visitor’s sticker badge that gave him access to only the sub-lobby level, the complaint said.
Surveillance video shows him briefly entering, then leaving, the property clerk’s office, then taking an elevator up to the 14th floor, where Commissioner Kelly has his offices.
Sweet got let onto the locked floor — in his t-shirt and jeans shorts — by some friendly construction workers, who were renovating an office.
The Dell Latitude and Macbook Pro laptops he allegedly took — plus the seven BlackBerry’s — were worth a total of about $6,000, a police source said. They were immediately reported missing, and Sweet was arrested with the goods on him before he could leave the grounds, cops said.
In asking for the $50,000 bail, prosecutor Jordan Arnold called the crime “an audacious heist,” and called Sweet a career criminal with a lengthy record of felony drug and misdemeanor theft arrests.
“My client denies being in any restricted area,” said Sweet’s lawyer, Andrea Moletteri — asking for cooler heads and, unsuccessfully, lower bail.
“I understand this happened in One Police Plaza, and this is embarrassing,” she said.