THEFT ON 88TH STREET
At 3 a.m. on Jan. 22, a 22-year-old man was walking home on the Upper East Side. On East 88th Street, he told police, three young black males approached him. One of them allegedly said, “Give me your wallet, do you have any money?” Another punched the victim in the face, while the third one kicked him. Then, one of the men went through the victim’s pockets and took his cellphone and wallet. One perpetrator told him to count backward from 1,000, and not to look back because “we know where you live,” and his partner in crime told the victim, “We can shoot you right now.” The assailants then fled on foot. Police searched the area, but no one was found, and no arrests have been made.

MAN HIT BY WOMAN WIELDING CANE
A 46-year-old man was on an MTA bus on Jan. 21 during evening rush hour when he saw a woman in front of him attempt to hit a child with her cane. The man tried to restrain the woman, who then turned around and struck him in the left eye with her cane. A nearby witness, a 48-year-old man from the Bronx, confirmed these events. The 66-year-old woman was arrested for assault, but at most, she will be charged with a misdemeanor.

EX-BOYFRIEND MAKES TROUBLE
On Jan. 20, a 21-year-old woman was returning home to her apartment on East 89th Street when she was approached by her ex-boyfriend. She told police he then proceeded to slap her and drag her down the building stairs. The young woman did not suffer any injuries, but her cellphone was damaged. Police are still on the lookout for the assailant, a 30-year-old Hispanic male, 5’8”, who was wearing a black jacket and jeans at the time of the attack.

PHONE SCAM SNAGS TWO MORE VICTIMS
In what is starting to emerge as a pattern of scams targeting elderly people, an 89-year-old man and 64-year-old female reported getting a phone call from an unknown person on Jan. 17 in their apartment on East 76th Street. The caller claimed to be their granddaughter, saying she had been arrested in North Carolina. The caller instructed the couple to wire $14,700 for bail in California. The victims sent over the money, and soon after, received another call asking for an additional $3,950. At this point, they called their granddaughter, who said that she had actually not been arrested. In total, they were swindled out of over $18,000.

CELLPHONE SNATCHER
On Jan. 17, a 33-year-old woman was walking on Lexington Avenue and East 95th Street, when an unknown woman approached her and started yelling at her in Spanish. The perp then grabbed the cellphone out of the woman’s hand and fled. She was last seen running eastbound on 95th Street. The woman’s iPhone, worth $800, was stolen, and has not been retrieved.

PETER COOPER VILLAGE RESIDENTS STRUGGLE WITH NO GAS, ELECTRICAL PROBLEMS AND FLOODED BASEMENTS

While most of Manhattan’s East Side neighborhoods have overcome Hurricane Sandy’s damages, some areas are still trying to catch up. Peter Cooper Village, particularly, is in an ongoing struggle to restore basic services to some of its buildings, like gas and intercoms, after the storm’s record-breaking surge flooded the complex’s basements. Management there is orchestrating a frenzy of repairs, which are moving things forward but displeasing many village residents.

“What I don’t like is all this secrecy,” said Arthur Wolf, an elderly tenant who sat on a bench in the middle of the iconic red brick private housing community. “They tell us only what they want to tell us. What’s all this stuff?” He gestured to the growling portable generators and patchwork of yellow tubing scattered between the buildings around him. Workers with wheelbarrows appeared out of a below-ground door and carted piles of debris to East 20th Street. During the storm, the basements of Peter Cooper Village’s buildings, located between East 23th and 20th Streets and First Avenue and Avenue C, took on up to 6 feet of water. A lot remains to be cleaned up.

“Nobody will tell what all this is, exactly, and how long it will go on,” added Marcia Robinson, a tenant who sat with Wolf.

Lax communication from the owner of the complex, CW Capital, has upset a number of tenants. Many rented personal storage space in the buildings’ basements, where they stored items such as clothes, decorations, memorabilia, documents and even paintings. After the flooding, residents were eager to assess the damage to their belongings underground, but at first were not allowed to enter the basements because of safety concerns. Then, according to Susan Steinberg, chair of the board of directors of the Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village Tenants Association (Stuyvesant Town, the village’s next-door sister development, was not heavily damaged in the storm because its buildings do not have underground storage), residents received a notification shortly before Thanksgiving that they had until Nov. 30 to retrieve their things. After that date, everything remaining in the storage areas would be discarded.

“CW just wants to steamroll ahead,” Steinberg said. “Some tenants needed more time. They couldn’t sort through their things in just one trip.”

When the residents arrived to rummage through the remains of their possessions, they were required to sign a waiver that relieved management and its affiliates from blame if they were injured. This document forced many residents to second-guess the need to salvage their items. What exactly was in these basements that was so dangerous?

“We were getting messages left, right and center,” said Steinberg. “There was a lot of anger, a lot of frustration.”

Following complaints, CW extended retrieval dates by five days, and agreed to transfer the flooded belongings of those who could not visit the basements to an above-ground drop-off point. According to Steinberg, those who already signed waivers were not allowed to revisit their storage areas.

Flooding also damaged basement electrical systems and gas pumps, shorting intercom circuits and leaving some tenants still without heat. Workers now must check gas valves in each of the complex’s thousands of units, and sometimes have to drill locks to enter. They reportedly have caught at least one resident in the shower while entering apartments.

City Council Member Dan Garodnick is a Peter Cooper Village resident, and he affirmed that life was still far from normal for many tenants. “We hear about people who still have their gas out, who still can’t access their basements, who have no washers and dryers, who lost their cars in garages, whose intercoms don’t work,” he said. He noted that his own intercom and washer-dryer were inoperable.
Garodnick expressed grief that some tenants’ approval of the property manager had declined after what he said was a highly cooperative recovery effort in the storm’s immediate aftermath. With the Tenants Association’s and CW’s help, Garodnick organized a large-scale volunteer emergency response that checked in with every tenant in the complex to address their needs. Steinberg called the effort “fantastic” and affirmed CW’s involvement.

“We worked hand in hand with management during the crisis. We were very happy to do so,” Garodnick said. “That level of collaboration has changed, unfortunately. There’s much less communication, much less information being shared.”

In Steinberg’s words, things returned to “business as usual.” Both she and Garodnick said they were not certain why this was, but Steinberg speculated that CW’s desire to return buildings to normal trumped their interest in responding to tenants.

CW themselves—via their office, Peter Cooper Village Residential Services and public relations firm—could not be reached for comment on their relationship with tenants, and did not respond to messages before press time. On the village’s website, www.pcvst.com, management has a “Post-Storm Updates” in which posts over the past month detail repair progress. CW Capital Managing Director Andrew MacArthur posted there shortly after the storm, “While this last week has been extraordinarily trying, it also highlighted all that is special about our community. Our younger residents kept careful watch over their elderly neighbors and our elderly residents provided us all with an example of how to overcome adversity with good humor and fortitude. Our political figures pitched in, and the various resident groups have done their part. Finally, our staff has demonstrated a commitment to this community that is extraordinary. During this last week, PCVST showed what it means to be part of a community you should all be proud to call home.”

John Marsh, president of the Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village Tenants Association, acknowledged issues in communication between CW and tenants, but asserted that overall the property manager was doing a good job with repairs, given the scope of the damages. “They’re dealing with it very aggressively, and we know it’s tough,” he said.

Marsh toured some of the basements shortly after the hurricane, and was one of the first to see the extent of what was lost. “It was pretty devastating,” he explained. “Piles of rubble, water lines above your head, glass smashed—it looked like a fire without the fire.”

Garodnick recently reached out to city agencies for assistance in making sure that there are no lingering safety issues in the buildings’ basements. By his request, workers from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development have begun daily inspections of the complex’s damaged properties.

“We will make it through this,” he said.

Hurricane Sandy outdid even the most aggressive projections of its impact on New York. In my district on the East Side of Manhattan, and some of the West 50s, we had severe flooding throughout Zones A and B, power and heat outages that lasted for over a week, and—as if that weren’t bad enough—a crane that hung precariously in Midtown, forcing residents from their homes.

The situation presented an important opportunity for local government to respond. The flooding left thousands of my constituents stranded in their apartments and in need of assistance, particularly in Peter Cooper Village, Stuyvesant Town and Waterside Plaza, home to nearly 30,000 right next to the East River. Residents—who include me and my family—lacked electricity, heat and hot water, and just as dangerously, any telephone service.

Without the ability to call in our out, seniors and residents with limited mobility were cut off from the outside world, with family members who were worried about them.

In response, we set up our volunteer operation starting on Thursday morning, and worked hand in hand with both properties’ management with the goal of knocking on every door in both communities every day until power began to be restored. We put out a call for volunteers; we secured donations of food, blankets, batteries and water with the help of Speaker Quinn’s staff; we set up a volunteer center (and City Council mobile office) in the Stuyvesant Town Community Center and in the Management Office of Waterside Plaza; and we got to work.

It was inspiring to see how many New Yorkers turned out to help, with hundreds of volunteers from New York Cares, religious groups, local tenants associations and many others, including my colleagues in government. We dispatched them door to door, checking on our neighbors, assessing their needs, and then sending volunteers back out immediately with the relevant supplies, to the extent we had them. This continued over several consecutive days, until the power and heat started coming back.

One of the most pressing needs was that of seniors who worried that their prescriptions were running out, and needed immediate refills. In response, we called for local nurses and doctors to arrange health visits for seniors who were trapped—and we had volunteers make runs to fill their prescriptions, and bring them up the dark staircases in the buildings.

We even had a couple of very nice surprises. We had generous donations of food from the Setai Hotel, Riverpark restaurant, which also offered hot coffee in Stuyvesant Oval, and a delivery of hot soup from celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito, which he had made himself. And we had countless volunteers who pooled their own funds and made emergency runs for supplies, including prescription refills and batteries. A particularly entrepreneurial group of volunteers at Waterside borrowed a shopping cart from a local store and wheeled 300 bottles of water across the FDR for residents at Waterside.

The most incongruous image that sticks out in my mind was 40 members of the Air Force National Guard showing up late on Thursday in the Stuyvesant Town Community Center, in full military fatigues and an army truck, passing boxes of “meals ready to eat” down an assembly line into the center. When they were done, we marched with them with flashlights through the dark and desolate Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper up to meet their truck in Waterside Plaza, where they did the same thing.

Another image was one that most New Yorkers won’t soon forget: a crane hanging dangerously above Midtown in 90 mph winds, also in my council district. While the City acted swiftly to evacuate hundreds of residents, many left their homes in a hurry, leaving medication, clothing and pets behind. We worked to help these residents gain safe, temporary access to their apartments to retrieve the items they needed. I’m happy to report that as of Monday night, the crane was secured and all residents in the West 50s who had been evacuated were allowed to return home.

While the communities in my district are slowly getting back to life as usual, there are still large parts of the city that are not so lucky. If you are able to get out to Staten Island or the hard-hit areas in Brooklyn and Queens, I strongly encourage you to lend a hand there.

Dan Garodnick is the City Council Member for District 4 on the Upper East Side.

Dangerous Doctor’s Office
A 42-year-old man was waiting to see his dentist on East 95th Street on Oct. 8 when his girlfriend stormed into the office. She accused him of not telling her about his appointment, and the two got into an argument. When he tried to get up and move away from her, the girlfriend put her hands in his face and then struck him in the head with her umbrella twice, causing severe swelling under his left eye. The 28-year-old fled the scene before police arrived and is now wanted for assault.

Too Good to Be True
A tag-team scam singled out a 63-year-old woman on the street near East 64th Street and Third Avenue on Oct. 8 at about 2:20 p.m. A man approached the woman to ask where the Johnson & Johnson law firm was located. Then a second man walked up to helpfully inform him that the law firm had moved. Suddenly, the first guy revealed that he had in his possession a winning lottery ticket in the amount of $500,000, but lacked the ability to cash it in himself because he isn’t a citizen. The second man suggested that he cash it on his behalf and that the newly formed trio split the proceeds. The men asked the woman to pony up $5,000 cash as a “show of good faith” in splitting the ticket with them, which she promptly withdrew from a nearby bank branch and handed over. The two told her to wait on the street while they supposedly cashed the half-million-dollar ticket and returned to hand off a sack, stuffed not with money but with pieces of paper, before scurrying off, at which point she finally caught on that she had been had.

Directions Dispute
A 36-year-old man ended his night out in police custody following an ill-fated cab ride on a recent Sunday morning. The man hopped into the taxi at around 3 a.m. on East Seventh Street and Avenue A and instructed the driver to bring him home to East 88th Street and Third Avenue. When the cab pulled up, however, the man became irate, insisting that he had tried to give the driver faster directions that he had failed to heed. The man paid his fare, but then got out of the car, walked to the driver’s side window and punched the driver in the face several times, causing a laceration and bruising. Police arrested him for assault upon arrival at the scene.

High-End Heist
An employee at an upscale handbag and leather goods store on East 85th Street reported a theft to police this week. On Monday, two men and one woman came into the store together around 8 p.m. The woman distracted the salesperson while the two men surreptitiously emptied a display shelf, stealing 20 men’s wallets from the display. The three then left together in an unknown direction, making off with $2,100 worth of wallets in total.

Counterfeiter Nabbed
Police arrested a 55-year-old man on the sidewalk outside an East 67th Street retail address last Thursday. The man was found with counterfeit Coach wallets and said he was selling them, and the cops picked him up on trademark counterfeit charges.

Newsstand Nightmare
Early on Monday morning, an employee at a newsstand on East 79th Street was approached by what he thought was a normal customer. At about 7:10 a.m., the man, described as black, aged 55-60, with medium height and build, asked the newsstand worker for a pack of Newport 100s cigarettes. When the employee handed the pack to him, the man said, “Mother [expletive], I need two packs.” Despite the rude request, the employee complied, handing over a second pack, but then the perpetrator started whacking him on the head and hands with a shaving razor before taking off with the packs, worth $26 total, down the street on foot. Luckily, the newsstand employee was not injured, but the crazed smoker got away before police could catch him.

Cellphone Snatch
A 24-year-old man was standing on the corner of East 62nd Street and Second Avenue on Sunday at 8 p.m., waiting to cross the street. He took out his cellphone to call his mother, but before he could dial, a man on a motorcycle rolled up and grabbed the phone. When the victim looked up in surprise, the perp said “What?” and then drove off with a group of fellow motorcyclers. The phone, a Virgin Mobile model, was worth $100.

Bodega Mayhem
A flustered store clerk from a Third Avenue bodega called police after a strange and destructive incident in his shop on Sunday. The employee told police that an unknown man walked into the store and purposefully knocked over a display case as well as the cash register, damaging both items. He made no statements and didn’t take anything before leaving just as quickly as he came.

JIMMY CHOO HEIST
Burglars made off with over $70,000 worth of Jimmy Choo handbags and shoes at the designer’s Madison Avenue store Sunday night just before midnight, police said. Two witnesses saw two men running out of the store with white shopping bags. The burglars hopped in a gray minivan and sped off.

A store security guard was downstairs in a storeroom when he heard noise in the showroom. He called police, who discovered the glass front door at 716 Madison Ave. was smashed. Thirty-four handbags with an average price of over $2,000 were stolen along with two pairs of shoes and one keychain, police said.

Witnesses gave police the license plate of the getaway van. No arrests have been made. Store employees declined to comment.

WOMAN MUGGED
A 30-year-old woman was mugged in her vestibule as she was coming home at 3 a.m. on Sunday, police said. The woman was looking for her keys to the front door of her walk-up at East 75th Street, between First and York avenues, when a man grabbed her purse, saying, “Shut up, all I want is your money,” according to police.

The robber became agitated when he could not find anything. When he grabbed her wallet, the woman started to fight back and all of her belongings fell to the floor. The man took about $20 before running off. Police said the woman’s lobby has a surveillance camera but did not indicate if they had tried to review the tape.

WIFE BEATER
A 44-year-old woman living at a shelter at 1645 First Ave. was punched repeatedly in the face by her husband early Tuesday morning at about 2:30, police said. The attack left the woman with a cut on her nose and a swollen face. She told police her husband also kicked her in the stomach.

The wife said the assault began during an argument over money and that her husband, 36, ran away after the beating.
Police had not made an arrest as of Tuesday afternoon.

Aguila Inc., a Bronx-based nonprofit that provides transitional housing for homeless families, runs a shelter at the address. It has various kinds of shelters across the city and it’s not clear if the husband was also living at the shelter. Aguila officials did not return messages Tuesday.

LAPTOPS LIFTED
Workers at a hair and nail salon at 15 E. 71st St. reported that two laptop computers were stolen last week sometime after the store had closed.

Even next-door neighbors are at odds about Susan (not her real name), a homeless woman on the Upper East Side known for her constant screaming, coughing and spitting on passersby. While some consider her a threat to the neighborhood, others feel sorry for her and say she can’t control her actions.

As Our Town reported last week, some residents want Susan off the streets or at least treated for her supposed mental illness and cough, which a few locals attribute to tuberculosis or whooping cough.

But there is no easy way to handle this situation. Police can only pick Susan up if they spot her committing a crime, according to Nick Viest, the president of the 19th Precinct Community Council. Spitting is classified as a violation, added Officer  Jepsen of the 19th Precinct, and police can only issue her a summons if they see her spitting on someone. She cannot be forcibly admitted into a mental hospital unless she is clearly a “danger to herself or others,” and no one can force her to stay in a homeless shelter if she chooses not to go, said Mary Lee Gupta, a social worker and program director for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill of New York City Metro.

Representatives at both the Manhattan Outreach Consortium at the Goddard Riverside Community Center and the Department of Homeless Services said homeless outreach teams have met with Susan.

But Gina Rotundo, who co-owns Alloro Restaurant on East 77th Street between First and Second avenues, doesn’t think Susan is worth this level of concern.

“While her outbursts have been disturbing, they’ve never, ever felt threatening,” Rotundo said. “I don’t think she is terrorizing the Upper East Side at all.”

Some locals believe that Susan maliciously, intentionally spits on those in her path, but Rotundo argues that Susan can’t help her outbursts. She pointed out that she has seen Susan walking over to a garbage can when she has to spit, so that she doesn’t end up spitting on people. When Rotundo was on the train taking her daughter to a class downtown, she realized that Susan tries to avoid confrontation, she said.

“Stupid teenagers were making fun of her and I could see that she was trying to say, ‘Cut it out, cut it out,’” Rotundo said. “She tried to spit out of the train.”

One of Rotundo’s employees, Nick, who declined to give his last name, said that Susan isn’t always wildly hacking and spitting.

“I’ve seen her when she’s not like that—when she’s completely normal,” Nick said. “Everyone has different outlets, and that’s how she expresses when she’s upset.”

Audi Brahimi, a doorman on East 77th Street, who works across the street from Alloro, said he has seen Susan but has never found her disturbing.

“She doesn’t bother me, but I’ve heard other people complain,” Brahimi said. “She didn’t do anything to me. She never comes in front of the building. She just walks down the street—walks down and walks back. That’s it.”

Another doorman on East 77th Street between Second and Third avenues agrees.

“I don’t think she’d ever do anything to anybody,” he said. “I don’t see her doing funny things like jumping on people.”

Next door to Alloro Restaurant, though, at Aaron Emanuel Salon, employees see a completely different side of Susan.

“What she does is she abusively spits on people,” said Alessandro Neira, a hairdresser at the salon. “I was passing by and she spit on me. She can control it and it’s clear that it’s on purpose.”

Unlike Nick, who believes that Susan’s occasional calm moments prove she is not a threat, Neira said he thinks this indicates that Susan intentionally decides when to act up.

Another employee, Elena Burbu, said she is afraid to pass by the woman.

“When she’s on this side of the street, I try to go to the other side,” Burbu said. “I try to avoid her illness.”

Jessica, an employee at Hot and Crusty Bakery on the corner of Lexington and East 77th Street who did not give her last name, said she and her co-worker were walking down the street when Susan spit on them.

“She’s doing it on purpose,” she said. “She’s crazy for sure.”

By Amanda Woods

Following the recent report of a young woman who was stabbed in broad daylight on East 86th Street near Second Avenue, some Upper East Side residents and business owners are concerned that the ongoing subway construction makes the avenue more dangerous and prone to violent outbreaks.

Crime within the 19th Precinct, which covers the neighborhood, has climbed 16.22 percent from this time last year and 7.72 percent over the past two years, according to the most recent CompStat report. But Nick Viest, president of the 19th Precinct Community Council, said that crime has actually decreased 40 percent on Second Avenue between 80th and 91st streets, compared to this time last year.

These stats don’t prevent concerns from pouring in. Viest noted that residents at 19th Precinct Community Council meetings have pointed out that the construction area could be a breeding ground for crime.

Those concerns carry over from the meeting room into the neighborhood’s streets. Some blame the scaffolding and fencing surrounding the construction—in some spots covered with green tarps—for tightening up and darkening the sidewalks, potentially hindering the police’s view of the goings-on along the Avenue.

“What do you see when you look outside?” asked Dimitrios Kontakos, the manager of Viand Coffee Shop on the corner of Second Avenue and 86th Street, whose storefront is completely hidden on one side by the construction’s fencing. “Can you see anything? They put a jail over here.”

Kontakos suggested that some of the scaffolding and fencing should be removed at night, when construction is not going on, because a wide-open view of the sidewalk may deter criminals. “Thugs and thieves and criminals don’t like to be exposed,” he said.

The recent stabbing, which occurred in broad daylight, led Kontakos to worry about what could happen in the middle of the night when people are not around to help.

“This is the first time I’ve seen somebody at 10:30 in the morning outside of the store doing this,” Kontakos said. “Imagine if nobody was around and the store was closed. [The woman] wouldn’t be alive.”

Frank Giambanco, owner of Midnight Blue, an Italian restaurant on Second Avenue between 85th and 86th streets, shares the same concerns.

“It’s pretty dark here because of the closure,” Giambanco said. “It’s pretty unsafe for women.”

Vincent Naval, manager of Ivory Cleaners Too, between 84th and 85th streets on the Avenue, also thinks the construction is inviting for criminals.

“Two people can’t pass at the same time,” Naval said. “It’s easy for them to do these kinds of things,” he added, making a stabbing motion with his hand.

Saxs Sexigs, who has lived on the Upper East Side for over 30 years, said that although the subway construction isn’t completely to blame for crime in the area, it holds some of the responsibility.

“There wasn’t that high a crime rate before they started,” Sexigs said.  “These streets are so narrow and all these people have to walk on one side.”

Some residents are concerned that the Avenue is becoming a haven for the homeless, who camp out in enclosed areas on the street, shielded by scaffolding. Many of them don’t appear to be threatening, including one who calmly sits with his dog and a newspaper, Sexigs said. But Naval said that two or three homeless people sleep in front of his store every night, and he called the police on one of them a few months ago, a man who repeatedly cut his wrist and threatened passersby. Naval said he hasn’t seen the man since his call.

Bob, an Upper East Sider who declined to give his last name, said he doesn’t think the subway construction has any relationship to crime in the area, and that other factors are to blame.

“I think the neighborhood changed since they brought in Best Buy and bigger chain stores,” he said. “More people bring the crime element as well.”

Viest said that the significant decrease in crime along the stretch of the Avenue affected by the construction indicates that crime in the area is probably not related to the project.

Of greatest concern in the 19th Precinct is the increase in grand larcenies—property crimes, including iPhone thefts—which have climbed 22.4 percent in the precinct over the past year, Viest said.

“When those numbers move, that tends to be the most significant in affecting the overall crime,” Viest said. “It’s the largest number. We’ve seen an [increase], but it’s also the most difficult crime to police because it’s a crime of opportunity. There tend to be gangs and groups that coordinate and do these things.”

Police are urging locals not to hold their phones in public, but other than that, the crimes are hard to prevent, Viest said.

Julia Csiki, a waitress at André’s Cafe, located on Second Avenue between 84th and 85th streets, and Mary Charlotin, who also works in the area, said they feel relatively safe and have seen more police patrolling the area since the subway construction began.

But Anima Golder, a Second Avenue fruit stand operator, said that she doesn’t see the neighborhood, once known for its relative safety, the same way anymore.

“There’s more crime,” she said. “This area is bad now.”

Street Fight
A Friday morning dispute between two men—a driver and a pedestrian—quickly escalated into violence, until both men were arrested. A 38-year-old man told police that a 48-year-old man’s car nearly hit him as he was crossing the street. As retaliation, the pedestrian began punching the driver’s car. This offense prompted the driver to jump out of his car and spit in the pedestrian’s face, police said. In a second moment of revenge, the other man hurled a punch at the driver’s face. The driver said he suffered a scrape on his face, and the pedestrian reported blood coming out of his nose.

Funny Money Tries at Bloomie’s
Counterfeit cash almost made the rounds at Bloomingdale’s last week, police said. In the first incident, which took place at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, two young women and one young man, all in their late teens, attempted to pay for dresses, shirts, jeans and a bathing suit with fake bills. The cashier notified store security officers, who found a bag containing marijuana in the teens’ possession. All three were arrested.

In the second incident, which took place on Thursday just after 8 p.m., security spotted a 25-year-old man buying merchandise with counterfeit $100 bills. He attempted to leave the store with jackets, jeans, shorts and two T-shirts totaling $933 when security stopped him and he was arrested on the scene.

Skin Care Swipes
A 34-year-old woman and a 50-year-old man must have been serious about skin care, because they snatched a Rosaliac anti-redness moisturizer and a L’Oreal double-lifting cream from the Duane Reade on Third Avenue between East 73rd and 74th streets just after 4 p.m. on Thursday. One employee noticed the woman snatch the items from the shelf and place them inside a towel, and she informed her co-worker of the crime. The two employees ran outside to try to stop the woman and reclaim the products. In an attempt to hold on to the stolen creams, one of the culprits sprayed an unknown substance at the employees. The man fled the scene, but the woman was arrested, and both skin care products, totaling $55, were recovered. One of the employees was taken to the hospital.

Woman Mugged
A 28-year-old woman was walking home along East 82nd Street near Third Avenue at 3:15 a.m. on Wednesday when a man asked her what appeared to be an innocent question: “What time is it?” After the woman responded, the man grabbed her purse and dragged her from the sidewalk into the street. When the strap broke on the woman’s purse, the man started running eastbound. Hoping to retrieve her bag, the woman ran after him, prompting the man to toss the woman’s wallet on the ground. The bag, still in the man’s possession, contained three debit cards, $80 in cash and a New York State driver’s license.

Ride Home  Gone Wrong
Last Sunday, a 26-year-old woman got into a taxi on East 62nd Street and York Avenue and asked the driver to take her home. The problem arose when the driver said he didn’t know how to get to her address on Webster Avenue in the Bronx. The two argued, and the woman demanded to be let out of the cab. As she was exiting, the driver allegedly got out and kicked her in the groin area and left leg, causing bruises and substantial pain. Police arrested the 35-year-old driver when they arrived on the scene.

Pushover Robbery
Police apprehended and arrested a 32-year-old man last Sunday evening for felony robbery. The man had been following his victim, a 26-year-old woman, as she walked on East 67th Street (she later told police she could tell she was being followed). Before she could get away, the perp threw her to the sidewalk and forcefully grabbed her purse, causing lacerations and bruises on her knees and shoulder. He got away with her purse, which she said contained $517 worth of valuables, but police were able to catch him, and the victim positively identified him before he was arrested.

Food Fight
Two employees at a Third Avenue Asian restaurant were arguing last Saturday over stolen food. One man accused the other of pilfering food from their place of work and, as the fight escalated, the accuser punched the other man in the face with a closed fist. The 55-year-old victim was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital for treatment, and the 45-year-old assailant was arrested.

Prankster on the Loose
A 23-year-old woman came home last Sunday to her East 83rd Street apartment to find that she couldn’t get into her door. An unknown perpetrator had filled the lock with silicon glue, damaging it and preventing her from using her key.

Doggie Debacle
Sometimes, even puppy love can go too far. One Upper East Side woman’s desire to protect her pooch recently got her into trouble with another passerby. On the evening of May 28, the 55-year-old woman argued with a man she claimed had almost stepped on her dog as she was walking on East 83rd Street near Park Avenue. The dispute escalated into violence when the man punched the woman on her right cheek, bruising her face. The man fled the scene and police are on the lookout for the suspect.

Wallet Gone Missing
An 18-year-old man was walking on the corner of Third Avenue and East 59th Street on the evening of May 28 when he felt someone bump into him. When he checked his back pocket, he noticed that his $200 Ralph Lauren wallet, containing his New York State learner’s permit, Citibank debit card and school MetroCard, was missing. No suspects were found.