NYPD Busts Thieves For Stealing Traffic Cams

Well, since my last mention of traffic cameras got such a rise out of you, check this out: A New York couple was just busted by the cops for stealing traffic cameras, and using a cherry-picker hoist to do it with. When I first read that headline, all I could think of was "Do they really hate these things, or is there money in pawning them?"

The story breaks down like this: The NYPD says that a pair of thieves purportedly spent nearly a month trolling The Big Apple in a pickup truck with a cherry picker mounted in the back (for you Brits that might not know, that's a crane-like lifting device utility workers use to get up high on telephone poles). They were using the hoist to steal the cameras whole, primarily for their valuable contents such as Nikon cameras used to take the photos and other, valuable, computer gear.

The two people, from Brooklyn of all places, are Anthony Cintorrino and Tara Laburt, and the police nabbed them after finding some of the stolen items "from a reseller and tracing them backwards from there." Personally, I read "reseller" as "fence", but that could be just me. After picking up Cintorrino and Laburt, the cops found more stolen loot in their homes, and they expect to recover everything.

By the time the cops got through, the total was more than $88,000 of equipment recovered, but still, why steal cameras? Turns out that Cintorrino knew what he was doing. Before turning to an alleged life of crime, Cintorrino had worked as a contractor for the firm that installs and maintains the cameras for the city. What sort of thought process Anthony Cintorrino was using is beyond me, but what is notable is that NYC takes its traffic cameras very seriously, since all of the cameras were replaced within 48 hours of the thefts.

No details were available as to just what sort of time Mr. Cintorrino and Ms. Laburt were looking at for this, but you know isn't not going to go down well for them. $88K probably puts them in felony territory, which means "the system" is going to jump all over them like trampolines.

The wages of sin, dear readers, the wages of sin.

And the real downside was that the city had replacement cameras up within two days.

Source: AutoBlog. Photos from Flickr users Adrian Short, sskennel and TheeErin.