New York Daily News

THIS IS A JOB FOR ... Platano Man

superhero Subway hate-spewing collars straphange­r

- BY MICHAEL GARTLAND, THOMAS TRACY, MIKEY LIGHT AND NOAH GOLDBERG

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … Platano Man!

City straphange­rs should keep their eyes peeled for the Big Apple’s newest superhero — a wisecracki­ng commuter who made a citizen’s arrest of an apparently disturbed woman who unleashed a violent and racist assault on the subway.

A Twitter user who goes by the name Platano Man — alter ego Juan Ayala — filmed the vile tirade before corralling the spitting, foulmouthe­d offender and detaining her until cops came.

Ayala, 31, posted video of her unhinged ranting and attacks online. The footage immediatel­y went viral in part because his side-eye expression­s and mocking commentary as the drama went down on a Brooklyn D train at 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday.

The woman in the video, Anna Lushchinsk­aya, 40, now faces menacing, weapons possession, attempted assault and harassment charges.

The bottle blond went berserk — for no apparent reason — in Ayala’s video, screaming “f--- off ” and slapping victim Michelle Tung’s phone and hurling racial slurs.

“I got on the train, I stood at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Tung later told the Daily News.

For about five minutes, Lushchinsk­aya aggressive­ly kicks at Tung, screeching, “f---in ch---k” and spitting, according to Platano Man’s video.

Tung initially kicks back in self-defense, and Lushchinsk­aya — after calmly removing her sunglasses and gloves and pulling back her hair — begins swinging her umbrella and a heavy key chain, even as multiple passengers try to intercede.

“She’s not even fighting you back,” groans one man.

“I’m lucky that it was just keys and an umbrella and not a gun,” Tung told The News.

“You’re not letting me hit her baaaaack,” Lushchinsk­aya shamelessl­y wails, as commuters beg her to calm down.

“It’s too early for this s--t,” our friendly neighborho­od Platano Man then says, sotto voce.

Eventually, Lushchinsk­aya turned her ire on the bearded, capeless crusader.

“So you’re just going to pick fights with everybody on the train now?” he asks. “Is that what you’re going to do?”

She spit on him in response and called him Muhammad.

“B---h, I’m Dominican,” he says in the clip. “I just had a bacon, egg and cheese yesterday. Literally, the whole world is laughing at you.”

After she delivered a few slaps and more harsh words, Platano Man sprang into action, slung his arm around Lushchinsk­aya’s neck and took her to the ground.

“We’ve gotta get her arrested. We gotta detain her till the cops come. She just spit on me. She assaulted me. This is self-defense,” he says in a second video.

The starchy superhero later posted a picture in which he appears to be holding the train terror on the subway platform and another with cops cuffing her above ground.

Tung, 24, described herself as “very lucky” that fellow riders helped her out and is “grateful” to Platano Man, but that “he posted his video for the wrong reasons.”

“Maybe he wanted to be in the limelight,” she said. “People recognized me because of him.”

Lushchinsk­aya – or Lushchinsk­y, as she’s listed in a 2000 New York Law School photo directory – registered as a lawyer in 2004, according to state records.

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 ??  ?? Anna Lushchinsk­aya attacks riders and shouts racist slurs on D train in viral video (r.) then is held for cops (left) by Juan Ayala aka Platano Man.
Anna Lushchinsk­aya attacks riders and shouts racist slurs on D train in viral video (r.) then is held for cops (left) by Juan Ayala aka Platano Man.
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