He’s got big tostones
MEET THE BRAVE SUBWAY HERO
The newest superhero story sweeping New Yorkers just got sweeter.
The fearless crusader known as Platano Man – a security guard by day and superhero by rush hour – appeared to take it in stride when he subdued a raving straphanger earlier this week, but inside he felt fear.
Thankfully, he told the Daily News Friday, witnesses on the D train vouched for him when cops arrived.
“In the history of my life, I have never seen a black person or a Dominican do a citizen’s arrest and be successful,” he said.
The Brooklyn native, whose real name is Juan Ayala, woke up to discover the fruits of his labor on the cover of The News — where a green-caped “Platano Man” protected the city while eating a sandwich.
As he held Anna Lushchinskaya for police Tuesday morning, he couldn’t help but remember Jemel Roberson, the suburban Chicago security guard who was fatally shot by police after apprehending a gunman last month.
“Without those seven or eight witnesses, if those cops saw a black guy holding onto a blond girl, I probably would have been shot,” he said. “I was a little freaked out. I’m not gonna lie.”
Ayala, 31, was riding the D train in Brooklyn Tuesday morning when Lushchinskaya unleashed a flurry of kicks, umbrella swings and racist slurs on fellow straphangers.
Ayala, the father of a 6-year-old who also works as a bouncer and has his own podcast, filmed most of it, at times narrating and cracking jokes.
He assumed a woman set Lushchinskaya off by brushing into her because their car was so crowded.
That woman, 24year-old Michelle Tung, seemed to Ayala the least likely person on the train to start a beef.
“She had a bow on her head,” he recalled. “You can’t get any more innocent than that. That’s, like, a staple of innocence.”
“At first, I thought, ‘Oh another crazy person,’” he said. “When the racial slurs started, that’s when the jokes stopped.”
At the time, Ayala did try to shrug it off with humor, though. When Lushchinskaya, 40, called him Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 terrorists, he went hog wild. “B---h, I’m Dominican,” he said. “I just had a bacon, egg and cheese yesterday. Literally the whole world is laughing at you.” She knocked his phone from his hand and spat at him, and that’s when he had to take her down. She “put her put her keys in her hand and swung at my head,” he said. “She was saying, ‘I’m an attorney.’” On Friday, during a visit to the Daily News — which Ayala said he’s been a fan of since childhood — he pointed out scratches on his hands, arms and face from the unhinged commuter. Ironically, 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. That did not prevent her from being arrested and didn’t help much when she was arrested in June for pepper spraying a car-full of passengers on the D train. Ayala’s line of work did seem to come in handy, though. “You gotta get in between people like they’re children with that kind of work,” he said. “It other was kind of like an- day at the office.”