SERIAL SUBWAY PERV
With over 160 busts, he’s held again in traffic agent grope
He’s the dirtiest of the city subway’s dirty old men.
Police on Friday morning busted a notorious sex offender wanted for sexually abusing an off-duty NYPD traffic agent who managed to snap his picture before he ran from a Manhattan subway stop, cops said.
Bearded 67-year-old Gian Verdelli was on an L train crossing into Manhattan from Brooklyn when he slipped his hand under the 37-year-old woman’s dress and molested her at 8:50 a.m. Wednesday, police said.
“He is a sexual predator,” NYPD Chief of Investigations William Aubry said.
When Verdelli (photo) got off at the first stop in Manhattan, First Ave. and 14th St., the traffic agent, who was on her way to her daughter’s graduation, followed him and took his photo.
When she filed a police report, cops recognized Verdelli right away because he is a transit recidivist and level 2 sex offender.
Aubry praised the victim for keeping her cool to take the photos of Verdelli and urged other women who may recognize him as their abuser to come forward.
At arraignment Friday night in Manhattan Criminal Court, a judge ordered Aubrey held on $100,000 bail. A prosecutor called him a “violent predicate felon.”
Verdelli has more than 70 arrests, Aubry said. Counting his sealed cases Verdelli has been busted about 169 times, said police sources.
He was released from prison in May after serving time for a subterranean sex crime. He spent less than a year behind bars for groping a 42year-old woman at the Broadway and E. Houston St. stop in Manhattan. In 2012 when he was busted in New Jersey for twice molesting a woman on a PATH train. “He can’t help himself,” Aubry said. “He goes down there. This is what he does. He preys upon women, and he did that to this off-duty traffic agent. She’s going to a joyous occasion, a graduation, and it’s crowded and here she feels somebody with their hand beneath her skirt. Horrible.”
Verdelli was nabbed at a homeless shelter on Wards Island at 5:30 a.m. Friday.
The NYPD has been calling on the MTA to shun repeat subway sex creeps.
“If this case doesn’t point to the fact that the NYPD should continue to push for a ban … I don’t know what does,” Police Commissioner James O’Neill said.
The NYPD also tweeted its support of a perv prohibition on subways.
“This is why we strongly back a transit-system ban for serial subway offenders. Gian Verdelli preys on victims in our subways. He’s been arrested more than 70 times for crimes that include public lewdness and sexual assault — and has shown no plans to stop,” the department wrote.