LOOTING FOOLS
Rob shop three times, don’t take good stuff
Pass the Courvoisier.
Looters who pillaged two Chelsea liquor stores under the cover of police brutality protests may have been more inspired by songs they heard than by news they saw on TV.
The bandits passed on the stores’ high end liquor in favor of booze often name dropped in popular hip hop songs, like Busta Rhymes’ “Pass the Courvoisier” or Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice,” the stores’ operators say.
“They grabbed what they knew,” said London Terrace Liquor manager Ricky Teruel, who mentioned Hennessy cognac and Patron tequila as the brands most favored by late-night looters.
The looters didn’t touch bottles of single-malt scotch like Macallan, which can go for hundreds or thousands of dollars depending upon the age, Teruel said.
“Maybe they didn’t know the brands.” Teruel said.
Still, the tally was substantial after masked marauders made multiple trips to the shop on Ninth Ave. near W. 23rd St. during a not-sohappy hour that started shortly before midnight on June 1, police said.
The looters couldn’t bust down the bullet-resistant door — so they broke out the shop’s windows with a garbage can, which triggered the store alarm. They fled with boxes of liquor just before police arrived, then returned again and again, police and Tereul said.
The $50,000 in losses would have been worse if the thieves had gotten in through the front door because more looters would have joined in and emptied the shop, he said.
London Terrace Liquor was hit again by burglars this week.
Two burglars, not believed to be connected to the first crew, broke in at 1:30 a.m. Sunday. They took liquor and fled, and one of them returned later to steal more booze, police said. The cash register, containing about $2,500, was also stolen, Teruel said.
Then at about 2:10 a.m. Tuesday, a burglar stole a case of Tito’s vodka. He might have taken more, but was scared off by the alarm and dove through the bottom of the door, which he had entered by busting the glass partition.
On the same night of the June 1 looting, thieves busted into Wine on Nine, just two blocks south, and took whatever they could grab. No one has been arrested.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said a witness who has lived on the block for 15 years. “It was scary. At what point does it stop?”
The witness, who did not want to be named, said cars and even a U-Haul truck pulled up beside the store carting out merchandise as if they were helping the owner relocate.
“What broke my heart is the owner got there and set up a folding chair and sat there and no one came back,” she said.
Manager Ali Mohammad said Thursday that even though the suspects didn’t touch the pricey wines, the losses totaled nearly $40,000.
Mohammad said he raced to the scene from his home in New Jersey after a cashier called to report that a customer had called her about what was going on.
He complained that he got there before police, and that video showed squad cars driving past but not stopping.
“Sure they were busy,” he said. “But couldn’t they send someone to scare them away.”
A police source said police were flooded with 911 calls that night and that officers were forced to prioritize.