TOTALLY PLUGGED IN, MAN

Homeless guy’s street power play

'After 27 years of being homeless,the city is my den, my living room'

This vagrant doesn’t let being homeless get in the way of gluing himself to the TV or using an electric razor.

But unlike other New Yorkers, Guy Ritchie does it all on the street — powering his devices by tapping into a city light pole.

Ritchie, 55, said fellow bums taught him how to spot a pole with an outlet illegally installed in its base, and he’s found about a dozen of them on his daily route around Manhattan.

“After 27 years of being homeless, the city is my den, my living room, my bathroom — everything,” he said with the Texas twang he picked up in his native Wichita Falls.

Passers-by did double takes when they saw Ritchie doing his best impression of a couch potato on a First Avenue sidewalk north of East 38th Street.

With his portable RCA digital TV set propped against a light pole, Ritchie sat cross-legged on a fuzzy green bath mat as he peered into the 7-inch screen and listened through a pair of earbuds.

The power cord for the $85 set — which he said was a gift from a good Samaritan — snaked through a busted hatch on the base, and reception was provided by a small, magnetic antenna stuck on the side off the pole.

Ritchie said his favorite shows include old classics such as “Dragnet,” “Laugh-In” and “The Burns and Allen Show,” adding, “What can I say? I’m a Cold War kid.”

He also claimed he wasn’t doing anything wrong by siphoning off the city’s power.

“I don’t open the things. I do realize that legality,” he said.

“It’s one thing for it to be open and I use it. But if I open it up? That’s breaking and entering.”

State law says differently, however, and calls tapping the poles “theft of services,” a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in the slammer.

Ritchie admitted he got busted once for plugging a TV into a light pole in Midtown, and now enjoys his reruns on the quiet block south of the United Nations.

Law-enforcement sources confirmed Ritchie’s 1995 arrest for theft of services, along with more than 75 other busts, mostly for disorderly conduct and quality-of-life violations.

His illegal power play comes amid an ongoing effort by the Department of Transportation to cut down on electricity costs by spending $76.5 million to retrofit the city’s 250,000-plus street lights with LED bulbs.

The DOT noted, “If we find outlets that are unauthorized, we either remove them or report the electrical theft to Con Edison, as the power belongs to the utility, not DOT.”