CREEP IN THE NIGHT
It’s always Christmas for career thief who tells how easy it is to rob city apts.
When career burglar Joseph Smith goes to work, success depends on his most reliable accomplices: The good people of Brooklyn.
With their penchant for leaving windows open and doors unlocked, Smith's unwitting partners in crime turn every day into Christmas morning — with victims as plentiful as hipster coffee shops.
“I don't rob people,” declared an unapologetic Smith, 54, in a Daily News interview on Rikers Island. “I don't walk around with pick locks. I'm not a locksmith. But some people are dummies.
“They leave their doors open. They leave their windows open.” Add a bit of acrobacy to the access, and Smith is in business. “I'm what you call a secondfloor man — I climb up the fire escape and make my way to that window,” Smith said, using the table in front of him as a prop and pointing to a “window” several spaces away.
“People don't think someone could get there,” he adds. “But I could.”
His matter-of-fact recitation offers a reminder that crime rates plunging to record lows mean little to career criminals still working across the city.
Some do it violently. Others, like Smith, capitalize on the lowered defenses of New Yorkers lulled into a false sense of security as homicides and other crimes plunged over the last quartercentury.
Too often, as police commanders ruefully recount at community meetings, property is easily stolen from cars with unlocked doors and homes with open windows.
Just ask Smith, whose latest arrest came in October for a dozen burglaries in and around Bedford-Stuyvesant.
His victims are sometimes native New Yorkers who temporarily let their guard down. But just as often, if not more, it's a new New York arrival or someone too young to recall the crackfueled crime wave of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when the number of murders hit a record high of 2,245 in 1990.
Last year, homicides dropped to just 290 — the lowest number since the end of World War II.
To the average Brooklynite, the oftarrested Smith looks like any anonymous middle-aged fellow walking down the street. The mundane persona served him well.
“I wear Armani suits. When you see me, you see a man in his 50s, gray beard,” he said. “People don't mess with me — and I stay out of their way. But you never know what I'm doing. That's called hiding in plain sight.”
He may blend into a crowd and be invisible to others on the street — but he's not to the NYPD.
“Our focus for the last few years has been precisely on people like Joseph Smith,” said Chief of Detective Dermot Shea.
“By focusing on very specific wrongdoers and lifelong recidivists, we are able to put patterns together earlier and arrest individuals that are committing the most crimes, and then when we do
ting the most crimes, and then when we do bring those cases to a successful conclusion, it has the greatest impact.”
Smith, who once relied on cocaine to get high, never kicked his addiction to stealing.
And as with drugs, the robbery jones comes with a cost — four stints in state prison. His latest arrest came for a crime spree that started this past April, just three weeks after his latest parole. He was ultimately indicted in four cases and held without bail for violating his lifetime parole.
One of Smith’s alleged victims, Gloria Peart, 88, lost two pricey watches to the burglar who slipped inside her thirdfloor apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, in August.
She brushed aside Smith’s “blame the victim” attitude by noting the circuitous route taken by the burglar: Up three stories on the fire escape and over an air conditioner in the window. “It’s not my fault,’ she said. “My windows were locked up.”
Smith endured a tough childhood, with the death of his mother at age 2 and his subsequent years with a harddrinking, physically abusive aunt.
But he never blamed his life of crime on his upbringing: “I don’t have a hard story.”
Smith started stealing early, focusing on electronics as a teen. He landed in the same group home as a young Mike Tyson, raising pigeons in a coop on the roof.
“You would take out certain feathers so they couldn’t fly,” Smith said. “This way, they would stay on your roof. When their feathers grew back they would leave, but then fly back.”
Told that sounds a lot like his life — busted, jailed, released, busted again — Smith didn’t disagree. “People have to want to change,” confessed the criminal who makes the same mistakes over and over again.
“This place acts like detox for a while,” said Smith, who lived in the Atlantic Armory Men’s Shelter during his brief time as a free man and must return to court on Jan. 22.
His court-appointed lawyer is likely to be the only one there for him; his sister died in 2007, and his brother passed a year later.
After taking the trip down his crooked memory lane, Smith said, “I can’t have a script. When you have this many recurring instances, you have to be honest. You can’t have an act.”