Picking pockets

NYPD probes migrant bands of thieves

The NYPD is homing in on migrant pickpocketing crews operating in the Big Apple — with nearly 100 asylum-seekers popping up on NYPD radar, law-enforcement sources tell The Post.

One sticky-fingered trio was nabbed over the weekend after allegedly picking pockets at three separate Greenwich Village watering holes in under 30 minutes, according to the sources.

“It’s been happening all the time here,” one staffer at the Red Lion on Bleecker Street told The Post. “The last few months it’s been intense. Maybe they spread the word, I don’t know. It’s on Friday and Saturday when it’s busy.

“They work as a team,” she said. “It’s creepy.”

Oscar Tarazona, Sebastian Baez and alleged ringleader Lina Jacome-Bedoya, all migrants from Colombia, were charged with grand larceny and possession of stolen property at Bosco on Bleecker, Wicked Willy’s and the Red Lion around 1:30 a.m. Saturday, authorities said.

Jacome-Bedoya, 23, has been arrested four other times in Manhattan since July, including for allegedly stealing cellphones from handbags and pockets, according to the police sources.

Baez, 25, and Tarazona, 26, were allegedly working in tandem with Jacome-Bedoya in the three new larceny incidents over the weekend, the sources said.

“We have a hard enough time going after actual New Yorkers committing crime,” one frustrated cop said. “Now we have to deal with a whole different subset of people who arrive here with no means of support, no legal means of working or opportunity.

“So, I don’t see how this should come as any surprise,” the officer said.

More than 172,000 migrants from the US border with Mexico have arrived in the five boroughs since the spring of 2022, with about 67,500 now housed across more than 200 city shelters and hotels.

Also this month, residents near Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, where a 2,000-bed migrant tent shelter was erected, complained about “lawlessness” by the occupants there.

By September, more than 40 migrants had been arrested at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, the city’s intake center for the thousands of arrivals.

‘Bad for business’

“I’ve seen some things,” a bartender at the Wicked Willy’s said of the pickpockets Monday. “Something happened last week. Someone complained — they lost their phone.

“One hundred percent it’s bad for business,” he said. “People don’t feel safe and even us employees, we have to tell the customers, ‘Hey, things are increasing. Don’t leave your stuff on the table.’ ”