This thief was signed, sealed and busted.
A man accused of stealing several packages from an Upper West Side building was caught after a pair of cops set up a bait package — a box full of NYPD magazines — department officials said on Tuesday.
Carlos Maisonet, 52, was charged with several counts of burglary after the two cops, Lt. Tony Lavino and Officer Nicholas Ramsammy, arrested him last week. Maisonet allegedly stole several packages, including one that contained a laptop, from a lobby of a building on West 85th Street and Columbus Avenue between Jan. 30 and Feb 6.
Maisonet would allegedly manipulate the building’s locked front door and go straight for the mail room. After he was recorded on security cameras, Lavino and Ramsammy decided to set a trap: They set up a bait package early Saturday morning and filled it with a stack of law enforcement magazines that had been sitting inside of the precinct.
"As you can imagine, our perpetrator was not thrilled when he learned that the package he got caught committing a burglary to steal contained only policing periodicals," the 20th Precinct wrote in a Facebook post. "We doubt the publishers of The Blue Magazine had this in mind when they sent these magazines to our precinct . . . but Lt. Lavino, Officer Ramsammy, and the rest of us would like to thank them for the assist in taking this criminal off the street!"
Police said Maisonet, who had an active parole warrant and has been arrested more than 30 previous times — six of them for burglaries — was held in lieu of $30,000 bail.
