He’s the self-appointed etiquette enforcer of the Long Island Rail Road – only he’s more Charles Bronson than Emily Post.
Chat too loudly or yap on your cellphone too long near John Clifford, and the hulking, 6-foot-4 ex-cop will get in your face.
Protest or persist, and he’s apt to get ugly.
Cowering commuters on the 8:02 a.m. from Long Beach to Penn Station say they’ve witnessed Clifford scream, punch and poke, swat cellphones, pour coffee over heads, and even throw an egg sandwich – an incident he denies but which earned him the nickname “The Eggman” among fellow travelers.
By his own count, the unapologetic trainiac has been arrested 10 times on assault and harassment charges in what he describes as a one-man, decades-long crusade against rudeness on the rails.
The 59-year-old retired sergeant was first collared in 1994 for slugging a woman.
“She went for my nuts, so I clocked her,” he said, laughing. “She didn’t go down, but she was close.”
And the woman he doused with java had it coming, he maintains.
“Four hefty girls get on and yap, yap, yap,” he recalled. Then one woman nudged him, causing him to spill coffee on his pants. Clifford returned the favor by pouring coffee on her pants. She poured the cup of joe on him again, so he answered by dumping the contents of his cup on her head.
A Nov. 27 court date looms for his latest scrap – allegedly smacking the hand of Lydia Klein, who unwisely tried to offer assistance to a young man Clifford was in the process of berating, according to the Manhattan DA.
Clifford, who became a lawyer in 1984 after retiring on disability from the NYPD, says she slapped his hand first.
Clifford knows that some people look at him as a “loose cannon,” but he says he’s just standing up for his rights.
“If I look like an ass, I look like an ass,” he said Friday, after sharing his commute with a Post reporter. “I can’t change who I am.”
None of the charges stick – a point prosecutors from Nassau County, Queens and Manhattan concede – because the victims never show up in court, he notes proudly.
Clifford argues that he’s the real victim – of a self-centered culture that has no consideration for people who want to quietly read the paper or take a nap on their way to work.
“They just want everyone to put up with everything,” he said. “More than one person has come up to me and said, ‘Thank you, that woman wouldn’t shut up.’ ”
Not everyone would agree.
Take an incident last October, when Donna DeCurtis, Stanley Stevens and Louis Jacobs kibitzed on the last car of the train from Long Beach to Penn Station as Clifford sat in his usual seat, eating his butter roll, drinking his coffee and seething over the chatter.
“I want quiet on this train,” he bellowed at DeCurtis, she said. “He had his finger right up against my nose. He’s a scary guy.”
“I know you, I know where you live,” he allegedly told DeCurtis. “I know you have a 5-year-old daughter. I know where she goes to school.”
Clifford, a twice-divorced father of two adult children, denied he mentioned the woman’s daughter. He admits he threatened to make a citizen’s arrest against Stevens for harassment.
The argument with the three commuters on train No. 823 landed the Long Beach resident in a Nassau County jail for three days on a menacing charge – and prompted train brakeman Robert Carlovich to call Clifford a “pain in the ass” over the train’s intercom. But Clifford says he will not be railroaded; he’s suing his alleged victims.
In a lawsuit Clifford filed last week in Manhattan Supreme Court against the three commuters, Carlovich, the LIRR and the MTA police, he claims the incident was a violation of his First Amendment rights, and alleged defamation, libel, malicious prosecution, false imprisonment and an abuse of process.
He’s seeking $5 million, according to his notice of claim.
As a result of the arrest, Clifford was fired last year from his job investigating cable theft for HBO.
“These people were exercising their right to free speech, and so was I, but I ended up in jail,” he said.