He looks like a harmless old man, innocently shambling from car to car on the subway — but cops say one sneaky 72-year-old is exactly the kind of crook they are warning sleepy commuters about as he targets them for theft while they foolishly slumber.
Sources say that Sidney Phifer makes himself up to look like a unremarkable senior citizen as he wanders the subway hunting for marks, which he rolls for cash and goods as they fall asleep during their rides.
In fact, cops busted Phifer last Saturday on a train near 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue for walking between cars, in what they feared might be an attempt to target some sleeping marks, a police source said.
“We watched him for a while,” the source said. “We saw him going car to car, saw him looking for victims.”
Cops had reason to fear Phifer was every subway sleeper’s nightmares. The 72-year-old has been arrested 26 times since 1984, 22 of the arrests were in the transit system and 12 of those involved the theft of property, the sources said.
His most recent grand larceny arrest was in 2013 when he removed a cellphone from a sleeping passenger on an L-Train at the 8th Avenue station in Manhattan.
NYPD Transit Chief Joseph Fox tweeted that Phifer was “a chronic sleeping passenger criminal on the prowl for more victims”
He’s been taken into custody throughout the city – as far north as Inwood and as far east as Flushing and Jamaica. He’s been arrested multiple times at 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue.
The career criminal also served a 10-year prison stint starting in 1976 on a charge of robbery in the first degree.
Paroled in 1984, he returned to prison in 1986 on a grand larceny conviction, records show. He got out on parole in 1990 and was released from supervision three years later.
The city’s top cop said on Feb. 3 that police would begin waking up sleeping passengers because they were the victims in more than 50% of subway crime.
“One of the areas we are going to focus on is, subways are not for sleeping,” Commissioner Bill Bratton said. “A lot of people are tired, they work very hard, but our officers are going to be instructed to start waking people up.”
The NYPD didn’t answer an email when asked how many straphangers were awoken by cops on the subway since the announcement.
Meanwhile, subway crimes have continued to rise with an overall increase in the seven major crimes to 301 as of Feb. 14 from 237 in the same period of 2015, or a 27% increase.