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Taco Bake: Anti-stop-frisk poster boy arrested again

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For someone who claims to hate being stopped by cops, he sure 
winds up in handcuffs often enough.

The city’s poster boy against stop-and-frisk has been busted 
three times for selling thousands of dollars in bogus Broadway, 
concert and sporting tickets — including just this past Friday.

Angel Ortiz, 19, first grabbed the spotlight as a high-profile 
plaintiff in anti-stop-and-frisk litigation in late 2012, giving 
press interviews and posing for photos outside Manhattan federal 
court as hearings were held.

“We were stopped, frisked and arrested for trespassing,” the 
teen has complained to reporters, alleging he was thrown to the 
ground and beaten by cops in a racial-profiling bust near his 
Tremont, Bronx, home seven years ago.

“I was stopped, frisked, of course, and I was basically stripped 
of my rights and arrested for no apparent reason, for visiting a 
friend,” he told 1010 WINS in October 2012.

Ortiz’s arrest late Friday was for a quite apparent reason — for 
allegedly selling phony tickets for “Book of Mormon,” “Kinky 
Boots” and Giants games to rubes he met on Craigslist.

He was arraigned at Manhattan Criminal Court on Sunday and 
charged with grand and petit larceny, possession of a forged 
instrument and fraudulent accosting. He was held in lieu of 
$10,000 bail.

Ortiz’s lawyer refused to comment after the hearing.

Ortiz allegedly hauled in a total of more than $2,000 from six 
victims on a half-dozen occasions.

A Long Island surgeon told The Post on Sunday that the alleged 
fraudster coaxed him into buying two tickets to a concert at 
Radio City Music Hall in September.

“It’s scary what a charmer and scammer this guy is,” said Long 
Island Dr. Harvey Manes, who purchased fake ducats to a Sarah 
Brightman concert.

“I could have bought the Brooklyn Bridge from this guy, he was 
so charming.”

Manes said he at first turned down the tickets, which each had a 
face value of $100. But when Ortiz then dropped the price to $25 
a pop, he scooped them up, only to later learn they were fake.

Ortiz also was arrested twice last spring on charges of selling 
bad tickets to Broadway hits — and $500 in bogus ducats for an 
April 2013 Rihanna concert at Barclays Center, law-enforcement 
sources said.

Those arrests come just weeks after Ortiz stood before the 
cameras and told reporters that he hoped his activism would make 
kids like him safer — from cops.

“I’m glad I’m one of the first cases because hopefully, I’m one 
of the last,” he said.

By April, he was getting caught allegedly selling $220 worth of 
fake Rihanna tickets to two Texans on East 19th Street and Park 
Avenue South, police said.

“When they get to the theater, and the bar code is scanned, they 
get screwed,” said one law-enforcement source.

Cops rank Ortiz as a mediocre trickster — he’d text his alleged 
victims from his own cellphone and often use his real name, even 
letting his marks snap pictures of him and his state ID card 
before walking off with their money, according to officials and 
victims.

“He’s a moron,” another law-enforcement source told The Post. 
“He gave people his real ID number.”

But to his half-dozen alleged victims, Ortiz was slick enough, 
meeting them at Starbucks and hotel lobbies and sweet talking 
them out of hundreds of dollars.

The alleged marks told The Post that Ortiz would text them 
politely and helpfully throughout the day, even signing off on 
one note, “Have a blessed day.”

He’d show up for the drop-off wearing dress clothes and a tie 
and hand over hard-paper tickets plus a printed receipt before 
traipsing away with their loot.

“We were a bit skeptical, but we asked to see his photo ID,” 
remembered one Manhattan-based victim who asked her name not be 
used. “We asked to see the credit card that was used to purchase 
the tickets, and they all matched up,” she said of answering 
Ortiz’s ad on Craiglist.

“Cannot make the show tonight. Looking to sell two tickets to 
‘The Book of Mormon,’?” she remembers the ad stating.

She and her husband met Ortiz at Bryant Park, peeling off $300 
for a couple “Book of Mormon” tickets that were promptly 
rejected at the theater.

“We were shocked,” she remembers.

She would be just as shocked to discover that her alleged 
scammer had used his own now-famous name.

Doing her own sleuthing online, she stumbled upon one of Ortiz’s 
many press clippings — complete with his photograph.

“I screamed, ‘Yes! I found him!’” and promptly called the cops.

“He’s really good at this,” said Jan Corlett, 59, of San 
Francisco, who paid $640 for bogus “Book of Mormon” tix in 
September.

“Really polite. In hindsight, he was reeling me in like a fish.

“That’s pretty ballsy of him to have gone in front of the press 
and then done this,” she added.

Another tourist, Lynn Sumlin, 46, of Atlanta, paid $280 for 
hinky “Kinky Boots” tickets.

“They were hard tickets,” she said. “I naively thought those 
would be harder to fake.”

The last time she saw Ortiz, he was walking away from Grand 
Central with her cash.

“I tried to watch him as he walked, to see if he did a little 
skip or a jump — but he just walked like he was on his way,” she 
said.

https://nypost.com/2014/01/12/advocates-anti-stop-frisk-poster-
boy-cuffed-in-ticket-scam/
                    

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Taco Bake: Anti-stop-frisk poster boy arrested again Bean Soup <beansoup@cnn.com> - 2019-07-13 09:44 +0200

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