An Upper East Side restaurant was one of nine businesses targeted in a string of early-morning commercial burglaries across the city, and the NYPD is asking the public for help identifying the person it’s looking for.
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The local break-in happened at Spiga Ristorante & Cocktail Bar, at 808 Lexington Avenue near East 62nd Street, at about 4:51 a.m. on Saturday, October 17. According to the NYPD, the suspect used a hammer to break the front door while the restaurant was closed, causing about $4,375 in damage to the door, frame and lock. Once inside, the suspect took $200 and a $60 bottle of vodka before fleeing.Spiga, a Roman-style Italian restaurant, opened on Lexington Avenue last December as a sister to the original Spiga on West 84th Street.
The incidents happened in eight precincts across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens between September 27 and October 29, and eight of the nine targets were restaurants. Most took place between about 4:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. The suspect usually broke or tampered with a lock to get in, and a hammer was used in at least three of the incidents, including the one at Spiga.
There were three other Manhattan incidents. On October 19, the suspect cut through the lock of a business in Midtown East and took $1,000 from the register area. On October 24, a hammer was used to damage the lock and break the glass front door of a restaurant in Greenwich Village. The suspect didn’t get in that time, but left about $2,000 in damage. Then, at 12:57 a.m. on October 29, a restaurant in Chinatown was broken into with a hammer, and the suspect took a cash register with $410 inside.
The largest theft happened in Queens on October 23, when the suspect walked out of a restaurant with a cash register holding $4,200. In Brooklyn, one business was entered through a window from an adjoining roof and ransacked, with two offices damaged.
The NYPD has released images of the suspect.
Anyone with relevant information is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the CrimeStoppers website or by sending a direct message to @NYPDTips on Twitter. All calls are strictly confidential.
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