He isn’t as slick as the other guy.
Police who were already hunting for a burglar who has brazenly pulled off 14 apartment break-ins in Upper Manhattan — using Vaseline to block door peepholes — captured another apartment thief re-handed, casually watching TV, in the middle of a heist tonight.
But law enforcement sources said the 20-something perp is not the so-called Vaseline Bandit, who is in his 50s.
Nonetheless, this wannabe’s bust tonight gave Washington Heights residents on watch for the older crook a bit of drama around dinnertime.
The brazen thief ignored the repeated — and loud — demands of cops for an hour as they banged on the door of the apartment in 825 W. 187th. St. with their guns drawn and the entire building surrounded, witnesses told The Post.
“They said, ‘We have a police dog, even if you’re hiding in the closet, he will find you, and bite you,’ ’’ said Sue Daglian, who lives next door to that apartment.
One burly cop came into Daglian’s apartment and went through her living room window to eyeball the burglar, and make sure he didn’t escape out the second-story window of the victim’s apartment when cops knocked down the door.
That officer told Daglian, “He’s lying on the couch, watching TV,” she recalled. “We don’t know if he has a gun.”
Daglian said, “It as very loud. They had to break down the door.”
Cops then dragged the perp out of the apartment, which belongs to an elderly woman who was not home during the break-in.
They were questioning him tonight, sources said.
But he was quickly ruled out as being the same burglar who has plagued Inwood and Washington Heights with a bizarre series of break-ins, law-enforcement sources said.
That still-at-large robber’s crafty habit was to first smear a potential victim’s peephole with petroleum jelly and then knock on the door, police said.
If someone looked through the hole, they wouldn’t be able to see him, and by the time they got the door open, he’d have already moved on to the next pad.
If no one was home, the perp would break in and steal jewelry, electronics and money, authorities said.
Late yesterday afternoon, a man was suspiciously lurking around the outside of 825 W. 187th Street, whose lower floors are surrounded by scaffolding and thick black netting that obscures the outside walls from passerby.
“I saw him,” said Omar Padilla, Daglian’s next-door neighbor. “He seemed like he was waiting for somebody . . . He started making chit-chat about rollerblades.”
After Padilla went inside, the building’s super spotted the man behind the black netting, and clambering into the window of the apartment where Daglian’s other neighbor lived, witnesses said.
“The super said he recognized him. The super saw him breaking in, and Louis, the super, called the cops,” Daglian said. “I was scared. I freaked out.”
Cops descended on the building, with K-9 units, at about 6:20 p.m.
Several dozen residents who had gathered outside the building to watch the takedown unfold burst into applause when cops hauled the perp out and into a police car an hour later.
“They’re all whistling and cheering,” said another building resident, Doug Fallon said. “The cops did their job.”
The son of the apartment’s occupant, who lives on the same floor as his mom, said, “It’s good. The police got here, super called the police.” He then went off to deal with a locksmith who was repairing his mother’s busted-open door.
The standoff was still going on as the Police Department issued a media request asking for the public’s help in identifying the so-called Vaseline Bandit, who began his spree Sept. 4 and continued until March 8 – when he pulled off four break-ins on that day.
Three of those March 8 break-ins occurred on either Cabrini Boulevard or W. 187th Street. near where the other, younger burglar was nabbed tonight.
The police issued a surveillance photo of the burglar. The suspect was described as a man between 50 and 60 years old, close-cut hair, clean shaven and carrying a cane.
He typically wears a Yankees hat and dark glasses.