Metro

Verizon employee suspected of cutting LI Cablevision lines

The cable-TV wars have spun out of control on Long Island, where a saboteur who knocked out service to 8,000 Cablevision customers last month has been identified as a worker for rival provider Verizon, officials said.

Vincent Gargano was charged with criminal mischief and tampering Tuesday for allegedly snipping cable lines on Jan. 7 and blacking out TV screens across Suffolk County.

In addition to the six-hour outage, Gargano’s alleged antics did some $1,500 damage to Cablevision wires and equipment.

The 40-year-old suspect was busted by Suffolk cops after surveillance cameras at a home near where lines were cut in Holbrook captured his image, according to sources close to the probe.

Reached at his home on Tuesday night, Gargano didn’t want to talk about the charges.

“I got nothing to say,” Gargano muttered, before hanging up.

Verizon spokesman John Bonomo confirmed Gargano’s employment, but declined to say what he did for the company. He pledged full cooperation with police.

“Actions such as the police describe are not consistent with how Verizon conducts business,” Bonomo said. “We are assisting the police in their investigation.”

The blackout affected Cablevision home and business customers in Bohemia, Ronkonkoma, Holbrook and South Holbrook.

Those who lost service couldn’t watch television, make phone calls or run credit-card charges between 1:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on the day of the outage. They also couldn’t call 911 on their home phones.

Cops and Cablevision employees immediately suspected it was the work of a well-schooled vandal.

“If you saw the cut, it was a clean cut — a very clean cut, you know what I mean?” a source close to the probe said.

The sabotage was made to underground wires, so the vandal probably had a background in the field, the source said.

“Usually when these kinds of things happen, it’s on the street [level] — a tree falls, a car hits it — but that wasn’t the case here,” the source said.

Gargano allegedly agreed to take a polygraph test but failed it, prompting his arrest, the probe source said.

All the customers who lost power received multiple days of credit.

Additional reporting by Selim Algar