A 270-pound hustler who had menaced tourists for 10 years with the “broken eyeglasses” street scam is finally going to prison.
Over the past decade, Naim Jabbar, 43, had been convicted on 18 occasions for the same con — never serving more than three months’ prison at a time.
But Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Carol Berkman put an end to that yesterday, slamming him with the maximum sentence, seven years.
Armed with cheap reading glasses, he would hit the tourist-jammed blocks just below Central Park South.
The 6-foot-2 goliath would break one of the lenses himself, then purposely bump into some poor rube and throw a violent tantrum, claiming the person had busted his glasses and owed him $60, $80, even $120.
“When the defen dant doesn’t get what he wants, he escalates the violent behavior,” prosecutor Erin Tierney said yesterday.
In court, Jabbar admitted that the scam was his main source of income — he’d pull it two, three times a day.
But when Jabbar was busted last July on West 58th at Seventh Avenue — after squeezing $100 out of a skinny French businessman — his luck ran out.
Jabbar had already been listed as a priority offender by the Manhattan district attorney’s new Crime Strategies Unit, and the arrest flagged his case for heightened attention in the prosecutors’ computer system.
Cops from the Midtown North Precinct also had their eye on Jabbar.
So Jabbar was charged and convicted for the first time with a felony — robbery in the third degree.
It took a jury 10 minutes to convict, despite Jabbar’s insistence on the witness stand last month that he was just a gentle, small-time offender.
“He’s very much the Mike Tyson kind,” Jabbar’s lawyer, Natasha Lapiner-Giresi, argued after court yesterday.
“He’s this huge guy, but he’s actually very soft spo ken,” she said. “I think that the jury saw his size, and they were frightened of him.”
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