“I don’t read the paper,” Gregg Washington, 40, told cops at Midtown South when they asked whether he knew he had been on the cover of New York’s favorite tabloid.
He was tossed in jail for five days after an arraignment early Sunday in Manhattan.
If Washington doesn’t read newspapers, it may be because he’s too busy using them to clean car windshields at Manhattan’s tunnel entrances.
The Post had found him squeegee-ing at East 37th Street near the entrance to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. He had given his name then as Mike Benthins and showed a reporter his earnings — a handful of dollar bills totaling $14.
He was one of three squeegee men The Post found pestering drivers last week in an apparent flouting of Mayor de Blasio and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton’s quality-of-life “crackdown.”
On Saturday near the Lincoln Tunnel, Washington had $11 on him, along with a spray bottle and wadded-up newspaper so crumpled cops “couldn’t tell which one it was,” a source said.
“You see a lot more of them around the city now,” the source added.
Washington’s 225 arrests include marijuana possession, but no violent or serious offenses, sources said.
At 5 p.m., the unhappy-looking panhandler was escorted by three cops out of the Midtown South Precinct station, where cops have busted him more than 50 times before. He was taken to Central Booking.
“Every time we bring him in, he goes right back out,” one source there said.
Additional reporting by Erin Calabrese and Leonica Valentine