Three fake cops were busted by the real NYPD after they committed a series of violent robberies across the Big Apple — and made bomb threats over police radios while vowing to shoot cops, authorities said Friday.
Ricardo Torres, 29, Kevin Remache, 19, and Jay Peralta, 20, were arrested earlier this week on a host of charges, including robbery, criminal impersonation and making terroristic threats.
Torres was busted Sept. 25 after he and his two accomplices stole $60 and a Samsung Galaxy phone from a livery driver, who had just dropped off a passenger in Queens, cops said.
Two patrol officers, armed with a description of Torres provided by the driver, found him in a subway station at 41st Avenue and 21st Street in Long Island City, cops said. A pair of police radios and a flashlight emblazoned with the word “Police” were recovered from Torres.
Detectives executed a search warrant at Torres’s uptown Manhattan apartment and discovered a trove of evidence, including 15 portable radios, nine scanners, nine hand-held microphones, four speakers, two roof antennas and six computers.
Investigators learned from the evidence that Torres had made several illegal transmissions over police radios, promising to plant pressure cooker bombs around the city and threatening to shoot officers, cops said.
The evidence also linked him, Peralta and Remache to the seven heists in Manhattan, The Bronx and Queens, police said.
The bogus 911 calls were unrelated to the robbery spree.
“There was also a bomb threat involved in the same series of transmissions and a reference to a Walgreen’s in Times Square,” NYPD Intelligence Bureau Chief John Miller said at a Friday press conference. “In the course of the investigation, we identified two of the suspects as people who had worked in that Walgreen’s and were present on the scene watching some of the mayhem they were trying to create occurring below.”
The thieves began their spree Sept. 8, committing three of the thefts on that date in Harlem and Long Island City.
Typically, they would pull over victims while driving in a white cargo van, police said.
They would identify themselves as police officers and then yank the victims out of their vehicles, cops said.
They would then spray the victims in the face with a chemical substance and snatch their cash and credit cards, before fleeing in the van, police said.