Metro

Hotel art thief is prison-bound

A compulsive fine art fan is going to prison for at least a year after getting caught lifting hundreds of thousands of dollars in paintings from the lobby walls of the Carlyle and Chambers hotels in Manhattan.

Mark Lugo, 31, was a restaurant waiter with caviar taste — as much as $700,000 in stolen art and fine wine was recovered from his Hoboken, NJ apartment when cops busted him this past summer.

Lugo pleaded guilty in Manhattan Supreme Court today to one count of grand larceny in the second degree, the top charge against him.

He faces as little as one year and as much as three years prison when he is sentenced Feb. 28.

“In an effort to display stolen art in his apartment, this repeat art thief boldly walked out of two Manhattan hotels in broad daylight with valuable paintings,” said Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance.

At the time of the Manhattan hotel thefts — which Lugo pulled off by simply yanking art from the walls and into a shopping bag — Lugo had just been sprung from a California jail for lifting a $275,000 Picasso pencil sketch off of the wall of an art gallery in San Francisco, prosecutors said.

His Manhattan thefts including a nearly century-old, $350,000 drawing by the Cubist painter Fernand Leger that he swiped off the wall of an art gallery adjacent to the Carlyle’s lobby.

The 1917 work, “Composition with Mechanical Elements,” vanished on June 28.

Lugo was also charged with stealing a group of five works by the South Korea-born artist Mie Yim from the Chambers Hotel — works that went missing June 14 and which the hotel had purchased for $1,800 each.

As The Post reported this summer, authorities are investigating whether Lugo swiped a Picasso etching, “Sculptor and Two Heads,” worth $30,000, from the William Bennett Gallery in Soho on June 27.

A total of 19 allegedly stolen paintings were recovered from his apartment, prosecutor Meghan Hast said during Lugo’s December arraignment Manhattan Supreme Court.