Three fake police officers have been rounded up by real NYPD cops after they committed a series of robberies in Manhattan, The Bronx and Queens — while making bomb threats over police radios, police said.
Ricardo Torres, 29, Kevin Remache, 19, and Jay Peralta, 20, were arrested early this week on a host of charges, including robbery, criminal impersonation and making terroristic threats.
Torres was busted on Sept. 25 after he and his two accomplices had stolen $60 and a Samsung Galaxy phone from a livery driver who had just dropped off a passenger in Queens, cops said.
Two police officers, armed with a description of Torres provided by the livery driver, found him in a subway station at 41st Avenue and 21st Street in Long Island City.
A pair of police radios and a flashlight emblazoned with the word “Police” were recovered from Torres.
Internal Affairs investigators identified Torres as a suspect in the crime spree after they learned that he made several illegal transmissions over police radios, promising to plant pressure cooker bombs around the city and threatening to shoot police officers, cops said.
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.
The evidence linked Peralta to the illegal radio transmissions and the seven robberies, police said. Remache was only tied to the robberies.
The threesome began their spree on Sept. 8, committing three robberies on that date in Harlem and Queens.
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.
