Runner’s Records of 2-Yr. Global Trek Stolen in N.Y.

While passers-by watched, a traffic cop wrote tickets nearby and a cameraman got it on film, thieves broke into a parked car and stole the entire record of a young Briton’s two-year run around the world to raise money for the World Wildlife Fund, police and the young man said.

“I’ve made it through 20 countries, had my shoes stolen by monkeys in India, got stuck in a swamp in Thailand and got beaten up by some drunks in Australia a couple of days before Christmas,” Henry Weston, 24, said.

“We’ve come through a lot of hell to get here and now we lose absolutely everything in New York.”

The daytime theft in mid-town Manhattan on Monday came as Weston was preparing to fly to Ireland for the final leg of a 16,000-mile charity run that began April 1, 1984.

“We’ve lost the record of the run,” he said of the thousands of film slides that vanished along with his passport, travel documents, cameras and video equipment. “There’s no dollar value on it.”

Weston learned of his loss from a Cable News Network team that interviewed him recently and recognized his car as it was being robbed. A cameraman filmed the thieves, but police initially showed little interest in the film, he said.

The first officer at the scene told him, ‘ “This city’s full of homicides and this is a very minor thing,’ ” Weston said.

Weston said witnesses told him about 20 people watched without trying to stop the thieves and a parking enforcement officer stood nearby ticketing a car as the theft occurred.

“The worst thing is not so much the (equipment) but the fact that all this three years of work--and it’s not been three years of regular work, sometimes it’s been hell--will be dumped in a rubbish bin somewhere,” he said.