Safer streets are paved with clues to old crimes

There are so many repugnant aspects to New York City living. Mostly we hate the beast the city brings out in us. When we’re on foot trying to cross a car-choked street, we are one step away from committing homicide. In a car, we want to mow down the pedestrians who block our way. If we are poor, we hate the Petrus-drinking plutocrats who dine at four-star restaurants. If we are rich, we hate the smirking waiter who pours that extravagant French wine.

But it is a measure of how civilized New York has become that we now have time to hate the things that have nothing to do with how dangerous the city is. Indeed, this week the New York Police Department reported that major crime dropped 5.6% compared with last year -- that’s 8,000 fewer major felonies committed compared with a similar period in 2002. If this keeps up (or down) the city is on track to be even safer than it was in 1968, the first year the NYPD began keeping crime statistics.

Criminally speaking, times are so good that police have the luxury of dusting off cases that are decades old. Some detectives have become like Maytag repairmen, sitting around waiting for a call.

And some retired cops are inadvertently helping the old cause by simply reading newspaper ads.

Which is what happened in Queens the other day. A retired policeman answered a newspaper ad for a teal blue 1968 Mercury Cougar XR7 and ended up solving a 20-year-old crime.

In May 1983, the Cougar was stolen from Tom Jacobellis’ driveway in a quiet neighborhood in the Bronx. Jacobellis, an NYPD detective at the time, had been planning to restore the car to its original beauty. He reported the theft but had little hope of seeing the car again, figuring it was cut up for parts. Back in those days, after all, overworked detectives were too busy with mayhem to bother looking for stolen old cars.

A few months after he lost his blue Cougar, Jacobellis retired to Florida and a new life free of crime, snowstorms and high rents. During the next 20 years, he occasionally thought about the blue car with the white leather interior and how she might have looked had he only had the chance to fix her up.

Then last month another retired cop who has a thing for Cougars happened to spot an ad for one in Newsday. It was a blue 1968 XR7; the asking price was $2,500. He went to see the car and took photographs. Later, this ex-cop contacted the database coordinator for the Cougar Club of America to determine the car’s provenance. Jacobellis’ name popped up as a former owner. E-mails were exchanged.

“Hey Tom,” the database coordinator wrote, “thought you would find it kind of interesting that your old car is up for sale.”

“Hey,” Jacobellis wrote back, “it was stolen 20 years ago.”

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An arrest is made

The relatively new Auto Crime squad in Queens got on the case. They arrested the car’s owner, a 46-year-old Astoria Queens man who insisted his father gave him the car 20 years ago and he had no idea it was stolen.

“I’m just glad I’m getting it back,” Jacobellis said. He credited luck and the Internet for the return of his would-be pride and joy.

But good police work played no small part, not just in finding the Cougar but in keeping crime low enough to enable police to have the time to solve what once was considered a speck on a police blotter. This isn’t an isolated case; cops are now even combing car and car-parts sale ads looking for leads.

The improving crime rate in New York is consistent with rates nationwide, but this city’s record is better than most, particularly in solving cases and making arrests. In fact, New York didn’t even make the list in 2003 of the top 25 most dangerous cities compiled for the 10th year by a Kansas-based publishing and research company.

If this is a few too many good tidings in one column, not to worry.

New Yorkers read the tabloids every day. We are filled with anxiety about what can happen on the street. We worry our little ones will get caught in cross-fire, as was a 6-year-old girl in the Bronx last month. Or of rapists who trap young girls in their apartment alcoves as they’re returning home from buying milk, as happened recently in Manhattan. Or of estranged husbands who hunt down their wives the way a man did Tuesday, pumping her with bullets in broad daylight. This is still America at its most urban.

But at least once a year -- when the police commissioner releases annual crime statistics -- it’s important to step back and look at the big picture, which is so much better than it was that even a former cop like Tom Jacobellis is toying with the idea of coming home.

“I don’t know why, but I’ve had an itch lately to move back,” he said, adding, “if only I could afford it.”

Good police work may bring down the crime rate, but it can’t do a thing about the high cost of a Manhattan apartment. Not to mention a bottle of Petrus.