He just can’t seem to keep his hands to himself.
A prolific alleged pickpocket once featured in the NYPD’s “Nifty 50” deck of cards of the biggest subway-crime recidivists was busted again this week in two more heists, police sources said Wednesday.
Darin Mickens, 55, who has more than 60 busts on his rap sheet, was arrested Tuesday on a fare-beating rap at the Chambers Street J train station — and then hit with grand larceny charges in the new cases out of Brooklyn.
It comes after Mickens was allowed to walk out of Manhattan Criminal Court just last month on charges in two earlier thefts — only to allegedly pick another pocket behind the courthouse less than an hour later, according to court documents.
“This guy has been arrested 13 times so far this year, victimizing hard-working New Yorkers at a time when they can least afford it,” one law-enforcement source railed Wednesday.
“At what point will the system start protecting hard-working New Yorkers instead of hard-working criminals?” he said.
“So much for supervised release.”
In the latest busts, Mickens was charged Tuesday with stealing a wallet from a home healthcare aide who was picking up meds for one of her clients at Sunway Pharmacy in Sunset Park in Brooklyn on Nov. 8.
Two days later, Mickens allegedly struck again, stealing a wallet from the backpack of a straphanger on a subway train at Flatbush Avenue and Fulton Street, according to the sources.
The grand larceny charges repeatedly lodged against Mickens in the past do not qualify for bail under the state’s controversial 2019 criminal justice reforms — although prosecutors have tried to have him held on a loophole in the law, to no avail.
After his earlier arrest late last month, Manhattan prosecutors had asked the judge to hold sticky-fingered defendant on as much as $75,000 bail despite the charges not being bail-eligible.
The DA’s office argued that a stipulation in the criminal justice reforms known as the “harm on harm” clause allowed the judge to set bail.
The loophole in the law states that a repeat offender who gets nabbed while facing charges in another case can be held on bail if he or she presents a “harm” to a person or property.
Still, the Manhattan judges in Mickens’ cases — Erin Schumacher, Sabrina Kraus and Marisol Martinez-Alonso — ruled in each instance that prosecutors hadn’t made their cases under the difficult-to-prove “harm on harm” loophole and said supervised release was sufficient.
Asked about the provision, a spokesman for the New York State Office of Court Administration told The Post earlier this month that the onus is on prosecutors to make a convincing “harm on harm” case — a challenging task on most cases where the clause is invoked.
But at his early Wednesday morning arraignment on the latest two grand-larceny charges, Mickens was finally held on bail — $15,000 cash in each case.
Mickens has been on the radar for the NYPD for years and was among the repeat subway-system offenders on the “Nifty 50” deck of cards put together by cops several years ago so that officers could be wary as they carried the suspects’ mug shots with them on the beat.
In an odd twist, police sources also said a second member of the notorious “Nifty 50” club was with Mickens when he was busted Tuesday. However, Terry Rivers was not charged and later released.
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