STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – These thieves traveled light. And got away with a heavy score.
A Rickel Home Center in Port Richmond was robbed of $20,000 in 1982, with resourceful robbers using tools and a forklift found inside the popular home improvement store to do the job.
It was around 10:30 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 19, 1982, right in the swing of the Christmas shopping season, when the Rickel at 1520 Forest Ave. in Port Richmond was robbed.
Police said that the thieves knocked out the store’s alarm system, snapped a padlock with bolt cutters and entered the closed store through a rear door. The crooks then broke into the store manager’s office, where a wall safe was located.
Cops said that while a burglar alarm had been transmitted from the store at about 10:30 p.m. that night, an alarm company truck dispatched to the scene found nothing amiss.
RIGHT OFF THE SHELF
The robbers then used tools they found on the shelves of the Rickel store to smash and gouge their way through a fiberboard wall in the manager’s office, freeing the 3,000-pound safe.
They then drove a store forklift into the office, hoisted the safe and its ill-gotten lucre onto it, and drove the forklift backward through the store’s aisles to a waiting getaway truck.
“It was a big safe,” said one store official.
Sgt. Gene Martinez of the Crimes Against Property Squad said that “a pile of tools” was found on the floor outside the manager’s office, including a crowbar, hammer, axe and a hand-operated winch, known as a “come-along.”
“The store has everything you need to steal a safe,” said one NYPD officer on the scene.
Pointing to the forklift, he said, “And this thing.”
“Everything was available to them,” Lt. Louis Fiore of the Crimes Against Property Squad said later. “They didn’t have to bring anything with them.”
When the bandits were done using the forklift, investigators said, they returned it to the Rickel loading dock.
THIEVING TRIO
Martinez said that there were at least…
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