Greenpoint mystery solved: serial litterer was NYPD sergeant

Nearly every Sunday morning for four years, residents of a quiet block in Greenpoint, Brooklyn woke up to reams of paper dumped on their street. A serial litterer was precisely slicing pages from old Reader’s Digests, Bibles, junk mail and 1970s porn magazines before dumping them on tree-lined Noble Street between Manhattan Avenue and Franklin Street. Surveillance videos captured the driver tossing the pages from his car before sunrise.

“It felt accidental at first, and then after a couple times, it felt intentional,” said Dillon Kraus, who moved to the block last year. Kraus described “hundreds, maybe thousands of pages” that covered sections of the street.

In April, the serial litterer was finally identified to residents as Sergeant John Trzcinski. He’d grown up on the block in a family home sold in 2016, according to property records. An NYPD probe resulted in discipline for Trzcinski: loss of one vacation day, according to public records. He was not fined or issued a summons by the sanitation department, which can run in the thousands of dollars.

The slap on the wrist followed years of inquiries by block residents, a stakeout by a private security firm and the involvement of NYPD Internal Affairs investigators. Questions still linger. Why did Trzcinski, described by his sister as an “environmentalist,” do it? Residents – who devoted countless hours to the mystery in block association meetings, correspondence with the sanitation department and cleanup – were reluctant to talk about the litterer once he was identified as a cop. They didn’t want to be seen as badmouthing police.

Gothamist reviewed notes and correspondence with the NYPD and sanitation department about the mystery. Gothamist also obtained surveillance footage and photos of the litter, including pages sliced from Poe’s “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” and what appears to be pages cut from a book on Greco-Roman art.

Residents described the…