Need extra copies of the Sunday coupon inserts? Going to the store to buy a stack of newspapers can be such a pain. Carrying enough quarters to feed the newspaper machine is a hassle. So why not just take a leisurely ride around your neighborhood, and swipe your neighbors’ newspapers right out of their driveways?
That’s what residents of two New York communities say has been happening where they live – and now police are on the case.
In recent weeks, dozens of people living in the Long Island communities of Sound Beach and Miller Place have woken up on Sunday mornings to discover that their newspapers were not there waiting for them. Ron and Lucille Marshack, the husband-and-wife team who deliver papers in the area, couldn’t figure out why the newspapers they had just dropped off, were being reported as undelivered.
With help from one resident’s security camera, they found out.
Video from the camera shows an SUV driving up to the resident’s home, jumping out, grabbing his paper and taking off.
“You feel violated,” Tony Randazzo told WABC-TV. “You’re coming onto my property taking something that doesn’t belong to you.” Besides, he added, it’s just “a stupid paper. It’s a couple of dollars.”
But to those who took his paper, what’s inside makes it worth a lot more than that.
The Marshacks vowed to find whoever was stealing the papers they delivered, forcing them to pay for replacement copies out of their own pockets. They managed to locate the vehicle shown in the surveillance video, and its two female occupants, in the parking lot of a nearby McDonald’s. There, Lucille Marshack said, “they were pulling the coupons and throwing out the rest of the paper.”
The paper-pilfering pair is accused of making off with 60 newspapers over the past two weeks. The Marshacks got their license plate number and reported it to police. Police are also taking a look at Randazzo’s surveillance video.
It’s not clear what the women are doing with their ill-gotten coupons, though 60 sets of each and every Sunday coupon are probably more than any two people can use on their own. Like the Arkansas woman busted for allegedly stealing hundreds of Sunday newspapers from coin-operated newsstands earlier this year, or the former newspaper deliveryman charged with doing the same a couple of years earlier, it’s likely the coupons ended up being resold online.
In the meantime, you can bet that police and local residents will be watching their driveways very closely this weekend, to see if the coupon thieves strike again. And if your New York-based source for extra insert coupons suddenly dries up this weekend, at least now you know why.
