Two Venezuelan citizens face trespass and conspiracy charges after police caught them climbing out of a manhole on Park Avenue near the hotel where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was staying during the UN General Assembly.
Kevin Rodriguez, 26, and Samuel Reveron, 25, were spotted emerging from an underground pit near East 61st Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side at roughly 4:35 a.m. on a Wednesday, just steps from the Loews Regency New York hotel. A third, unidentified suspect climbed out with them. All three fled north on Park Avenue in two vehicles before police could intervene.
The NYPD tracked Rodriguez and Reveron to their Queens residences and arrested them the following day. Both were arraigned Friday in Manhattan court on charges of trespass and conspiracy, and a judge granted both supervised release. Reveron picked up a separate charge, driving without a license, when officers brought him in. Both men are due back in court November 25.
Prosecutors say Reveron offered a blunt explanation for why two men were crawling through a sewer beneath one of the most security-sensitive blocks in the city. The New York Post reported that Reveron allegedly told police:
"We go into the sewers to look for valuables that go into the sewer drains."
A federal law-enforcement source briefed on the matter said neither suspect appeared to have had malicious intent or posed any direct threat to dignitaries at the hotel. The source added that both men are part of a larger pattern of sewer spelunking across New York City.
That pattern is not small. The NYPD acknowledged that individuals have been dropping into the sewer system repeatedly in recent months, particularly after storms, to scavenge for precious metals and scrap. Similar incidents have been reported this year in Middle Village in Queens, Williamsburg and Gravesend in Brooklyn, and near Penn Station and Madison Square Garden in Manhattan.
The department released a statement putting the Park Avenue incident in that context:
"We have seen a number of incidents over the past few months of individuals going into the sewer system to look for valuables and other scrap metal after a storm."
But the NYPD did not stop there. The statement continued:
"This incident fits that same criteria, but out of an abundance of caution given the UN General Assembly and the sensitivity of the location, the NYPD is conducting additional security sweeps with our federal partners."
Police said Rodriguez had no prior arrests. Reveron, by contrast, had one previous arrest for criminal mischief in Queens. Neither man's immigration status beyond Venezuelan citizenship was detailed in public statements.
The third suspect who emerged from the manhole alongside them remains unidentified. Whether that person has been located, arrested, or charged is unclear. Police have not said whether any valuables or scrap metal were recovered from the suspects or from the sewer itself.
The nature of the conspiracy charge also remains unexplained. Prosecutors have not publicly specified who or what the alleged conspiracy targeted beyond the act of trespassing into the sewer system. The charges as filed, trespass and conspiracy, carry relatively modest weight, and both men walked out of court on supervised release the same day they were arraigned.
Whatever the motive, the optics are difficult to wave away. Two foreign nationals crawled through the infrastructure directly beneath a block hosting the Israeli prime minister during one of the highest-security weeks on New York's calendar, and nobody stopped them until surveillance footage was reviewed after the fact. They fled in vehicles. Police did not catch up to them until the next day, and only at their homes in Queens.
The NYPD's assurance that the incident "fits the same criteria" as routine scrap-metal scavenging may be accurate. Federal authorities appear to agree that no threat to Netanyahu or other dignitaries was intended. But a pattern of people freely entering and exiting the city's underground tunnel system, repeatedly, across multiple boroughs, for months, is itself a security problem, especially when it surfaces yards from a diplomatic protection zone.
The fact that both suspects were granted supervised release and sent home until a November 25 court date will not reassure anyone worried about accountability. Trespass charges rarely carry serious consequences, and conspiracy charges built on top of a misdemeanor trespass are not the kind of case that keeps a defendant awake at night.
When people can pop in and out of the city's sewer system at will, across boroughs, across months, beneath VIP security perimeters, the problem is not a couple of guys looking for gold. The problem is that nobody locked the door.
