By Matthew McGevna
Malverne P.D. narrowly misses nabbing suspected serial burglar
It was a quiet night on Clifford Court in Malverne Village. Feb. 22, 3:30 in the morning. A winter wind was howling through the trees.
At one of the houses on Clifford, a back window was sliding open. The homeowners, asleep upstairs, awoke to some noises coming from downstairs. It couldn't be one of their children, they thought. There were more noises, but it wasn't the wind. It was coming from inside. Calmly, the man of the house sat up and reached for the phone.
Malverne police officer Joe Chiafari, working the night shift, was on patrol. Some nights he was part of the department's undercover operation near Foster Brook. Officers took turns patrolling that neighborhood in unmarked cars, hoping to catch a burglar, or burglars, who had hit a number of houses along the boundary between Malverne and Valley Stream. This night, however, Chiafari was in a marked vehicle, on his routine shift.
A call came over the radio about a resident on Clifford Court reporting noises inside his house. Chiafari wondered if this might be another burglary with the same M.O.: middle of the night; a quiet entry while residents were asleep or in some other part of the house; pocketbooks, wallets, cash lying around. Quiet exit. Sometimes the victims said they didn't even realize they were robbed until hours later, when they reached for some cash to pay for a cup of coffee. It might be nothing - but it might not be. Chiafari whipped his car around and headed over to Clifford.
The homeowner knew it wasn't his imagination when he crept downstairs and saw that his front door was wide open. The burglar was gone. Whoever it was had entered through an unlocked window, and left through the front door, as if he lived there and was heading off to work.
When Chiafari was a few houses away, he saw a man standing under an outside house light, rummaging through a tote bag. He was counting his score. It was him.
When Chiafari got out of his car, the man looked up and saw him. "I took a look at him, he sees me, and he wasted no time - he high-tailed it out of there," Chiafari recalled. "I called for backup." Two Malverne police cars and eight Nassau County P.D. cars cordoned off the area. Chiafari had no idea whether the fleeing thief was armed. He didn't think he was. The way these jobs were being pulled off, it didn't seem likely that the burglar would need a weapon. But Chiafari was taking no chances. He drew his revolver and took off after him.
He followed the suspect's route between two houses, and chased him through a couple of backyards. Then down Maple Street, and across some more backyards. Then he ran down Chestnut Street. As the other cars started arriving, the thief disappeared into the night. He couldn't have gone far, Chiafari thought. Other officers were already staking out his possible escape routes.
"In darkness it's hard because you start to look in every direction," said Chiafari, a five-year veteran, "Did he turn left? Did he turn right? The person could be hiding behind a fence. So you set up a perimeter. Nassau County ... brought in a K-9 unit to try and pick up his scent."
But the dog couldn't find him. The elusive burglar had gotten away again. But not without a price: He'd been seen. "The light helped me out," Chiafari said. "It was just the luck of the draw. I happened to pull right up when he was counting the proceeds." He added that it's not often an officer gets the chance to encounter a suspect so close to the scene of a crime. Usually, by the time cops arrive to take a statement, the suspect is long gone.
But the close call with the authorities didn't seem to diminish the suspect's bravado. Six days after Chiafari's foot chase, the burglar was struggling to escape the grasp of a homeowner on East St. Mark's Place in Valley Stream.
Similar to the Clifford Court incident, the homeowner awoke to noise downstairs, thinking it was his son. He called down to him, but the voice that boldly answered back was not his son's. The man went downstairs and confronted the burglar in his kitchen. The two men wrestled on the kitchen floor until the thief struck the homeowner. Then the thief took off, and the homeowner chased him. Another foot race, this time down Cottage Street in Valley Stream. Once again, the suspect had been spotted. Once again, he got away, this time with a purse and some jewelry.
On March 10, a couple of weeks after his chase in Malverne, Chiafari got a call. The 5th Precinct had a man in custody, after detectives responded to a burglary on North Corona Avenue in Valley Stream. The man was caught a half hour after the burglary. A few hours after that, Chiafari was at the 5th, looking at a photo array, in which police mix a mug shot of a suspect in with photos of four or five other people, and ask the eyewitness to point to the person they saw. Chiafari studied the photos and pointed to a shot of Raymond Beck - the same man Nassau County detectives had busted on North Corona.
Beck, 52, of Rockville Centre, is being held without bail in the burglaries. As the Herald went to press, detectives were seeking a warrant to search Beck's home, to determine if they could find stolen goods that might link him to more than just the two burglaries he has being charged with. Chiafari said that since Beck's arrest, all has been quiet in Malverne again, and he feels confident that police have ended the string of home invasions. Chiafari credits the homeowner on Clifford Court for keeping his cool in a frightening situation.
"He was very calm about it," Chiafari said. "If it wasn't for the homeowner hearing him, he would have been out of there. He was a clean burglar."
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