Fake Wall Used To Nab Trump-Loving Subway Tagger, NYPD Says

NEW YORK — President Donald Trump might not be a fan of this wall. Cops hid behind a "dummy wall" to catch a serial Trump-loving tagger in a Brooklyn subway station last week, a top NYPD official said Tuesday.

The MTA put up the wall in the Court Street R stop on March 12 after cops got a rash of complaints about pro-Trump graffiti on a mezzanine there going back to early January, Chief of Transit Edward Delatorre said.

Cops got their man on the first try on Friday, when police say Jamie Montemarano returned to the Brooklyn Heights station and scrawled "#LoveTrump" on a beam while officers were hiding behind the plywood wall.

"They caught him live writing on the beam," Delatorre told reporters.

The arrest was Montemarano's first, according to Delatorre. He was charged with making graffiti, criminal mischief and possession of a graffiti instrument and given a desk appearance ticket, the NYPD said.

Neighborhood coordination officers raised the wall idea with the MTA's group station manager on Feb. 26, Delatorre said. The graffiti had been cleaned up several times before but police wanted a more permanent solution, according to the chief.

"The idea was not just to keep cleaning it up. The idea was to capture the person who did it," Delatorre told City Council lawmakers.

Delatorre cited the stealth mission to tout the NYPD's recent expansion of its neighborhood policing model to its Transit Bureau. The initiative assigns cops to the same lines each day so they can patrol stations and ride the subway, officials said last year.

"I have numerous different success stories. But the idea is pretty — I would call it common sense," Delatorre said.