Career criminal gets off scot-free while innocent New Yorkers pay the price

Bail reforms have led to profession criminals like Charles Wold.
Christopher Sadowski

We couldn’t script this if we tried: A profession felony is “grateful” for the state’s terrible bail-reform legal guidelines maintaining him out of the place the place he clearly belongs — jail.

“I’m grateful for [bail reform] as a result of I’m too outdated to go to jail, I’m method too outdated, I can’t do it,” Charles Wold, 58, mentioned Friday.

The longtime drug addict stands accused of burglarizing seven totally different Brooklyn companies and three in Manhattan over the course of three months. And his rap sheet dates again to 1983, with 32 prior arrests for housebreaking and theft.

However don’t put him behind bars?

“Rikers Island will not be the important thing, you understand what I’m saying? I’ve been in jail all my life, I can do this standing on my head, it’s not educating me something, I can get extra medication in there than I can out right here,” Wold instructed The Publish. “Hopefully, the DA will see that I didn't do all these crimes that they're accusing me of and they'll get dismissed.”

Effectively . . . he “would possibly’ve completed or two of ’em however that was at first of the summer season.”

As a substitute of being held in jail pending trial, Wold runs free, and the companies he rips off pay.

“It’s actually gotten to a degree the place you need to catch them red-handed for them to get arrested. The burden is on us,” Shareen Elkenani, who owns Sandwich Woman Cafe on seventh Road, instructed The Publish. “They’re going to maintain releasing these folks till they repair the criminal-reform system,” she mentioned. “The detective instructed me to be cautious as a result of he’s going to return again once more.”

It’s not simply the no-bail regulation: Information web site The Metropolis reviewed state information from January 2020 to June 2021 on a de Blasio let-’em-out program and discovered that half the beneficiaries have been rearrested, 28% on felony expenses.

Mr. Wold is proud of this free-for-all. As for the remainder of us . . .