Michael D. Sydnor Jr. is just one face of the alarming spate of car break-ins around downtown Baltimore.
He's 40 years old and until two years ago, he says, he lived rent-free with his girlfriend in an apartment on North Charles Street, though the address he provided authorities does not exist. He says he earned $11 per hour working in a stockroom at the Inner Harbor's Hyatt Regency, but when asked the address of his employer on a court form, he put down a question mark.
He's been arrested 101 times under the name Sydnor since 1994, but he sometimes uses the last name Thomas. He's been convicted more than 30 times for crimes that include dealing drugs and urinating in the street, and his public defender wrote in one recent court document that his "extremely long, steady addiction to drugs has fueled his criminal behavior."
In November 2007, a bystander saw him use a steel plumbing cap to break the driver's side window of a car parked in the Redwood Street garage and take an iPod, a Nintendo and an ash tray. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison, but was back on the street in time to be arrested again in January 2008 for being disorderly.
Again, a judge sentenced him to spend a year and a half in prison, perhaps after seeing a handwritten comment that a prosecutor scrawled in blue ink on a perfunctory document calling attention to his past transgressions. Still, Sydnor was back on the street in time to be arrested yet again, on Sunday, charged with breaking into two more cars in a downtown garage and stealing a Global Positioning System device.
He's in jail again awaiting trial.
In police parlance, the crime is a "larceny from auto," and in sheer numbers it dwarfs every other crime category in Baltimore but property damage, with more than 6,500 cases reported in the city last year. That is actually down from the more than 15,000 in 1996, when drug dealers were stealing cell phones by the thousands and reprogramming them with stolen numbers to avoid eavesdropping by police.
Now, the hot items are iPods, iPhones and GPS devices.
Thieves target the tens of thousands of cars parked in business districts and tourist areas. Police report that 74 vehicles were broken into in the first two weeks of this year downtown, at the Inner Harbor and in Federal Hill. The nicer the car, the nicer the stuff that might be inside. And nearly every break-in is accompanied by a broken window and a pile of shattered glass on the sidewalk.
