The December 7, 2014, New York Police Department CompStat report found that the number of shooting incidents in the city was up 4.5 percent year over year, while the total number of shooting victims was up 5.5 percent — not a great showing for the first year of Mayor Bill de Blasio, the first Democrat to occupy the newly fortified Gracie Mansion since the 1990s. But there was one good bit of news: The NYPD has brought a criminal case against one of Gotham’s most dangerous nemeses: the Penguin.
“Yeah, I’m the Penguin,” says 60-year-old Randy Credico, a comedian, radical activist, and frequent political candidate — most recently challenging Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary — who in August was brought in on five felony charges, including three counts of menacing police with . . . a $1 bodega umbrella. Credico, a protégé of the late left-wing lawyer William Kunstler, was taking video of police questioning a man at the Van Cortlandt Park train station. In his account, three non-uniformed men displaying no badges were “shaking down” an elderly African-American man on a station bench. Credico was on his way to a newspaper interview to talk up his protest candidacy: “I was in a hurry,” he says, “but I couldn’t resist. So I started taking pictures. It wasn’t even clear they were police.”
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