The owner of Billy's Antiques and Props on E. Houston vented about his arrest, after cops raided his store Friday, accusing him of selling stolen MTA property. NYPD officers took 96 subway signs priced between $40-$1,000. But Leroy says a MTA subcontractor sold him the signs fair and square for $3,000. "He was supposed to dispose of the signs, and he disposed them to me," Leroy told the News. "I don't send an army of crackheads into the subway to unbolt signs."
Leroy says police overdid it in the Friday night raid. "There were 20 cop cars here. It was like they were arresting Public Enemy No. 1," he said. Leroy recalled that when he first started stocking the signs, cops came sniffing around the store, but for the next 12 years they left him alone. "Why didn't they just tell me I wasn't able to sell the signs?" wondered the junk shop owner yesterday.
Allegedly, cops told Leroy that if he revealed his secret subway sign source they wouldn't put him in cuffs. (Previously he'd kept his supplier carefully guarded: “If I made it public then every shop would have them,” he told NYC the Blog in 2008.) But they didn't keep their promise, says the antiques dealer: "They took me out in cuffs and put me through the system."
