He went from fighting crime to getting clobbered by it.
A former federal prosecutor was punched in the face by a brute while riding the subway on the Upper West Side — an attack he said shows the crime-plagued Big Apple is “not a safe place.”
The 56-year-old attorney was heading uptown on a “not terribly crowded” No. 2 train at 6:20 p.m. Wednesday when the crazed straphanger growled, “Back the f—k up” then struck him, the victim and police said Friday.
“He takes [his] hand and he folds it up into a fist and punches me in the side of the face and kind of knocks my glasses off,” said the attorney, who asked that his name be withheld out of concern for his safety.
“It was clearly a solid smash in the face with that right hand, right fist,” he said.
“My jaw is still kind of sore today.”
The former prosecutor — who spent 12 years sending gangsters and white collar criminals to prison in the New York— was gobsmacked by bad old days-style subway violence because he hadn’t even been standing near the guy, he said.
“I was completely taken aback. It happened really fast,” he said.
“I said, ‘“What the f–k? I wasn’t even close to you.”
He got off the train on Broadway and West 72nd Street and called police — but his attacker was still at large Friday, said the former prosecutor, who now works at a private firm.
He said the beating frightened him enough to make him believe the city is unsafe.
“Stuff like this certainly gives the city a feeling of like, it’s not a safe place. Like is this the worst crime in the history of the world? No, I mean, I’m going to be fine,” he said.
“But it does create an entire sensation that the city is not that safe, and that, you know, like law-abiding people and law enforcement is not really in charge.”
He added, “If medium-sized crimes go unprosecuted, that eventually leads to a greater sense of disorder and larger crimes.”
Asked about Gov. Hochul’s plan to deploy the National Guard to city subways, he called the idea “ineffectual.”
“I don’t know what the National Guard is going to do about people punching people in the face on a subway car. Unless they’re on the subway car, they’re not going to do anything,” he said.
“What needs to happen is police need to be in the subway system, and they need to react quickly to situations like this.”
The attack hearkens back to the “bad old days” of subway crime in the 1970s and 80s — when straphangers feared riding the rails at night and Guardian Angles patrolled the underground.
Subway violence in the Big Apple has spiked significantly since before the pandemic, with the number of injured straphangers jumping 53% from 2019 to 2023, according to data reported last month.
Additional reporting by Joe Marino
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