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FIERCE ADVICE: Angel Ortiz, 19, had become an outspoken opponent of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk tactics.Photo: Reuters
For someone who claims to hate being stopped by cops, he sure winds up in handcuffs often enough.
The city’s poster boy against stop-and-frisk has been busted three times for selling thousands of dollars in bogus Broadway, concert and sporting tickets – including just this past Friday.
Angel Ortiz, 19, first grabbed the spotlight as a high-profile plaintiff in anti-stop-and-frisk litigation in late 2012, giving press interviews and posing for photos outside Manhattan federal court as hearings were held.
“We were stopped, frisked and arrested for trespassing,” the teen has complained to reporters, alleging he was thrown to the ground and beaten by cops in a racial-profiling bust near his Tremont, Bronx, home seven years ago.
“I was stopped, frisked, of course, and I was basically stripped of my rights and arrested for no apparent reason, for visiting a friend,” he told 1010 WINS in October 2012.
Ortiz’s arrest late Friday was for a quite apparent reason — for allegedly selling phony tickets for “Book of Mormon,” “Kinky Boots” and Giants games to rubes he met on Craigslist.
He was arraigned at Manhattan Criminal Court on Sunday and charged with grand and petit larceny, possession of a forged instrument and fraudulent accosting. He was held in lieu of $10,000 bail.
Ortiz’s lawyer refused to comment after the hearing.
Ortiz allegedly hauled in a total of more than $2,000 from six victims on a half-dozen occasions.
A Long Island surgeon told The Post on Sunday that the alleged fraudster coaxed him into buying two tickets to a concert at Radio City Music Hall in September.
“It’s scary what a charmer and scammer this guy is,” said Long Island Dr. Harvey Manes, who purchased fake ducats to a Sarah Brightman concert.
“I could have bought the Brooklyn Bridge from this guy, he was so charming.”
Manes said he at first turned down the tickets, which each had a face value of $100. But when Ortiz then dropped the price to $25 a pop, he scooped them up, only to later learn they were fake.
Ortiz also was arrested twice last spring on charges of selling bad tickets to Broadway hits — and $500 in bogus ducats for an April 2013 Rihanna concert at Barclays Center, law-enforcement sources said.
Those arrests come just weeks after Ortiz stood before the cameras and told reporters that he hoped his activism would make kids like him safer — from cops.
“I’m glad I’m one of the first cases because hopefully, I’m one of the last,” he said.
By April, he was getting caught allegedly selling $220 worth of fake Rihanna tickets to two Texans on East 19th Street and Park Avenue South, police said.
“When they get to the theater, and the bar code is scanned, they get screwed,” said one law-enforcement source.
Cops rank Ortiz as a mediocre trickster — he’d text his alleged victims from his own cellphone and often use his real name, even letting his marks snap pictures of him and his state ID card before walking off with their money, according to officials and victims.
“He’s a moron,” another law-enforcement source told The Post. “He gave people his real ID number.”
But to his half-dozen alleged victims, Ortiz was slick enough, meeting them at Starbucks and hotel lobbies and sweet talking them out of hundreds of dollars.
The alleged marks told The Post that Ortiz would text them politely and helpfully throughout the day, even signing off on one note, “Have a blessed day.”
He’d show up for the drop-off wearing dress clothes and a tie and hand over hard-paper tickets plus a printed receipt before traipsing away with their loot.
“We were a bit skeptical, but we asked to see his photo ID,” remembered one Manhattan-based victim who asked her name not be used. “We asked to see the credit card that was used to purchase the tickets, and they all matched up,” she said of answering Ortiz’s ad on Craiglist.
“Cannot make the show tonight. Looking to sell two tickets to ‘The Book of Mormon,’ ” she remembers the ad stating.
She and her husband met Ortiz at Bryant Park, peeling off $300 for a couple “Book of Mormon” tickets that were promptly rejected at the theater.
“We were shocked,” she remembers.
She would be just as shocked to discover that her alleged scammer had used his own now-famous name.
Doing her own sleuthing online, she stumbled upon one of Ortiz’s many press clippings — complete with his photograph.
“I screamed, ‘Yes! I found him!’” and promptly called the cops.
“He’s really good at this,” said Jan Corlett, 59, of San Francisco, who paid $640 for bogus “Book of Mormon” tix in September.
“Really polite. In hindsight, he was reeling me in like a fish.
“That’s pretty ballsy of him to have gone in front of the press and then done this,” she added.
Another tourist, Lynn Sumlin, 46, of Atlanta, paid $280 for hinky “Kinky Boots” tickets.
“They were hard tickets,” she said. “I naively thought those would be harder to fake.”
The last time she saw Ortiz, he was walking away from Grand Central with her cash.
“I tried to watch him as he walked, to see if he did a little skip or a jump — but he just walked like he was on his way,” she said.
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