The Mystery of Staten Island’s Ninja Burglar
The black-clad super-villain was so stealthy, most of his 200 victims never even saw him. Was he a creation of the NYPD and the press?
By Jim Knipfel
The story was iffy from the start. That didn’t matter, because it never does.
At 1 a.m. on the morning of September 6, 2007, Phil Chiolo, a resident of the Dongan Hills section of Staten Island, was startled by suspicious noises coming out of his kitchen. When he went to check it out, he came face to face with a man dressed all in black.
“I see this guy dressed in a Halloween-like ninja outfit, with just his eyes peering out,” he later told the New York Post. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
Not only was the intruder dressed like a ninja, according to Chiolo, he was also armed with a set of nunchucks, which he used with lightning-fast speed to strike Chiolo on the head and body. Undaunted by the brutal attack, Chiolo told police, he then grabbed a butcher knife and plunged it into the intruder’s chest.
“All the way up to the hilt,” an unnamed friend of Chiolo’s told the Staten Island Advance.
Amazingly enough, after being so grievously stabbed, the ninja showed no sign of pain or being wounded. Instead, he vanished silently and with agility through Chiolo’s back door and into the darkness, the knife still stuck in his chest. When police arrived to investigate, they could find no trace of blood in the area where Chiolo claimed to have stabbed the shadowy figure. What’s more, it seems nothing had been stolen from the house. Despite the reported struggle, the mysterious black-clad intruder had left nary a whiff of evidence behind.
At a news conference later that day, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, without so much as a smirk or giggle, recounted Chiolo’s harrowing tale for the gathered reporters.
Kelly was a fairly decent, reasonably smart and very serious cop. But at his news conferences as Commissioner, he was in the habit of dropping in strange and unexpected tidbits of information no one had been asking about. In this case, without further explanation or detail, he announced that the previous night’s events had actually been the fourteenth Staten Island burglary attributed to a similarly described intruder since June 6. He further added, almost as an afterthought, that prior to Chiolo, three other people claimed to have seen the ninja.
Before anyone had a chance to raise a hand and ask a few fundamental questions—“Why have we not heard about this weird crime spree before?” Or “Who else has seen this ninja?” Or “Um, did you say nunchucks?”—it was all over. When the story hit the tabloids, radio and the Internet with a mighty splash the next morning, “The Ninja Burglar” was born, complete with accompanying comic book moniker and legend. Nearly every journalist covering the story acted as if they, and we, had been fully conscious of The Ninja Burglar’s exploits over the previous three months. In a flash, the story was firmly planted in the heads of the public — particularly those on Staten Island. We were off to the races.
Having fully recovered from that mortal knife wound to the chest (thanks no dowbt to his super ninja healing powers), The Ninja Burglar was back in action two weeks later. On the night of September 21, in the Flagg Place Hill section of Staten Island, Mary Ann Carlo was heading off to bed when she ran into a masked man in the hallway.
“I started screaming, ‘The Ninja is here! The Ninja! The Ninja!’,” she later told reporters. Her husband, a dentist, called 911, and the pair fled the house. Although police arrived on the scene and had the entire neighborhood locked down in a matter of minutes, no trace of the diabolical — perhaps even supernatural — villain could be found. Once again there was no mention of whether anything had been stolen. For those keeping count, it was reported the Carlo’s house was the sixteenth the Ninja Burglar had struck, though apart from the Chiolo and Carlo cases, none of the other fourteen had been publicly documented. .
Two days later, at a civic association meeting about the ongoing Ninja Burglar menace, hundreds of terrified area residents showed up to share their fears and anxieties, agreeing to keep their doors locked and upgrade their security systems. In the days following the public meeting, local Democratic attorneys accused then-Staten Island D.A. Dan Donovan of not doing enough to protect the fine people of Staten Island from this mysterious but all-too-devilish fiend. Donovan responded that he was not at liberty to discuss matters involving an ongoing NYPD investigation. And sure enough, by that point Commissioner Kelly had appointed two task forces to investigate the Ninja Burglar, though to date they’d uncovered no physical evidence at all.
They did, however, release a profile of this criminal mastermind. They were looking, they said, for “a white male, dressed in black and what appears to be a ski mask. He is reported to be between 5 feet 8 inches and 6 feet tall, and weighs roughly 180 pounds. He primarily works at night on Wednesdays, although he has hit during the day and on every other day of the week as well. His target is mainly wealthier homes on Staten Island, particularly in the more affluent neighborhood of Todt Hill.”
The NYPD also, with the help of a local bank and private donors, posted a $5,000 reward for information leading to The Ninja Burglar’s arrest.
On the night of November 25, the nefarious phantom struck twice in the Todt Hill section of the borough, reportedly getting away with several thousand dollars worth of cash and jewelry.
There was just one small problem with the crimes. Although in one case the residents were home at the time of the robbery, neither admitted to seeing or hearing anyone. Which of course begs the question, if nobody saw him, how do they know it was The Ninja Burglar? Again, in cases like this, such questions simply don’t matter.
Local media couldn’t get enough of the story, and, inevitably, it wasn’t long (in the press if not officially) before every last robbery on Staten Island, no matter how petty, had been pulled off by The Ninja Burglar. Who wants to be robbed by some boring teenage junkie when there’s a super villain on the loose?
**
In early January of 2008, a family from the affluent Castleton Corners section returned home after a few days out of town to discover someone had ransacked their bedrooms and made off with an estimated $20,000 worth of jewelry. Although they claimed they had a security system up and armed, it had never been triggered, so you know what that means. The papers once again ran more screaming headlines about the latest strike by That fiendish and unstoppable Ninja Burglar.
Later that month, finally fed up with all the nonsense, Commissioner Kelly held a news conference in which he proudly announced The Ninja Burglar had “left town” and would not be bothering the residents of Staten Island any further. He didn’t explain how it was that if the NYPD knew enough about this guy to know he was leaving town they simply didn’t arrest him. Questions like that just didn’t come up. He had gone far away, is all, so everyone could rest easy. When it comes to dealing with an obvious case of mass hysteria, it is the oldest trick in the book.
For a few weeks, the ploy worked. Then more burglaries began cropping up, and were almost reflexively attributed among the locals to The Ninja.
Realizing that the first scheme hadn’t worked, in late April the NYPD tried a new strategu. They announced they were dismantling their Ninja burglar investigative teams. They wouldn’t be needed anymore, not because after nearly a year they had collected absolutely no evidence, but because they had three Albanians in custody who were being processed for deportation, and they were pretty sure one of them was well-versed in the Wisdom of the East.
They offered no names or descriptions, but said that the trio had been part of a loosely-knit Albanian burglary ring. One had been picked up in November of 2007 after a homeowner caught him in the act and called the cops. A second had been arrested after leaving his fingerprints behind at the scene of a burglary which occurred in May, a month before the first official Ninja strike. Since neither of those bumbling oafs sounded much like the work of the impossibly stealthy) and again possibly supernatural Ninja Burglar, they figured that third one must be their man. They didn’t really have any evidence against him, but that right there is evidence, right? Given they were all here illegally the NYPD contacted the feds to get deportation proceedings underway. Once again, the fine folks of Staten Island could sleep at night, knowing this baleful character and all his dark and deadly arts would soon be thousands of miles away.
This second attempt to quell the hysteria had more teeth to it. The local papers certainly ran with the Albanian story with very little question. But the NYPD’s promises did not stop The Ninja Burglar from striking again two months later, on June 16. It must have been him, the homeowners figured, as he left no shred of evidence behind. The only thing that cast doubt on the case was that it had occurred on Long Island. Perhaps the Ninja was expanding his territory. But it was him alright.
The real proof that the whole ham-fisted “Albanian” story was nothing but a cheap ruse came on May 6, 2009, when Staten Island resident Russ Irady’s seven-year-old Yorkshire terrier started yapping, alerting Irady there was a prowler on the second floor. When Irady went to investigate, he came face to face with, yes, The Ninja Burglar.
“I see this guy dressed as a ninja. Black mask on with only his eyes showing. All black outfit. He comes running down our hallway,” Irady told the Post in an eerie echo of Phil Chiolo’s original description.
Instead of whipping out the nunchucks or throwing stars, this time around, according to Irady, the Ninja Burglar proved he was a real ninja and not just some guy in a ski mask by nimbly leaping from the second-floor balcony without a moment’s hesitation, landing on the ground neat as a pin and vanishing into the shadows, still clutching the box of expensive watches he’d stolen.
Police were called to the scene, but as ever could find no evidence the ghostly figure had ever been there.
**
For the most part, press reports at the time continued to cling tight to the NYPD’s Albanian story, arguing that subsequent robberies attributed to the Ninja must have been the work of a new Ninja Burglar. If it was an effort to re-kindle the panic of the previous two years, it didn’t take hold, even though this was one of the rare instances in which the victim had actually seen the thieving apparition. Although the Ninja supposedly struck again in the same neighborhood in August, the story quickly cooled.
That was hardly the end of it, though. By that point the Ninja Burglar had become the stuff of legend in the minds of New Yorkers, even if some of us believed from the start he was nothing but a legend.
A full seven years later, on April 19, 2016, perhaps realizing long after the fact that no one ever bought the shaky “Albanian” story, Staten Island D.A. Michael McMahon sent out a tweet no one was expecting:
“The Ninja Burglar in the custody of RCDA NYPD Detective Squad. 10-year crime spree over. Arraignment tomorrow morn. Press conference at 1pm.”
At the news conference, McMahon announced the super villain in question was one Robert Costanzo, 46, a Staten Island resident with a long rap sheet, dating back to the 1989 knifepoint rape of an elderly woman. He’d been picked up on robbery and kidnapping charges for a 2014 incident in Connecticut. Nothing on his rap sheet sounded a thing like the Ninja Burglar, until he reportedly confessed on tape to over 100 burglaries, including several the cops weren’t previously aware of. Again without explanation, within a few days the NYPD had boosted those numbers themselves, claiming he used his Super Ninja Powers to pull off closer to 200 unsolved robberies. According to his lawyer, the almost mystical crime spree began only after Costanzo, a convicted Ninja Rapist, lost his job as an elevator mechanic. He said nothing about where his client may have received his martial arts training.
Without being asked to illustrate his ability to leap great distances, evade electronic detection, or even prove his proficiency with nunchucks, Costanzo was sentenced to 25 years in prison followed by an additional five years of supervised probation. Given, of course, any prison can hold him.
The story had one last gasp left. For some reason, the NYPD felt the need to try and quash the story for good, ten years later, a third time. It may have had something to do with the recent emergence of the Ninja Arsonist (who’d been setting fires in a Forest Hills, Queens housing development), or maybe the NYPD had more invested in this story than anyone realized. It was Ray Kelly, you’ll remember, who sparked the whole thing by giving public credence to Phil Chiolo’s cockamamie story about stabbing a superhuman ninja back in 2007.
If you think about it, as I’m sure the NYPD did, The Ninja Burglar was a blessing to cops on Staten Island. For nearly ten years, they had a legitimate excuse for not solving all those burglaries, given they were up against a comic book super-villain. Now that they had their man, they could wipe all those unsolved cases off the books and start afresh.
Jim Knipfel is the author of three memoirs, five novels, a short story collection and a volume of pop cultural sociology. His most recent book is Residue (Red Hen Press). He lives in Brooklyn.
Production DetailsV. 1.0.0
Last edited: June 4, 2019
Author: Jim Knipfel
Editor: Alexander Zaitchik
Illustration: Mark of the Ninja / DLC Games
