So it’s just like in the movie Cool Hand Luke. The Paul Newman character did the same thing. That’s what got him in prison (I think). Okay.

But this guy, Maurice Mizrahi, beheaded 87 parking meter heads. Well, we in Park Slope can certainly understand the motivation. Here’s part of the story from the Times:

When Salvo Frisina went to work recently at a pharmacy in Gravesend, Brooklyn, he saw something odd: a parking meter with a sawed-off head

Mr. Frisina said he thought it was part of the transition in the neighborhood from coin-operated parking meters to Muni-Meters, a move that the city is making across New York.

“I thought the city was cutting them off to put the new meters in,” Mr. Frisina said on Saturday, as he worked behind the counter at Harold’s Pharmacy on the corner of Avenue U and McDonald Avenue.

But Mr. Frisina, 20, may have unknowingly seen the handiwork of Maurice Mizrahi, a man who the police said had cut off the heads of several dozen parking meters in the past two years. They recovered 87 meters from the house where he lived in Gravesend, the neighborhood where the police said most of the thefts took place.

The police said that Mr. Mizrahi was arrested on Saturday afternoon on Kings Highway and was expected to be charged with numerous counts of criminal possession of stolen property.

While it is not unusual for coin-fed parking meters and Muni-Meters to be vandalized, city officials and the police said they had never seen anything on the scale of the thefts in which Mr. Mizrahi had been accused.