A Staten Island barber says cops unfairly targeted his business and roughed him up as part of an iPhone sting. EZ Does It Barber Shop owner Michael Pacheco, 25, says the incident happened around 2 p.m. on Friday when a police informant came in claiming he had an unopened iPhone 5 for sale. Initially no one in the barbershop offered to buy it, but then Pacheco decided to take a second look, which is when a group of plainclothes cops stormed in. You can see how that played out in the very heated video below.
"To bring something wrong into the shop, then try to set us up and it goes wrong, it's very disgusting to me," Pacheco told SI Advance about the sting. The sting was part of the controversial Operation Take Back, in which "undercover cops or police informants go into stores trying to sell stolen iPhones and iPads." The officers did not initially identify themselves as cops when they entered the store; that's when Pacheco got into an argument with them, and ended up in a physical fight.
He was arrested and charged with resisting arrest, criminal possession of stolen property and disorderly conduct; Pacheco's brother, 29-year-old Stephen Cummings, was also arrested and hit with the same charges. All those charges were dropped the next day. "They apologized and said it was a misunderstanding," Pacheco said officers told him at the courthouse.
Pacheco suffered a hemorrhaged eyeball when cops allegedly slammed a police radio into the side of his head as they arrested him. "Fortunately, I’m not asthmatic,” he told the News. "If I had asthma or high blood pressure like Eric [Garner] did, I could have died. But now I have to go home to my infant son and try not to scare him with this bloody eye."
