Ninja Hunt.(The Talk of the Town)(burglar in Staten Island, New York)

In retrospect, it figures that a serial "ninja burglar" would turn up on Staten Island, a borough whose biggest cultural export, the Wu-Tang Clan, long ago nicknamed the place Shaolin, in honor of kung-fu movies. This particular bandit, who is now thought to have robbed eighteen homes on the island in the past seven months, acquired his honorific in September, when he encountered a Dongan Hills resident named Phil Chiolo while raiding Chiolo's home. He was dressed all in black, with a black face mask, Chiolo said, and he carried nun-chucks, which he used to club Chiolo in the chest, head, and shins before Chiolo was able to retaliate by stabbing at him with a steak knife.

Chiolo, who suffered a welt near his collarbone, said the other day that he is fine, but Staten Island has since gone ninja mad, with the burglar enjoying a kind of romantic outlaw notoriety. Other victims have likened him to a gazelle or a cat ("very athletic, very quiet, and very fast"), capable of scaling walls and leaping noiselessly out windows. (No one has heard him speak.) The "word on the street," according to a Staten Island Advance editorial, was that ninja costumes were going to be an especially popular Halloween choice around the borough this year, and several weeks ago a local home-security company incorporated an image of a rappelling ninja in its print ads. The Post's police blotter, last month, included a small item about a man who, after allegedly attempting to flood his landlord's apartment, exclaimed to the cops, "I know who the ninja is." If he knew, apparently he didn't tell, because recently the ninja burglar struck again--twice in one night, escaping with a hundred and thirty thousand dollars' worth of loot. "Now he's the famous ninja who's disturbing our peace," Dr. Mohammad Khalid, a dentist from Pakistan who lives in Todt Hill, said last week, while standing under some trees near the scene of the latest break-ins. "He looks like a really professional robber that does not leave any marks or anything."

The N.Y.P.D. has assigned a task force to the ninja caper, and its officers, according to the Advance, have resorted to asking strangers point blank, "Are you the ninja burglar?" Dr. Khalid, who serves as the president of the Iron Hills Civic Association, could be called the primary civilian combatant. For the past two months, he has employed a supplementary private security detail for the organization's membership, which includes six hundred homes, and it seemed no accident, he thought, that this latest spree occurred just a block outside the prescribed range of his surveillance crew.

It was Wednesday, ...