TOM BACHTELL

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, which, as some amateur profilers have noted, is the ninja burglar’s favorite night, but no one would have mistaken Khalid for a ninja as he stood gazing at neighboring windows in the dark. Khalid is rotund and deliberate. He wore a suit and tie, and was on his way to meet with another civic association to discuss expanding the surveillance range. “Yesterday at my own home, which is about half a mile from here, my garage was open, because somebody came to fix my computer printer,” he said. “He opened the garage and went down to the basement to get some cables. Five police guys came in and they grabbed him: ‘What are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I’m fixing the doctor’s computer.’ ” Khalid smiled. He believes the ninja’s days are numbered.

On Thursday, as Police Commissioner Ray Kelly prepared to address a gathering of concerned Staten Islanders on the East Shore, a group of ninjas in training at the Island Martial Arts Academy demonstrated considerably greater courtesy than their renegade cousin. Instead of breaking and entering, they bowed before a doorway and spoke Korean salutations. None of them appeared to have stab wounds, although many were quite proficient with nun-chucks, given their age (five to nine, which distinguishes them from the academy’s peewee ninjas, who are three to five). Some held pieces of plywood with their names written on them. It was board-breaking week.

The academy’s master, Pete Paramithis, was careful to point out that all his nun-chucks are made of foam, and he expressed concern that the ninja burglar was giving karate a bad name. Representatives of the N.Y.P.D. had already dropped by, looking for leads. Paramithis had a theory that the burglar, if he had any training at all, might be the product of an older, more punitive approach to martial-arts instruction, involving pushups, as opposed to the positive reinforcement that he favors. “Negative training creates little monsters,” Paramithis said. “It’s just like ‘The Karate Kid.’ You’ve got the good guy, and the guy who’s, like, ‘Kill, kill!’ ” Paramithis teaches concepts like “bully awareness” and “stranger danger.” He picked up a pen and wrote “Codes of Ninja” on a sheet of paper, above the words “concentration,” “courage,” “confidence,” “perseverance,” and “discipline.”

Meanwhile, at the Shaolin Kung Fu Temple, near the North Shore, Sifu Paula Wong, an instructor, seemed unaware of the burglar and his legend. “We’re not familiar with the ninja, since a ninja is an assassin,” she said. “Our training is more philosophy, with Buddhism and philosophies like Bruce Lee.” ♦