MANHATTAN SEWER CRAWLERS STRIKE AGAIN

Three men were seen climbing into a manhole on West 141st Street in Hamilton Heights at 12:52 a.m. Sunday. Officers showed up. The men were gone. FDNY and NYPD investigators worked the scene overnight looking for anything that would point them toward the crew, and came back up with nothing. Police say it's the first time this has happened in that neighborhood, which is the only confident sentence anyone has produced about this story. It came two days after the Upper East Side, where four men and a woman popped out of a manhole on East 82nd Street near East End Avenue just after 2 a.m. and drove off in a black SUV. They left behind two shovels and two other tools. The Emergency Service Unit fished the shovels out with a magnet. The working theory from the NYPD and the Department of Environmental Protection is treasure hunting. Storms wash valuables and scrap metal into the storm drains, and people go down after them. That's exactly what two Queens men told detectives in September after they surfaced on Park Avenue near East 61st Street during the UN General Assembly, across from the hotel Netanyahu usually uses. Cops say it wasn't political, it was scrap. Both were charged with trespassing. DEP keeps pointing out that the sewers are illegal to enter and stocked with noxious gas, flooding and confined spaces. Sightings have piled up across the boroughs and out on Long Island since at least May. Nobody has stopped going down.

Why you should give a shit: Grown adults are crawling into a gas-filled sewer at 1 a.m. for other people's lost jewelry, and five months in, the city's sharpest tool against them is a magnet on a rope.