Cops: Man charged in NCC meal card theft

A Levittown man was charged with bouncing $2,100 worth of checks at an on-campus restaurant at Nassau Community College in East Garden City, police said Tuesday.

Michael Johnson, 23, of Long Lane, wrote four bad checks in the past month, and the restaurant applied the amounts to a meal card, according to Det. Lt. Raymond Cote of the Third Squad of the Nassau County Police Department.

Johnson, formerly a resident of Garden City but not a student at the college, would then give the card to students he knew and they would give him the cash, Cote said.

Apparently, Johnson thought he would not be caught because he had opened a checking account with a few dollars using his old address in Garden City and gotten a handful of "starter checks," Cote said.

"They didn't have a very good monitoring system," Cote said in explaining why it took several bounced checks before the restaurant spotted the problem and notified police.

The restaurant is owned by J & B Restaurant Partners, and the college has no role in its operations, college spokesman Reginald Tuggle said. Calls to the company Tuesday were not returned.

Johnson was arrested Monday afternoon on the campus. He faces a fourth-degree larceny charge and was scheduled to appear Thursday in First District Court in Hempstead.