When we first saw the Post cover story about three clever thieves who figured out how to get a MetroCard machine to give out free tickets, we thought it was a little hysterical. How much money could you possibly get from a machine that doesn't sell anything over $100? Well, it turns out you can get $800,000 from it. Which, admittedly, is a fair sum. The perpetrators would get free tickets by using a debit card with no funds on it to buy from a machine in Penn Station, and then sell the tickets at a discounted rate.

So what kind of criminal mastermind comes up with a nefarious plot like this? An innocent-seeming housewife named Lisa Foster Jordan, who stumbled across the machine's malfunction accidentally. She and her husband, Cary Grant, both from Roosevelt, Long Island, quietly took advantage of the scheme for three years. They also got their friend Christopher Clemente involved. The trouble was, Clemente had been busted for heroin and weapons possession in 1990 and spent years in prison. He's probably headed back to the slammer because of all this. When cops arrested him this time around, all they found in his possession were seven MetroCards. It's almost poetic, no?

THE MAGIC METROCARD MACHINE [NYP]