Beware! Battery Park Tourist Scammers Persist Despite Years of Complaints & Warnings

Let’s call it Anarchy in Battery Park.

That’s the impression a visitor gets as they traverse this historic jewel of lower Manhattan while being accosted, cajoled, hustled, and sometimes intimidated by a ragtag army of touts, frauds, scammers, con men clad in vests and jackets or ersatz “authority” costumes.

Their goal is to extract money from innocent and confused tourists wanting to visit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, those twin symbols of American opportunity and idealism, both of which are administered by the National Park Service (NPS).

From Battery Park there is only one way to get to Liberty and Ellis islands and that’s a ferry operated by Statue City Cruises (SCC), which since 2008 has had the exclusive contract with the NPS to run ferries that land on the islands.

Seasonal crowds aside, getting ferry tickets is no problem. Or at least it shouldn’t be.

The prices are reasonable: $25.50 for adults; $22.50 for seniors 62+; $16.50 for children 4-12; and free for kids under 4. There are also some optional add-ons (30 cents extra for pedestal or crown access at Liberty Island; $50 for a hard-hat tour of the old Ellis Island Hospitals) but those dollars are well spent: They cover the costs of that day’s trip and, via SCC’s licensing deal, earn the city money also.

SCC estimates that ticket scams cost the city $2 million to $3 million a year in revenue.

Online, the ducats are officially available only at the Statue City Cruises.com website. Anyone else is a reseller.

In person, one walks to the ticket office at Castle Clinton, waits in line and pays their money.

Getting to Castle Clinton through the gantlet of tour marauders is another story

Literally every approach is covered by “ticket agents,” whether one approaches Battery Park by car, bicycle, foot, or subway.

From Little West Street to South Street and all along Battery Place and State Street, they are there. Outside the Whitehall Street, South Ferry and Bowling Green subway stations, they are there.

This last station is an especially ripe target, as construction from the Battery Park Resiliency Project has created a choke point where ticket scammers can impede people on their way to Castle Clinton.

The ”ticket agents” are mostly black males, most appear to be native-born New Yorkers, mixed with others, migrants from various locales including West Africa, with a few women and other ethnicities mixed in. Some “ticket agents” are jovial and some are aggressive. Many “ticket agents” are wary of pointed questions. Some smoke cigarettes or marijuana, both prohibited within Battery Park though allowed on adjacent sidewalks.

Nobody gives up a job on nearby Wall Street or a civil-service position to become a ticket agent. To be fair, it’s plain these people need money, and, for myriad reasons, this is the low-skill, low-supervision job they can get.

Their goal, both collectively and individually, is to get people to purchase tickets to this or that means of conveyance: ferry, bus, helicopter, even if none of these alternative modes of transport will actually reach Liberty or Ellis islands.

This itself isn’t illegal, and anyone who has worked as a sandwich-board man or woman can respect the act of being out there, part of the great street-theater flow.

Where things get trickier—literally and figuratively—are the modes of deception, and intimidation, involved in keeping people from buying the legitimate tickets they seek, which are for ferries that actually go to Liberty and Ellis islands.

According to sources, the scam dates to early 2013, after Hurricane Sandy late the previous October. Initially, it sometimes involved the free Staten Island Ferry. One New York Post story told the tale of “career con” Gregory Reddick in a bogus “Authorized Ticket Agent” jacket charging a tourist couple $400 for a round-trip “ticket” to the Forgotten Borough of Staten Island in May 2015.

While Reddick, who claimed to work for an unlicensed company named SJQ Tours, was arrested for unlawful vending and other charges, he was quickly released—and subsequently sued the city in turn. Interestingly, when the Post returned to Battery Park, Reddick was again there, hawking ferry tours for “a sightseeing outfit called Hornblower.”

Two years later, Hornblower Corp. became the official operator of NYC Ferry, which it remains today.

Let’s call this a “coincidence,” and also a moment of recognition: that many “ticket agents” trying to steer people away from Castle Clinton, work on behalf of competing tour operators, while others scalp them tickets with fraudulent claims and come-ons.

It’s not just rubes who get caught. In October 2019, actor Alec Baldwin and his family were swindled into buying tickets to a “’boat tour” of the Statue of Liberty, after which they were directed to a bus on West Street, which took them to New Jersey, where they could board a boat that doesn’t even stop at Liberty Island but only chugs past it.

Other operators today take duped tourists to Pier 16 near South Street Seaport or to Pier 83 on the West Side.

Understandably, Baldwin—who himself played a con man in the excellent 1990 film version of Charles Willeford’s novel Miami Blues—was furious, and Mayor De Blasio vowed a crackdown.

Whatever efforts were made to suppress the deceptive trade, however, the problem remains, no matter how many NYPD, NYC Parks Enforcement Patrol, or US Park Police vehicles are around.

Similarly, Battery Park today is besieged by illegal vendors. Wanna buy counterfeit Louis Vuitton purses or AirPods Max?

Wanna buy a bootleg Yankees hat or mango slices in the middle of the eight massive granite walls of the Maritime Memorial, honoring the 4,601 missing American servicemen who lost their lives in combat in the Atlantic Ocean during World War II?

To see such a solemn monument turned into the backdrop for a cheap—and wholly illegal—bazaar is both a travesty and a sad testament to the state of law enforcement in the Battery.

While both SCC and the NPS warn against the scammers online, in lieu of robust enforcement in Battery Park, large signs have been erected with bright red and white stamp-like logo reading WARNING SCAM ALERT. Illegal Ticket Vendors are selling deceptive tickets that cannot access the Statue of Liberty OR Ellis Island. Illegal Ticket Vendors cannot “upgrade” Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island tickets!”

Warning labels, boldface, ironic quotes and an exclamation point!

The problem is growing on the New York side of the ferry, and the bogus businesses appear to be hurting business on the Manhattan side even as the New Jersey business is growing. Asked if SCC has this problem on the New Jersey side, where they also operate ships from Liberty State Park, a company spokesperson said, “Not at all, and in fact, Jersey visitation is up over 9 percent year over year, while NYC traffic is down 4 percent. What used to be a modest seasonal nuisance of vending during peak tourism time is now year-round in Battery Park.”