TIMES SQUARE — He’s not the hero Gotham needs right now.
A man dressed as Batman was arrested for snatching $50 from a tourist who’d taken a photo with him in Times Square, police said.
Jose Escalona-Martinez, 42, had just snapped a picture with a 23-year-old Irish tourist at West 45th Street and Broadway around 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday when he started asking her for money, police said.
As the woman opened her wallet to give him a tip, the Dark Knight look-alike grabbed a $50 bill from the wallet and fled, according to police.
He was arrested soon after and charged with grand larceny and criminal possession of stolen property, police said.
He had not been arraigned as of Thursday afternoon, court records showed.
It was not Escalona-Martinez’s first run-in with the law.
Police said he was arrested in March 2014 for urinating on a subway platform.
In August 2013, he was charged with attempted assault after threatening to hit a woman with a wooden stick outside 200 W. 44th St., the NYPD said. Police did not say whether he was working as a costumed character at the time of his arrest.
The Daily News reported that Escalona-Martinez was put in handcuffs for 30 minutes earlier this month for walking toward an area that is off-limits to costumed characters.
“I was walking like a tourist… I know the rules,” he told the paper, which reported that Escalona-Martinez has sued the NYPD over false arrests several times.
“This is big discrimination,” he told the News. “The cops just wanted to be a------s, and they were.”
On Wednesday evening, a Twitter account run by the Times Square Alliance posted a photo of a police officer leading Escalona-Martinez to an NYPD vehicle in handcuffs.
A dark night for Gotham when fake batman is led away in cuffs. Time to enact Mayor @billdeblasio reforms ASAP! pic.twitter.com/6YhXfEBYXw
— ABetterTimesSquare (@abettertsq) February 25, 2016
After city officials and the Times Square Alliance announced legislation that would require Times Square's costumed characters to wear ID cards in 2014, Escalona-Martinez told DNAinfo that wearing an ID wouldn't bother him.
"I think everybody needs identification to do the job. I don’t need to be hiding. I think it’s a great idea," he said.
An attorney who represented Escalona-Martinez at the time of the Feb. 9 incident did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
