Hipsters Are Part Of A Cult

The Post adds some details to the “hipster bank robbers” from yesterday:

Joe Kirby, 23, and his sister, Shemini, 20, told friends that they spent their formative years being psychologically abused in a “cult” in the Catskills community of Monticello, where their mother and another brother live.

“I don’t know him to be a bad person. I don’t know him to be a thief or anything like that. I just know he has a serious drug problem,” said a pal.

The friend of Joe Kirby said the alleged bank robber referred to the strange “hyper-religious” group he grew up in only as “the community” — and said it kept him in line by doling out punishments like being locked in a closet or forced to stand naked in front of a group of adults.

“It was a very Jim Jones, hyper-religious kind of thing,” the friend said. “Joey used to call it a cult. He was raised in it; he was abused in it. Just extreme situations . . . nothing sexual, just humiliation.”

Joe and Shemini Kirby escaped when they were adolescents and were put into foster care, the pal said.

He said when they were teenagers, Joe started coming to New York City to go clubbing and got involved in the underground drug scene.

Then, when he had to pay for his expensive habit, Kirby hit rock bottom.

“For the last 18 months to two years, he has been working as a male prostitute, selling himself, sometimes for a very low amount of cash, to support his drug addiction,” the friend lamented.

. . .

Prosecutors said the sister served as a lookout during one of the heists and pretended she had a gun in another.

She also “had knowledge of her brother’s [computer] research to rob the bank,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Jordan Arnold said in court last night.

“She Googled bank robbery.”