Taxman, Mr. Thief

The City Finance Department is tracking down people who bought cigarettes online and is making them repay back taxes:

The city has come up with a new 10 Most Wanted list — serial cigarette scofflaws who will have to cough up upwards of $40,000 for buying bushels of butts online.

The smokers likely thought they were being savvy by ordering hundreds of cartons of smokes from Web sites and not paying tax on the orders, the city said.

But the end result is they’ve puffed the most expensive cigarettes on earth, with the city billing them $1.50 per pack for unpaid taxes, with an added penalty of $100 per carton.

The city Finance Department is hunting down 194 Most Wanted Smokers who, the agency said, failed to respond to two written requests over the past year to settle up. The Post exclusively obtained the top 10 list. Eight of the worst offenders owe heart attack-inducing penalties of more than $20,000.

. . .

The Post successfully tracked down one of the alleged Top-10 scofflaws in Florida. The former New Yorker, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he was not happy about the city’s crackdown. “It’s ridiculous. They’re such a–holes. I haven’t got anything in the mail here,” he said. “The bastards. I got those cigarettes legally from an Indian reservation over a period of years; this is just revenue-raising.”

How did the city get the records in the first place?