And NYPD CTU — Just So We’re Clear, This Totally Doesn’t Count As A “Foiled Terrorist Plot”

Time was, the crazy and insane could plot against public officials and few people — if anyone — would notice. Then you start throwing around terms like “beheading” and “blowing up” and all of the sudden you’re a teaser for the 11 o’clock news:

The undercover detective posing as a hired assassin sat across from his client in the Rikers Island visitation room last month and asked how he wanted the hit carried out.

In hushed tones, the inmate, David Brown Jr. — a 6-foot-3-inch, 375-pound man with a beard streaked with white — gave the order.

“I want his head chopped off,” he said.

The target: The police commissioner, Raymond Kelly.

. . .

On February 21, an undercover detective made a phone call to Brown in jail. Brown told the detective, whom he believed to be a professional hit man, that he was “fed up with the case where the guy got shot 50 times.”

Mr. Kelly didn’t have the “initiative to prosecute the officers,” he said, according to a transcript of the conversation. “That kind of got me frustrated to the point where I want him murdered.”

The two spoke three times, including once more on the phone on February 22, and then in person on February 23. Brown said he would pay $15,000 to have Mr. Kelly beheaded and another $50,000 for police headquarters to be blown up, police said. The detective advised him that blowing up a building could cost as much as $150,000. They agreed to talk again soon, police said.

“I want them to feel like I’m a . . . terrorist,” he said, according to the transcript of the third and final encounter.

Yup, that’ll get their attention.