The Old Brookville police recently closed the books on the activities of a burglar who picked the affluent area of Mill Neck as his bailiwick. James Casey, 64, used the Long Island Rail Road to commute from Manhattan to commit burglary. Old Brookville spokesperson Police Officer James McCarty, explained the difficulties of finding burglars.

"Nationally, the solvability of burglaries is generally under 10 percent. Burglary is a crime against property, but an intrusive crime that upsets people.

"What makes it difficult to solve is that there are usually no witnesses. In crimes against people, we are more likely to solve them because the victim is the witness. The real professional burglar tries to deal with a house that is empty. They don't want to see you, or talk to you or worry you, if they can avoid it," he said.

Mr. Casey was arrested on Sept. 22 at 10:34 p.m. in Mill Neck. He took the train to the village of Oyster Bay, and he walked the tracks back from there, to Mill Neck. He had been doing it for 15 to 20 years. "The Old Brookville Police will probably close 30 cases we know of. There may be more that have gone unreported.

"Why? Because he was careful about what he took. In affluent homes, people are not always in residence and he took what he knew he could fence, such as porcelain pieces and sterling pieces with substantial craftsman work. He sold the merchandise at the flea markets along Sixth Avenue in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, to survive," said Officer McCarty. "He sometimes walked past more expensive items, leaving them, because he was looking for familiar things that he knew he could sell."

Mr. Casey, an Irish immigrant, who has lived here for 30 years, was basically a street person. He was sometimes homeless. He often slept on trains and at Penn Station. "We surmise that he ended up here and started walking around to find places to rob. He sometimes paid for his train ticket, wearing business clothes. He always had a change of clothes with him to work in."

The Old Brookville Police took over the Mill Neck area in 1991. Mr. Casey would wait until the dark of night and sneak around. He would get into the houses one way or another, sometimes breaking a window to get inside. Sometimes he set off alarms, but "He was pretty good at what he did. He was very patient. He picked a mode of operating and stuck to it," said the policeman.

Officer McCarty said sometimes he stayed in the woods and didn't act - if it wasn't safe. "In the last couple of years there was an increase in the frequency of his crimes. That led to finding and apprehending him."

They set up a joint task force between the Nassau County Police 2nd Precinct and the Old Brookville Police Department.

The final arrest came when Old Brookville detectives Glen Bartlett and Shaun McKee observed a suspicious man in the vicinity of a Horseshoe Road home and apprehended Mr. Casey during the commission of an attempted burglary which resulted in his arrest and charged with one count of attempted burglary and three counts of burglary. He appeared in First District Court in Hempstead on Sept. 23.