A Manhattan Bar Crawl of Sorts, With Thefts on Tap and on Tape It was a busy Friday night in March at Petite Abeille, a Belgian cafe on East 20th Street near Stuyvesant Town. Regulars lined the bar. Everybody knew one another, which made it all the more shocking when one of the women shouted, "My wallet! Someone stole my wallet! A manager, Patrick van Rosendaal, hurried over. The woman's purse had been resting on a bar stool when she had stepped away - a rookie mistake, sure, but the men on either side were friends of the bar, above suspicion. Mr. van Rosendaal rolled back footage from a video camera. And back, and back. So smooth was the thief, a phantom who blended into the crowd, that it took the manager hours just to figure out who he was. He wore a nice coat and a Kangol-style cap above a trim goatee. A woman entered behind him, also in a coat and warm hat. The man stepped up to the bar and, on the video, could be seen saying something to a bartender, who handed him a menu. The man lowered the menu, holding it in his right hand, reading. Under the menu was the woman's purse, and it was there that the man's sure and unhurried left hand dipped. "It all went so fast," Mr. van Rosendaal said. The thief, and his hat, reappeared on videos all over Manhattan in the weeks to come. His trail was like a walking tour of the city's popular bars and bistros. From the Upper East Side, where he visited the Parlor Steakhouse on Dec. 21, to the Bua Bar in the East Village months earlier, the same suspect struck at least 14 times from 2012 to, most recently, May 3, the police said, when he stole from patrons at Peter Dillon's Pub and, a few hours later, Butterfield 8, both in Midtown. "He's what we call a bar creeper," said Detective Antonio Esposito, who investigated the thefts. He was also, it would turn out, more than just a simple purse thief. Detectives watched the videos. At Bua Bar and the Chelsea restaurant Cafeteria, he stole a purse on the floor with his foot. "He was able to get his foot around it and push it over to him," Detective Esposito said. A woman returned from the restroom at Ammos Estiatorio near Grand Central Terminal one January evening to find her wallet missing from the purse on her seat. Her friend had been at the table the whole time, and saw nothing. She canceled her credit cards right away, she said this week in an interview, but the thief had already racked up hundreds of dollars in charges at nearby pharmacies. "I assume for gift cards or something," she said. I don't know what else he could have gotten that quickly. Eventually, a sergeant recognized the suspect from a past arrest: Cory Christopher, 39 and homeless, who had been imprisoned several times for thefts dating to his 20s. "Associating with the wrong crowd," he told a parole board two years ago. He was most recently released from prison on Nov. 13, and he stole from Madison and Vine in Midtown on Dec. 5, the first of a string of thefts that included 13 more, the police said. Officers arrested him May 20. Detective Esposito showed him pictures from the Bua Bar theft and told him: "Now's your time. You have an opportunity to come clean. He did, and then some, spending two days pointing himself out in videos for different detectives. "His memory was pretty good," Detective Esposito said. He could sit at a computer and look at a storefront on Google Earth and remember what he had stolen there. It became clear that Mr. Christopher was the tip of a much bigger operation. After buying gift cards, he sold or gave away the stolen wallets to a woman he worked with. "This woman had a son," he told Detective Esposito. The son had equipment to make fake IDs. When the victim from Ammos Estiatorio checked her Chase bank account a week or two after the theft, she saw she was out $4,800. She closed the account and opened another. It happened again, this time with a fake check made out to her that had been cashed. Prosecutors told her the ring uses a "stable" of women to pose as the victims to make bank withdrawals. Mr. Christopher, who remains in jail, told the police he knew nothing of those crimes, which are under investigation. He only knew how to steal wallets. "How he put it: "going to work," " the detective said.