A former pizza-slinger accused of posing as an FBI agent to try to spring Luigi Mangione was hauled back to the same Brooklyn jail as the accused killer Tuesday after pleading not guilty to his half-baked plot.
Mark Anderson, 36, was swiftly returned to the Metropolitan Detention Center, the same lockup where Mangione awaits trial for allegedly executing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, after the feds cited his long rap sheet and argued other reasons at a hearing in Brooklyn federal court.
Prosecutor Brandon Davis noted for example that Anderson also “had weapons on him” — a pizza cutter and BBQ fork — when he approached the facility’s intake area and claimed to have a judge’s “order” to spring the accused killer.
Magistrate Judge Seth Eichenholtz ruled to keep Anderson locked up after his public defender, Michael Weil, declined for now to apply to the court for a bail package.
Anderson was brought into the court room by US marshals for the brief hearing wearing a tan jail outfit. He slipped on a pair of thin black glasses just as the proceeding began.
Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York have said his lengthy criminal record includes past convictions on robbery, burglary and narcotics charges. He also has been arrested several times on weapons raps in The Bronx in recent months, authorities say.
In December, Anderson bizarrely pretended to shoot a BB gun outside Louie and Ernie’s Pizza in Throgs Neck, where he’d worked in the kitchen until being canned that April, the pizzeria’s owner told The Post.
Anderson has also filed handwritten lawsuits in Manhattan inexplicably suing the Pentagon and the ambassadors to China and Russia, court records show. All of those lawsuits have been tossed.
Anderson’s lawyer has called him mentally ill. The public defender noted at a previous court hearing that the Minnesota native did not make “a serious attempt to spring a federal inmate,” as he did not forge a FBI badge or claim that he’d been issued a weapon by law enforcement.
The suspect is due back in court Friday and faces up to three years in prison if convicted.
Mangione has meanwhile pleaded not guilty in his case as well, and trial dates in his headline-grabbing state and federal cases have been set for June and October, respectively.
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