The man in the suit, after spending nearly 45 minutes inside the engineer’s cab of a morning-rush hour Long Island Rail Road train, emerged and said jokingly to a fellow rider, “How’d I do?” said the MTA Police’s key witness in the ongoing investigation of charges that a passenger operated the train.

The witness, who was on the rush-hour train Friday morning and spoke under the condition of anonymity, nervously recalled what he saw on July 2, which sparked him to call police shortly after stepping off the train at the Hunterspoint Avenue station in Long Island City.

“I thought about it . . . and I just said, ‘You know what? If something happened and there was some kind of accident and the railroad figured out that the engineer was away from the controls and I knew it . . . ‘ ” the man said, trailing off. “He was putting my life at risk and everyone else’s on this train.”

Daniel Brock, 19, of West Babylon, was driving a 2006 Cadillac CTS north on Fire Island Avenue at about 3:30 a.m. when he tried to pass a 2001 Infiniti in a no-passing zone, police said.

The cars, which were going above the 30-mph speed limit, touched near the Cedar Lane intersection and Brock lost control of the Cadillac, which skidded sideways into an unoccupied parked 1997 Ford pickup truck, police said.

The driver for a Farmingdale delivery company had just dropped off merchandise at a store and received a cash payment when he pulled his 20-foot box truck over on Deer Park Ave. shortly before 2 p.m., Suffolk police said.

The driver was in the back of the truck and preparing to drop the money in a rear safe when someone approached from behind, stuck a blunt object in his back, and demanded the cash, according to Det. Sgt. Robert Doyle of the Major Cases Unit.

The business isn’t identified in the story. Apparently the driver was robbed of the money and then locked in the back of the truck.

[Update: 10:33 PM]

More from Newsday

A delivery driver’s story of being robbed at gunpoint and locked in his truck Tuesday soon fell apart, Suffolk police said, after he admitted he stole the cash and shut himself in to help hide the crime

Cesar Ramirez, 35, was charged with grand larceny and making a false report late Tuesday after being interviewed at police headquarters in Yaphank.

The police were immediately suspicious of the driver’s story, seeing as how it happened in broad daylight on a busy street and there were no witnesses.

Every time I read something like this, it makes me think back to the time I spent on grand jury duty. Seeing the parade of doofuses and incompetents who were accused of various crimes made me realize that there just aren’t many criminal masterminds out there. Most people who break the law are complete idiots.

Still, there’s something else in this story that relates to the subject of this blog.

Ramirez told detectives he stole the money because he was three months behind on his mortgage payments,