Off-the-wall art thief guilty

A compulsive fine-art fan is going to prison for at least a year after getting caught lifting hundreds of thousands of dollars in paintings from the lobby walls of the Carlyle and Chambers hotels in Manhattan.

Mark Lugo, 31, was a restaurant waiter with caviar tastes — as much as $700,000 in stolen art and fine wine was recovered from his Hoboken, NJ, apartment when cops busted him last summer.

Lugo pleaded guilty in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday to one count of second-degree grand larceny, and faces as little as one year and as much as three years in prison when he is sentenced Feb. 28.

Lugo pulled off the thefts by simply yanking art from the walls and putting it into a shopping bag. He had just been sprung from a California jail for lifting a $275,000 Picasso pencil sketch off the wall of a San Francisco gallery.