Apparently, they really want to shoot him.
Boy George began serving his five days of community service by sweeping trash off the streets of Manhattan Monday, a task made nearly impossible due to the army of paparazzi, reporters and looky-loos trailing him.
Eschewing his trademark makeup for dark sunglasses, plastic gloves and an orange safety vest, the "Karma Chameleon" purveyor commenced rubbish removal at 7 a.m., scouring the Lower East Side and Chinatown with a crew from New York's Sanitation Department. But a half-hour later, city officials were forced to move him to a fenced-off area inside a parking garage when the shutterbugs swarmed in.
"Because of the crush of the press, he had to be taken off for public safety and his own safety," department spokeswoman Cathy Dawkins told E! Online, adding that George was transferred back to Manhattan Garage No. 3, which is where he initially reported this morning, to continue his chores.
Before his retreat, however, the 45-year-old singer, whose real name is George O'Dowd, didn't mince words with the photographers recording his trash-collecting moves for posterity.
"You think you're better than me? Go home. Let me do my community service," he shouted. "It's supposed to be making me humble. Why don't you just let me do it?"
Armed with a shovel and broom, the flamboyant popster made quick work of filling his blue plastic trash bags. He said he came by the work honestly, joking that he was always a "scrubber."
"My mum was a cleaner, my dad was a builder, you know what I mean," he quipped.
His manager, Jeremy Pearce, told reporters on the scene that George was doing his best not to "show any kind of emotion about these things."
"He takes it in his stride," Pearce said. "He doesn't need to be humiliated. He's a humble person."
The former Culture Club crooner got into this mess last October, when police responded to a report of a burglary at his Big Apple apartment, and in lieu of an actual break-in, found 13 baggies of cocaine. He was charged with one felony count of criminal possession of a controlled substance, a charge that could have landed up to 15 years in the slammer.
George maintained he innocence and argued that one of his frequent visitors must have stashed the drugs at his place without his consent or knowledge.
By March, however, he copped to a lesser charge of third-degree false reporting of an incident in exchange for prosecutors dropping the more serious drug charge.
Judge Anthony Ferrara sentenced George to five days of community service, slapped him with a $1,000 penalty and ordered him to enter a drug rehab clinic in his native England.
George's attorney, Louis Freeman, argued that the entertainer should fulfill his community service deejaying an HIV/AIDS benefit instead of serving his time picking up litter because of the "humiliation" it would bring his client and the media circus it would create.
But Ferrara wasn't buying and, in a sharp rebuke, gave George until Aug. 28 to complete his street-sweeping chores, otherwise face jail time.
George's daily trash gig runs from 7 a.m. until 3 p.m. and wraps up on Friday.