NEW YORK (AP) – Three hijackers impersonating police tried to steal Christmas, but it looks like they wound up empty-handed instead.

The would-be Grinches commandeered a FedEx delivery truck filled with holiday shipments Thursday night on a Manhattan street and kidnapped the driver. They released him and abandoned the locked-up load hours later early Friday on the streets of Brooklyn, police said.

Police said nothing appeared to be missing from the 18-wheeler, and the driver was unharmed.

A FedEx spokesman said no packages were missing. No arrests were made, and no suspects have been identified.

The heist began at about 10:30 p.m. as the truck was headed down 11th Avenue en route to a company facility in Newark, N.J.

Police said after a maroon sport utility vehicle cut off the rig, the hijackers got out and flashed two guns and a silver badge.

The men forced the truck driver face-down into the back of the SUV, gave him handcuffs “and told to handcuff himself,” said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

The driver later told police that two men were in the car with him when he heard the truck pulling away, indicating that there was a third bandit behind the wheel.

While being driven around for the next three hours, the driver said one of the men taunted him by saying, “I paid a couple hundred dollars for that badge. Did you think I was police?”

At about 1:30 a.m., the driver was let go in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where he flagged down a police patrol car and reported the hijack. The truck, one of the biggest vehicles FedEx uses, was found abandoned at about 5:30 a.m. in nearby Greenpoint. When full, the vehicle can hold as much as 80,000 pounds.

Jim McCluskey, a spokesman for the Memphis, Tenn.-based FedEx, said the packages would soon be back on their way.

“We have accounted for all the freight; we have determined it has not been tampered with, and we are currently processing it for delivery,” he said.

Earlier, police had said all the packages were secured in six metal air freight containers. All six were locked and accounted for, they said.

AP-ES-12-21-07 1839EST