“If you have been stopped and were not involved in any criminal activity the NYPD regrets any inconvenience”:

The NYPD has begun handing out informational cards to pedestrians they stop, question and frisk, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Thursday.

Cops in sections of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx have given those people 4 X 2 1/2-inch white cards that explain a so-called stop, question and frisk encounter.

“We know that the whole stopping and question procedure is a difficult one for us,” Kelly told reporters at Police Headquarters.

“People are, at the very least, losing time, and we’re taking time away from them. We’re hoping to . . . give people a little more information about what the procedure is and why it’s being done.”

. . .

The two-sided card cites common reasons for stops, such as carrying what appears to be a weapon, sights or sounds that suggest criminal activities, or reports of suspicious behavior.

For a while there at least we became inured to high prices and conspicuous consumption. $150 million apartment, six-figure parking spaces, $1600 helicopter rides to the Hamptons, gigantic bags of bonus money and dopey gimmicks like “Martini on the Rock” — yawn. And then there was the $2600 seat for a baseball game. Most probably thought, “Wow, that’s expensive” or “I wonder who would pay that” but until the season started and seats started showing up empty on television I’m guessing most also thought that there was probably someone who would pay $2600 to watch the Royals on a Tuesday evening.

But now that the Yankees are forced to lower ticket prices in half (“That new lower amount is in line with prices for the same tickets being sold on StubHub for next week’s home stand against the arch rival Boston Red Sox, but twice as much as they’re going for against most opponents at the new Stadium”) you start wondering whether Yankees tickets are the most expensive tickets ever.

A recent piece in the Times hinted at this but skirted the issue — yes, I understand I could nearly get a degree at LaGuardia Community College for the cost of taking my family of four to the park. But what hasn’t been reported — at least not that I know of — is just how out of line $2600 is compared to other sporting events. It seems that 2009 Centre Court tickets for the last day of Wimbeldon are 100 pounds. Face value tickets for the 2008 Super Bowl — thought to be one of the most expensive so far — were only $700-$900, and scalped tickets on the low end were still only around $2,500 — less than the cost of watching that 22-4 drubbing at the hands of the Indians, the one in which Chien Ming-Wang only lasted an inning and a third.

But since Yankees management has turned a ballgame into a “Dance, Monkey, Dance” sort of performance it also seems useful to compare Yankees ticket prices to performances in general. Like any performance. Led Zeppelin reunion (some auction prices were actually lower than Yankees tickets)! Celine Dion (in general the Las Vegas Shows don’t even come close — even the VIPest seats at Hard Rock are $1000 max)! Barbra Streisand (VIP packages for her 2006 concerts were $1800)! And keep in mind that at least with Streisand you have some reasonable expectation that she will kick ass.

You can go down the road of non-spectator events and tickets are similarly out of wack: Skiing ($600 seems to the the max), a hot air balloon ride (doesn’t even come close) or sky diving (ditto) — all significantly cheaper.

In short, how expensive are tickets for this (to use a cliche) Taj Mahal of baseball stadia? Consider this: Go to Expedia and book a short trip to Agra, where you can see the actual Taj Mahal. It’s basically around $1000 . . .

Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium.

Or perhaps it’s just 50 percent less greatness:

Twelve days after opening their new stadium, the Yankees on Tuesday bowed to the sour economy and the specter of empty seats by slashing in half some of their top-end, $2,500-a-game prices.

. . .

Over all, the new policy represents a dramatic retreat from the team’s initial luxury-sales strategy for the new stadium, which was underlined in advertisements that crowed “Own the Greatness” and “Select the Greatest Seats in the World.”

Last week, team officials said they would no longer discuss ticket prices or the many empty seats behind home plate and the two dugouts that were painfully visible at Yankee Stadium and on television during the team’s first homestand from April 16-22.

Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium.

It’s tough these days to be a pig in this town:

There they stood, Tabitha and Sabrina, the loneliest animals at the Queens Zoo in Flushing.

Despite the name “swine flu,” it’s extremely rare for humans to be infected by being near a pig.

But most people don’t know that, so Tabitha and Sabrina, two female hogs, were left all but ostracized yesterday, along with their Vietnamese pot-bellied pal, Barbie.

To be fair he was probably thinking, “It can’t possibly be that important if they’re contacting me . . .”:

On Monday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was fuming. On Tuesday, he was forgiving, characterizing the actions of a low-level manager who failed to notify him or his superiors of a planned flyover exercise in Lower Manhattan as merely a mistake.

Perhaps it was because the mayor had already punished the manager, Marc Mugnos, with a letter of reprimand (and, presumably, a tongue-lashing). Perhaps it was because of all the apologies the city had received — from Mr. Mugnos, most likely, and also from the White House. (President Obama has ordered a review of the matter.)

“The guy just didn’t do it. He read the thing and just didn’t do it,” Mayor Bloomberg told reporters during a news conference at City Hall, referring to Mr. Mugnos’ inaction after receiving an e-mail last Thursday from the Federal Aviation Administration, notifying him of the plans for a flyover by F-16s and a backup to Air Force One. (The New York Police Department also received the same e-mail.)

That might be all in the past for Mr. Bloomberg, but a lot of people out there are wondering who Mr. Mugnos is and why the F.A.A. would pick him to share information about what turned out to be a nerve-rattling event for those who live and work in Lower Manhattan, particularly those who were there on Sept. 11, 2001.

Additional point: There’s a big difference between a “flyover” and a 747 looping around New York Harbor trailed by F-16s.

Earlier: What Kind Of “Photo Shoot” Involves Air Force One Flying At A Low Altitude Over New York Harbor? Publicity For A Harrison Ford Sequel?

. . . is Friday.

The mayor’s aggressive approach to gun control reaps results:

In 2008, even as gun killings fell, the number of killings committed with knives or other “cutting instruments” rose 50 percent in New York City, the Police Department said: to 125 from 83. Some other large cities saw no such increase last year, and police officials and experts are at a loss to explain what is either a new trend or a spike.

“It is hard to say with certainty what accounts for the increase,” said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York Police Department.

It was possible, but hard to document, Mr. Browne said, that measures like undercover gun-trafficking investigations and interrogations, in which people arrested for lower level crimes are asked to provide information on gun cases, had led to the rise in knife killings and the drop in gun slayings.

In 2008, 292 people were shot to death in New York, down from 347 the year before, continuing a longtime slide in deaths by firearms.

Over all, homicides of all kinds rose slightly last year, to 523 from 496 in 2007, which was a 45-year low. So far in 2009, about a quarter of killings in the city have been committed with knives or other cutting instruments, about the same percentage as in 2008. But the overall homicide rate is down: 97 through April 16, the Police Department said, compared with 135 in the same period in 2008.

“We may have made it harder for killers to get their hands on guns,” said Mr. Browne. “Knives are still easily and legally acquired.”

Is that really the coordinated message?

It’s changing how we see the world:

Erick Pulido, 29, who lives in a condominium three buildings down, said he measured his shock over the killing with the realities of city life. “Things happen all the time, it’s a big city,” Mr. Pulido said.

Mr. Pulido said that while on his way to work on Monday morning he noticed the police swarming around Ms. Lee’s building.

“I thought they might have been filming a movie so I just left,” he said.

Maybe you wondered why Bloomberg started a huge television campaign eight months before the election, a campaign featuring the mayor, “his trademark jacket and tie swapped for a casual button-down shirt, talking to ordinary New Yorkers about their financial woes.” Ads that focus on the mayor’s “plan to create or save 400,000 jobs, provide loans to small business and invest in infrastructure. ‘We do have a plan to get through this,’ Mr. Bloomberg says. ‘The city can’t do everything, but we can do a lot to make it easier for the people that live in this city.” Maybe you thought, wow, that’s early to be advertising, especially when likely opponents are basically silent. Hmm. Hmm:

Based on the amount of television time the mayor has purchased, the average New Yorker is likely to see the ads about 12 times.

Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for the campaign, said that New Yorkers “will certainly see the ad.” But, he added, “It will not saturate the airwaves.”

Asked about the timing, Mr. Wolfson said: “If it were up to me, we would have run ads a month earlier than today. This issue of jobs and the economy is one that we want to engage the public with in a conversation.”

So why burnish your middle class cred back in April? Is it because the Executive Budget is due in less than a week or so? Remember Chekhov’s Gun . . .

Which is to say, I don’t get it:

A low-flying commercial jetliner, followed by a pair of military planes, flew low over the lower New York Harbor on Monday morning, skirting close to the Jersey City coastline and prompting evacuations of office buildings in Lower Manhattan and Jersey City, N.J.

Perplexed officials at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey were inundated with calls from ferry passengers and residents in the area, but in fact there was nothing to be alarmed about. The large plane was a backup for Air Force One — a military version of a 747 commercial jetliner — and it was accompanied by two fighter jets, as part of a photo shoot, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

I was going to say, gosh, the city budget process seems quiet. But now it begins — with advocates fearing cuts and the mayor fearing a non-attriting workforce:

Mayor Bloomberg’s hopes of avoiding city-worker layoffs are being jeopardized by the record-low number of employees quitting or retiring, The Post has learned.

Because of the difficult economy, fewer employees are leaving the city’s workforce than in previous years, making it harder for Bloomberg to cut the budget by simply not replacing retired workers.

The city’s uniformed workers are on pace for a record-low attrition rate this year — 4.2 percent, according to the city’s Office of Management and Budget.

The typical attrition rate is between 7 percent and 8 percent.

The civilian workforce in the city had a steady 7.2 percent attrition rate in fiscal years 2007 and 2008, but is down to 5.7 percent for the present year, which ends June 30.

But then again, there may be a corkage charge for that, too:

Recession-hit restaurants are helping themselves to your wallet by serving you an extra side of super sneaky charges.

The Post last week found city eateries subtly billing customers for things usually free — including bread and butter.

. . .

Unexpected costs found by The Post include . . . $3 for bread and another $2 for butter at Company, in Chelsea.

No cost was mentioned when bread was requested and delivered to a Post reporter last week — and a waiter refused to give a refund.

“It’s clearly on the menu, and we do have a famous baker,” restaurant spokeswoman Danielle Pagano said, referring to owner Jim Lahey.

The menu listing is in Italian.

Update, 4/28/09: This correction doesn’t change the fact that Company charges $2 for butter:

Due to an editing error, a story in yesterday’s Post misattributed a quote explaining the cost of bread and butter at Company, in Chelsea, to restaurant spokeswoman Danielle Pagano instead of to a waiter. Also, the menu listing is not in Italian.

You would think that two adults could stop or at least disrupt a sexual assault. And you have to assume that those odds get even better if you have three adults at the scene:

A third MTA employee failed to come to the side of a woman being raped on a Queens subway platform, an internal memo revealed.

Location Scout: 21st Street/Van Alst Station.

Now that’s embarrassing:

Despite Mayor Bloomberg’s crusade against cigarettes, city pension funds remain heavily invested in Big Tobacco — with more than 6 million shares, worth $103 million.

The $82.5 billion pension system owns 6,024,823 shares of Altria, formerly known as Philip Morris, according to an agenda for the company’s stockholders meeting next month.

If you A) encourage it with park conservancies like the kind you see at Central, Bryant, Madison and Prospect Parks and then B) cut funding and cram more kids into classrooms then you may find that your local school looks more like a public-private partnership than an example of equality of opportunity:

Nearly 200 teaching assistants and other school staffers get their paychecks from the city’s wealthiest PTAs in violation of Department of Education rules.

The PTAs that do the most rogue hiring are on the Upper East and Upper West sides of Manhattan.

Parents at Lower Lab School on Third Avenue pay for 43 extra staff members, the DOE revealed.

The parent groups contend their schools need the extra hands, and some principals encourage staff padding.

No, it’s not just a coincidence, it’s probably actually swine flu:

A group of Queens high school students likely brought Mexico’s deadly swine flu epidemic to the city after they went on a wild spring-break party to Cancun earlier this month.

Some seniors from St. Francis Prep in Fresh Meadows took the trip over Easter hiatus two weeks ago. Days later, an outbreak of flu-like symptoms erupted at the school, leaving about 200 kids complaining of being ill.

Yesterday, city health officials confirmed that eight students “have probable human swine influenza” after testing positive for Influenza A, which officials say causes the swine strain of disease.

CBS2 is wondering whether a big flu outbreak at a school in Queens is swine-like:

As many as 75 students at St. Francis Preparatory School in Queens got sick on Thursday. More got sick on Friday. What health officials want to know is was it swine flu or something more benign.

There are mounting fears about a deadly swine flu virus that is reported to have killed as many as 60 people in Mexico, one that health officials fear has already seeped into the United States.

St. Francis Prep was ordered to cancel an evening program Friday night because the New York City Department of Health isn’t sure what made students sick Thursday and Friday with flu-like symptoms.

“I just saw lot a lot of kids lined up along the wall near the nurse’s office,” sophomore Kelsey Dittmeir said.

If it’s the flu, the question is what kind of flu? And could it be the unique strain suspected in 20 recent deaths?

Tests are underway.

Apparently it’s just that easy:

A stack of blank birth certificates has been stolen from the city Health Department’s offices, leading investigators to worry that they may have fallen into the hands of terrorists, The Post has learned.

On March 12, an employee discovered that 104 certificates with the agency’s stamp on them were missing from the department’s offices at 125 Worth St., near City Hall, sources said.

It was the first time in 10 years that blank birth certificates were stolen from the department.

The NYPD and the city’s Department of Investigation are investigating.

“It’s like hitting the Lotto for a terrorist,” one investigator said.

. . .

Investigators believe the theft was carried out by someone who has access to the offices, probably an employee.

And if you scare half the city by barricading yourself in a classroom, you get even better name recognition:

Apparently distraught over being removed from a school in the Bronx, a veteran teacher barricaded himself inside a classroom at the school on Friday morning, claiming that he had planted a bomb in the library and threatening to blow it up, the authorities said. About 1,200 students were evacuated, and within three hours, police officials escorted the teacher from the building and said his bomb claim had been false.

. . .

Mr. Garabitos’s bomb threat sent educators and police officers from the Emergency Services Unit scrambling to take precautions and assess the threat. The Police Department dispatched several officers, hostage negotiators and bomb squad technicians to the building, which also houses Junior High School 145 and the Urban Science Academy.

. . .

During negotiators’ talks with Mr. Garabitos while he was barricaded in the classroom, Mr. Browne said, he admitted that he had planted no bomb, but said he had undertaken a hunger strike over the way a disciplinary case against him had been handled. He also said he wanted to see the principal “ousted,” Mr. Browne said.

Ron Davis, a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers, said that Mr. Garabitos called the city union’s central offices on Friday morning and asked to speak with Randi Weingarten, the president of the union. After he was told she was in Washington (she is also the head of the American Federation of Teachers, the parent union based there), he later spoke to another union official who, with the guidance of police hostage negotiators, assured him that he would be safe and urged him to leave the building.

. . .

At a news conference on Friday afternoon, Ms. Weingarten, the union president, said: “No grievance is redressable in this way. We do not condone this behavior at all.”

She said that a list of concerns prepared by Mr. Garabitos was turned over to the Education Department by the union and that she hoped they would be addressed later.

Forgive me for saying so — because lord knows animals are so, so cute, cuddly and I just want to slurp them up through a straw — but when I see such crass grandstanding in advance of final budget votes it almost makes me want to root for the UFT to get another fat buyout . . . or for DEP to hire 2,500 more administrative staff . . . or for the Police Department to lower their retirement age to 38:

Layoffs in the city have spread from the piggy traders on Wall Street to the animals at the Bronx Zoo.

The institution is closing four exhibits and shipping hundreds of creatures to zoos and aquariums around the country, officials told the City Council Cultural Affairs Committee yesterday.

Deer, bats, porcupines, foxes, lemurs, caimans and antelopes will be pink-slipped as part of the 114-year-old zoo’s effort to cope with a $15 million budget shortfall.

“We plan to close four exhibits, four areas of the zoo . . . and we will have to reduce our collections in order to handle the cuts that we already know about,” said Bob Cook, executive vice president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the zoo.

Councilman Domenic Recchia (D-Brooklyn), who chairs the committee, was incredulous when Cook told him the loss of “hundreds” of animals would be permanent — not a temporary fix during the recession.

“It’s much, much more serious than what I even thought it was going to be,” Recchia said.

But perhaps I’m just being surly.

On the other hand it’s like, alright, alright, we get it already:

Six months before the election, Michael R. Bloomberg has already outspent his leading rival in the mayor’s race by a seven-to-one ratio, despite a commanding lead in the polls.

With a fresh wave of television and radio commercials, the mayor has poured $7.5 million into the campaign so far, according to new records obtained by The New York Times.

. . .

Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire, has now spent more than the city’s campaign finance laws allow Mr. Thompson — or any other challenger accepting public financing — to use in the race from now until the September primaries.

Mr. Bloomberg is not accepting public financing, and therefore faces no spending limit.

Maybe he meant Mike Huckabee*:

At a press conference in the Bronx to announce the opening of a new Home Depot store, Michael Bloomberg was [p]resented with the company’s trademark orange apron, but declined to put on a pair of safety goggles, saying, “The last guy to put on a pair was Dukakis.” (Close enough?)

Bloomberg was offered the goggles by a Home Depot manager as the mayor and other officials used a small electric saw to cut a piece of wood (the Home Depot version of a ribbon-cutting ceremony).

*As in. Because he certainly didn’t mean President Obama, who looks cool in his safety goggles. (Then again, candidates refusing to compromise their coolness by taking proper safety precautions seems to have a long history.)

[Introduce link here, perhaps by rewriting lede in stylish, snarky fashion]:

For the adult kickball teams battling it out in front of Public School 142 on the lower East Side this week, the game is about bonding with friends new and old, getting some open air exercise and reliving long-forgotten schoolyard exploits.

. . .

“It makes you feel like you are 10 years old,” said Ryan Stuczynski, 27, a banker and kickball player who also moonlights as a paid umpire for the league. He says the players take the game pretty seriously, even though they are on a playground.

“People are pretty adamant,” he said. “I try to run down the line and show everyone that I am into it, too.”

“Dentistry Duo Delivers Quality Care On Astoria’s Broadway”:

It used to be you would go to visit your dentist with some trepidation about the pain you would have to endure. You would sit in the waiting room bored, staring into space, dozing, or reading last year’s magazines.

The status quo may exist for some dentists who haven’t kept pace with all the technological advances of recent years, but that’s not the case when you keep an appointment with Dr. Clifford Degel and/or Dr. Carmen Every-Degel, the husband and-wife dental team that operates the Astoria Dental Group office at 32-17 Broadway in Astoria.

For starters, you can while away the time until your turn comes to see either Dr. Degel by watching an old movie on a video cassette player in the waiting room.

“We show lots of old comedy classics like the ‘Honeymooners’ or Abbott and Costello to get the patients in a good frame of mind,” Dr. Clifford Degel told us during a recent interview.

If you’re not in the mood for a comedy or other movie, you can play one of several tapes that explain one of the newer treatments or techniques that are available in this new age of dental wizardry where the Drs. Degel are among the practitioners.

*

The only difficult thing about rerunning a bunch of city council meetings is that there isn’t that much advertising revenue to skim from. But at least the production quality was raised.

I think they mean “50-foot” structure, not “500-foot” because that would be, like, huge, but point taken:

Once your eyes adjust to the scale of the New York City Panorama, it’s easy to spot Riverdale’s most familiar sights in all their miniature glory. The Whitehall Building, Van Cortlandt Mansion, and the 242nd Street Station rise up from a shrunken Bronx in the form of petite replicas.

But look toward Bell Tower Park in search of Riverdale’s best-known landmark and you’ll find nothing but a small, lonely white patch. The traffic circle is there, as are the trees and homes and highway that surround it. Yet the Bell Tower itself, a 500-foot structure cherished by residents, sightseers and historians alike, doesn’t exist in this alternate version of the city.

Urban planning czar Robert Moses and model-builder Raymond Lester may have taken painstaking care in creating the world’s largest urban panorama for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens (now housed at the Queens Museum of Art), but when it came to Riverdale’s 79-year-old tower and World War I veteran’s memorial, also known as The Monument, the pair apparently didn’t sweat the details.

There are about 895,000 individual structures replicated in the panorama, 25,000 of which are New York landmarks like skyscrapers, museums and major churches. They are custom built with striking detail.

Countless smaller structures are represented with generic blocks of wood and plastic. But The Monument didn’t even get that. Does the museum plan to place a tiny tower on the barren spot?

“I’m not sure what went into the decision making in 1964, but we’d love to work with the folks in Riverdale to see if we can get it put on there,” said the museum’s director for external relations, David Strauss, adding that even though he’s from Queens, he knows exactly where the real Bell Tower is in Riverdale. “The fact that I know the exact spot speaks to the idea that maybe it should be on there.”

Location Scout: Bell Tower Park, The Panorama of the City of New York.

If you’re going to control the schools, go whole-hog — control them! But don’t waste everyone’s time with neutered advisory boards that, little by little, chip away at democracy by poisoning minds with cynicism:

In designing the mayoral takeover, lawmakers viewed the panel as critical to maintaining a “balance of authority,” and promised it would have a “meaningful role” on citywide education policy and approve major contracts, according to the authorizing language that accompanied the bill.

But Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — who controls 8 of the panel’s 13 seats — made plain during the negotiations that he preferred no panel at all, and over the past seven years, he and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, who doubles as the panel’s chairman, have eased it into irrelevance.

The volunteer panelists — an investment banker, a lingerie store owner and an expert on electromagnetics among them — rarely engage in discussions with those who rise to address them. They do not debate the educational issues of the day, but spend most sessions applauding packaged presentations by staff. Some have barely uttered a public word during their tenures.

Writers and historians will use this anecdote in the introductions of the many books yet to be written detailing the Fall of New York City:

After spending $2.3 billion on new stadiums packed with suites, restaurants and the latest technology, the Mets and the Yankees expected fans to embrace their new homes and pay top dollar for the privilege. Almost every team that has built a new stadium in the recent past has seen an immediate surge in attendance.

Instead, the Mets and the Yankees face a public relations nightmare and possibly millions of dollars in lost revenue after failing to sell about 5,000 tickets — including some of the priciest seats — to each of their first few games after last week’s openers.

The empty seats are a fresh sign that the teams might have miscalculated how much fans and corporations were willing to spend, particularly during a deep recession. Whatever the reason, the teams are scrambling to comb over their $295- to $2,625-a-seat bald spots.

. . .

But the slow start in New York is striking considering how much the teams here spent to build and promote their parks. Like airlines that break even on economy tickets and rely on first-class travelers to turn a profit, the teams need to sell their most exclusive seats to help repay the hundreds of millions of dollars of tax-free bonds they issued to finance their new parks.

The unfilled seats in New York are even more glaring compared with how robust sales have been for previous stadium openings. The Baltimore Orioles sold out 67 of their 80 home dates in 1992, when Camden Yards opened. The Cleveland Indians sold out 36 games in the strike-shortened season in 1994, and were filled to capacity 455 consecutive games from 1995 to 2001.

After moving to their new park in 2001, the Houston Astros drew 3.1 million fans, 300,000 more than they ever attracted at the far larger Astrodome. The Pittsburgh Pirates, a perennial second-division team, sold 2.4 million tickets in 2001 when PNC Park opened, 700,000 more than they ever sold at Three Rivers Stadium.

Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium, Citi Field.

Of all the stupid things you can do when you volunteer, picking up trash at the park seems like one of the stupidest:

With record crowds anticipated this summer as many New Yorkers stay home to save money, the Central Park Conservancy had to devise an emergency plan to ensure the grass stays green and clean.

For the first time, park volunteers — who traditionally help with less menial tasks — will be given trash grabbers and garbage bags, conservancy President Doug Blonsky said yesterday.

As a result of budget cuts, the conservancy — which manages the park for the city — has already laid off some employees and cannot afford to hire the extra 50 seasonal workers normally depended on to pick up the trash, he said.

. . .

“The bottom line is we’re asking New Yorkers to pitch in and pick up the litter for us,” Blonsky told The Post. “In the past, our volunteers have focused on horticulture and planning, but now we need help with the litter.”

At several locations throughout the park, volunteers can sign up to help with the upkeep.

“You’ll get a bag and a grabber, and a little vest to wear,” Blonsky said.

But in the end, threatening to torture your landlord can only get you so far:

Manhattan prosecutors described yesterday how two Greenwich Village restaurateurs allegedly set the stage for extortion this past January — kidnapping their landlord’s agent, taking him to a nearby apartment, and showing him some hardware decidedly not meant for a home-improvement project, they said.

The unidentified victim took one look at the tarp and the wicker chair on it — alongside a table full of sinister-seeming tools — and agreed to forgive $250,000 in back rent, prosecutors said.

“They showed him a chair, placed on top of a tarp with a table holding pliers, a hammer, a screwdriver, and a candle,” said prosecutor James Meadows. “A burning candle.”

It hadn’t helped that one of the suspects, Vasileios Giamagas, 35, bragged he was a former mercenary and an accomplished killer who’d slain his own brother.

“He told the managing agent that he was in the Chechen army and had blown up a building with more than 80 people in it,” said Eric Seidel, chief of the DA’s rackets bureau.

Giamagas, an illegal alien from Greece, and co-defendant Ekkehart Schwartz, a 70-year-old German architect here on a green card, had fallen behind on their rent at their never-opened bar and nightclub, Restaulounge-Bar De’Vill, at 68 W. 3rd St.