. . . but some good timing on the filing of this suit:

A Bronx man named Amadou Diallo has hit the NYPD with a wrongful-arrest lawsuit, accusing crass cops of trying to frame him and taunting him because he bears the same name as the victim in the infamous “41-shot” slaying.

“Oh, you’re back from the dead,” the officers crudely joked as they cuffed Diallo, 26, who was stopped while parking his car with his wife in the passenger seat on Feb. 26, according to the suit filed yesterday in Manhattan federal court.

“The fact that plaintiff’s name is Amadou Diallo — a common name in Guinea, Africa, where both plaintiff and the victim of the ‘41-shot’ slaying . . . were born — was a source of amusement, laughing and inappropriate joking amongst the officers,” the suit states.

The cops initially told Diallo his headlight was out, but it was only an excuse to search his car on a “hunch,” according to the suit, which comes amid unrest over acquittals in the recent slaying of Sean Bell by cops who fired 50 shots.

At least they didn’t eat it:

A box turtle that has for years crawled through backyards in Williamsburg was discovered last week painted a sickly orange, with neighbors blaming construction workers next door with ample time and spray paint on their hands.

Photos of the poor turtle, known as Myrtle, in her new Technicolor shell were first posted on the blog The Gowanus Lounge, and caused a cascade of vitriol on the site.

“Whoever did this should rot in hell,” wrote one commenter. “We live in a world of sociopaths,” commented another.

Myrtle the Turtle was discovered painted orange in a backyard next to a development that has long been an irritant to longtime residents. They have complained of demolition work, cracks appearing in the walls of their homes, and ripped out phone and cable lines.

The developer of the residential project at 5 Roebling Street, Shlomo Karpen, could not be reached for comment.

The owner of the building next to the development has for years been keeping turtles in her backyard. Meredith Chesney, who lives there, says the practice is something of a neighborhood folk custom.

She said she believed that the turtle escaped through a hole in the fence left by the construction work and wondered onto the site.

Many in the neighborhood said they thought that the appearance of a traffic cone-colored terrapin symbolized all that had gone wrong with their area.

Just because you build a bike lane doesn’t mean people will respect it:

On streets clogged by pollution-emitting cars, buses and trucks, New York City’s quest to establish reasonably safe cycling paths by adding to its roughly 300 miles of bicycle lanes has been welcomed by cyclists. But the lanes are often battlegrounds between cyclists and drivers who seem undeterred by the clearly demarcated paths.

Although city regulations forbid cars from blocking bike lanes — a violation that carries a $115 fine — those rules are routinely ignored by drivers who use the lanes as parking spots, loading zones and places to pick up passengers. Such maneuvers have enraged cyclists who say they are unlawful, rude and dangerous.

. . .

And what might the nighttime campaign to give some bike paths greater prominence yield? A visit the next day to some bike lanes in Lower Manhattan found several cars and trucks standing or parked on the paths. On Second Avenue, Lynn Roman, a 42-year-old construction company employee, sat behind the wheel of a gray Toyota Land Cruiser just north of St. Mark’s Place.

Ms. Roman said she planned to be there only briefly while a passenger ran an errand but added that she rarely paid attention to bike lanes.

“I have other things on my mind,” she said. “This is the city. Bike lanes belong in parks.”

The letter writer apparently doesn’t get into the city much:

Charles Ober — an openly gay candidate running for the City Council seat formerly held by Dennis Gallagher — said Wednesday he has been smeared by a nasty anti-gay screed.

But Ober, a Democrat, was not alone in denouncing the hateful anonymous missive.

He was joined at a news conference by a potential rival from the opposite side of the political spectrum: Republican hopeful Thomas Ognibene.

The letter — a typed page full of vile hate speech, with frequent spelling and grammatical errors — was sent to an unknown number of households in Ridgewood, Middle Village and Glendale, they said.

“You need to know that one of the candidates that is trying to get Dennis’ seat is a f—-t,” the letter began.

“If you do not want your kids to be exposed to this garbage, you need to make sure you vote — and not for Charlie . . . Ober,” the diatribe continues. “Our kids will be exposed to f—-ts holding hands, kissing and running up Myrtle Ave. in a dress.”

Fortunately, there is still a healthy level of cynicism in Middle Queens:

Multiple Democratic insiders inferred that Ober and Ognibene — who have been spurned by their respective political parties in the nonpartisan special election — may have concocted the hate mail scheme to boost their candidacies.

“It looks like they manufactured an issue and tried to get press on it,” said Michael Reich, executive secretary of the Queens Democratic Party.

Others blamed Ober for going along with the conservative Ognibene in a plan to divide the Democratic vote.

. . . class acts like this:

The NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau is investigating a cruel prank call to the family of Sean Bell’s fiancée that originated from the Manhattan offices of a prominent police union, The Post has learned.

“Ha, ha, ha,” someone said in a 1:15 p.m. Friday phone call to the home of Nicole Bell’s father Les Paultre, according to a police source.

The number for the Sergeants Benevolent Association came up on the caller ID.

. . .

The president of the union, Edward Mullins, said, “If the accusations are true, we will deal with it.”

So that’s how it works:

A class-action lawsuit against top real-estate broker Brown Harris Stevens alleges the firm discriminated against families that were trying to rent apartments in Brooklyn — because they had kids.

The suit, filed Thursday, is the first class action against a real-estate agency for “assisting and enabling landlords to carry out the discrimination,” said Diane Houk of the Fair Housing Justice Center.

One agent allegedly told Jamie Katz and his wife, Lisa Nocera, “I’ll show you everything available that I think is suitable for kids.”

They first went to Brown Harris Stevens two years ago when they saw a listing for a converted carriage house in Brooklyn Heights.

Nocera was nine months pregnant, and they wanted to leave their tiny Manhattan apartment. But the broker didn’t show it to them, saying “the owners would not rent to people with children because there was an outdoor space,” according to the lawsuit.

The couple remained in Manhattan, but when they looked again last June, with their baby, Bruno, they liked a $2,300-a-month apartment in Park Slope. After filling out an application, a Brown Harris Stevens broker allegedly said the owners wouldn’t rent to anyone with a child because of lead paint.

“I felt bad,” Katz said. “I felt they were preying on our fears as new parents about lead paint.”

Can’t you people quit using the Bronx as the movie set for your amateur Soprano murder plot? It’s unfair to the borough:

A dumped lover hired his cousin to kill his teenage ex and then tried to cover it up as a botched Bronx robbery — even screaming after his bumbling relative, “You gotta shoot me,” too, when he forgot, cops said yesterday.

Carlos Cruz and killer cousin Devon Miller appeared to be within a hair of getting away with their fiendish plot — until Miller’s dreadlocks did them in, sources said.

A woman looking out her apartment window just after the Sunday shooting saw Cruz chasing a man down the street and told cops the thug turned around and fired at his pursuer. She described the shooter as a hulking man with dreadlocks.

When Miller later showed up at Jacobi Hospital supposedly to console Cruz as he recovered from a minor gunshot wound to the thigh, an eagle-eyed detective recognized him from the description.

That set an investigation into motion that ended with Cruz confessing, sources said.

Cruz paid his 25-year-old cousin — a convicted murderer — $1,000 to shoot Chelsea Frazier, his on-again, off-again girlfriend and the mother of their 14-month-old, Elijah, police said.

The explosive end to the case came less than two days after Cruz told cops that he and Frazier, 18, were the random victims of a street robbery gone awry.

Cruz had allegedly lured Frazier to The Bronx from their home in Southbridge, Mass., for a shopping excursion as part of the plot.

A cohesive family unit is important, just not at gunpoint:

A Brooklyn man enraged that his ex-girlfriend wouldn’t let him see their infant daughter kidnapped the child at gunpoint Tuesday, police said.

Shawn Fariera, 20, and a friend busted into Melissa Fyffe’s Weeksville apartment about 5:40 p.m., saying they had some clothes for 3-month-old Shamiece, cops and witnesses said.

“He bum-rushed the door,” said Fyffe, 21, who has a protective order against Fariera. “He grabbed her off my mother’s bed. While he had her in his arms, he pulled a small black gun out of his back pocket and put it to my face.”

Fariera’s friend grabbed some baby blankets from the bed, and the duo escaped through a back door in the building, Fyffe said.

So I guess Viva New York is chopped liver to this asshat:

The Flamingo is famed in its Queens neighborhood as a place for lonely men to dance with scantily clad beauties for just $2 a song.

But several former dancers at the Jackson Heights night club allege they were treated like virtual slaves — forced to work hundreds of hours a week without pay and to endure abuse and humiliation by the owners.

In a multimillion-dollar lawsuit expected to be filed today, several former dancers, bartenders and waiters contend dance hall owners Edith D’Angelo and her husband, Luis Ruiz, violated labor laws and treated them inhumanely, according to Make the Road New York, a community organization representing the employees.

“[Ruiz] would insult the women by calling us ‘whore’ or ‘prostitute,’ and he would throw drinks and alcohol on our bodies,” a former dancer said in an affidavit obtained by the Daily News.

The dancers also say they were:

Not allowed to sit down, eat or drink water during shifts of 10 or more hours.

Made to change in rooms that were under video surveillance.

Ordered to have bar managers inspect their toilets after each use to make sure they didn’t use too much toilet paper.

Forced to repeat humiliating statements about themselves during meetings, such as, “I am fat and ugly. I am the reason that Flamingo is losing business.”

. . .

Dancers at the Roosevelt Ave. hot spot have to pay the house to work there — $11 each night. They are fined $10 for each half-hour they’re late and are forced to pay $70 if they call in sick, former dancers said.

Each night, the young women dress in different outfits - sometimes only in bikinis or lacy pajamas — and offer to dance salsa, bachata or cumbia with men for $2 a song or $40 an hour.

. . .

Outside the club yesterday, bar manager Aridio Herrera was unapologetic.

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Herrera, 29, said. “Our customers don’t speak any English, so we don’t care if it’s in the paper.”

Apparently there is no place for poor old honeylocusts in the new downtown:

The three honeylocust trees on the corner of West Houston Street and West Broadway share their little slice of the city with seven newspaper boxes, four garbage cans, two billboard advertisements for a London vacation, and one Starbucks coffee shop.

The trees have been there for years, in the middle of a sidewalk that is newly widened, but the other day they were not looking good. They had no leaves, a branch was broken on the one in the middle, and all three appeared to have been heavily pruned in their upper reaches.

Still, given the events of the last month, it could be worse: Apparently, someone has been trying to kill these trees.

It seemed strange to Ian Dutton, too, when he was walking past one day a few weeks ago and noticed a layer of rock salt poured, rather neatly, on the dirt at the base of all three trees — but not on the surrounding sidewalk. Mr. Dutton, a pilot who lives in the neighborhood and is a member of the local community board, happens to be a graduate of a class on tree stewardship offered by the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, and he worried that the heavy rains forecast for the next day would help the salt soak into the soil.

“I was like, ‘I must be crazy,’” Mr. Dutton said Wednesday. “I mean, who would do that?”

. . .

For the next two weeks, nothing much happened. Then, on March 20, Mr. Dutton’s wife, Shea Hovey, passed the trees when she going to the subway and noticed that the salt was back — again, caked around the base of the tree but not on the sidewalk. Another call to the Parks Department brought another cleanup crew, along with increased suspicion that this was not an accident.

. . .

The company that owns the adjacent building said it was not involved and had no information on the matter.

Budget problems fixed . . . that was painless:

The New York City Council has appropriated millions in taxpayer dollars in recent years to organizations that did not exist, Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn disclosed on Thursday.

The maneuver, in which funds were set aside for fictitious groups like the Coalition of Informed Individuals and Senior Citizens for Equality, allowed Council members to spend the money later on community programs they supported without obtaining the mayor’s approval.

The practice dates to at least 2001 and encompasses the tenures of the previous two speakers, Peter F. Vallone Sr., and Gifford Miller, according to Ms. Quinn.

Since 2001, about $17.4 million has been budgeted for dozens of fake community groups, according to documents provided by Ms. Quinn’s office.

“I was obviously deeply troubled when I found out about this information,” Ms. Quinn said at a news conference on Thursday, after The New York Post reported on the practice. “I had no knowledge of it; I did not know this was the practice. It’s something I believe is completely inappropriate and should not have gone on, and will no longer go on.”

Many of the spaces in the downtown Brooklyn “park”-ing lot supposedly occupied by judges for supposed security reasons are actually being used by their secretaries:

It’s not just judges who are parking in the controversial judicial parking lot in a downtown Brooklyn park, the Daily News has learned.

Secretaries, court staffers and judicial hearing officers also are parked inside Columbus Park, a recent Daily News survey found.

Law clerks who chauffeur their judgebosses to work also have nabbed the coveted spots, the News found.

“It certainly shoots a hole in the argument that they need this parking lot for judges’ security,” said Transportation Alternatives spokesman Wiley Norvell of the Civil Court judges’ stance they need to park near the old courthouse next to Borough Hall where they preside over volatile cases. “It’s a job perk.”

The News’ findings came as judges threatened to sue the city over its plans to oust some of the cars from the lot and turn it back into a pedestrian plaza. Work is slated to begin as early as next month.

. . .

In 1999, judges allegedly promised to move their cars to a garage at the new courthouse at 330 Jay St. when it opened in 2005.

But they have more recently argued it is unsafe and inconvenient for judges who preside over divorce and foreclosure cases to park in the new Criminal Court garage and make the six-minute, two-block trek to Civil Court.

“They can’t walk two blocks to a garage, but they all walk to Queen for lunch,” quipped one insider, referring to a well-known Court St. Italian restaurant.

Among The News’ findings from its March 7 review are:

Nearly 40% of the 44 cars — 17 — did not belong to judges.

Three cars belonged to judges’ secretaries.

Another five cars were law clerks’; while two more were driven by high-level courthouse administrators.

Four cars were listed to retired judges now working as judicial hearing officers or court attorney referees.

Two cars belonged to court officers assigned to watch over the lot. One car’s owner could not be identified.

Location Scout: Columbus Park.

And she’ll be better able to deal when Gawker commenters trip over themselves to poke fun at her weight:

Think of someone you don’t like. Write the name down on a piece of paper and fold it in half.

That’s what 7-year-old Tiana Camacho and other students in her second-grade class at PS 18 in West Brighton were asked to do. Her parents were outraged — especially when several of Tiana’s young classmates wrote her name on their papers.

“My child is very sensitive,” said Ana Camacho, Tiana’s mother. “Something like that would not help her.”

The school’s principal did not return a message left with a secretary. Department of Education spokeswoman Margie Feinberg, speaking on the principal’s behalf, did not have details on the assignment but said it was intended to improve students’ oral and written skills.

“They were understanding what it means to interview people,” Ms. Feinberg said. “It was a request to interview someone whom they don’t get along with.”

Parents said they might believe that if the teacher hadn’t read out the names of the students.

“[The teacher] went about it the wrong way,” said Mrs. Camacho. “Children shouldn’t be exposed to something like that at such a young age.”

Apparently, officials at the department didn’t think it was a very effective project, either. According to Feinberg, the teacher was given a verbal warning.

“Poor judgment was used,” Ms. Feinberg said. “There was a conference and a discussion with the teacher.”

Officials wouldn’t release the teacher’s name, but parents identified her as Linda Jacobellis.

The student, Tiana, was stunned and saddened by the incident. She said her teacher was fun to be around, which made this assignment unusually upsetting. Ms. Jacobellis supposedly explained to the class that they were given the assignment because many of the classmates don’t get along. But never did Tiana expect that she would be picked.

“She called my name a few times and I had to go to the front of the room,” Tiana said. “I was sad. I thought I was everybody’s friend.”

. . . a note saying you lied about inspecting something you were supposed to inspect but didn’t and then that thing you were supposed to inspect ended up killing several people:

A city inspector, charged with ensuring the safety of the giant crane whose catastrophic collapse killed seven people last Saturday, admitted that he lied about checking the equipment, authorities said yesterday.

Edward J. Marquette, 46, of Hell’s Kitchen, was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court yesterday on counts of falsifying business records and filing a false instrument that could bring a four-year prison term.

. . .

Marquette was released without bail.

He was assigned to inspect the crane at 303 E. 51st St. on March 4 after a retired building contractor reported to 311 the crane did not appear to be properly attached to the building.

“Caller states crane does not appear to be braced to the building. There are only tie-backs on five or six floor[s], but upper part which is 100 feet up is unsecured,” a Buildings Department complaint form said.

Marquette filed a report stating he inspected the crane and found it safe.

“No violation warranted for complaint at time of inspection,” he reported.

Part of the problem of city employees taking advantage of free parking is that many of the permits are actually fake. That’s some clown shit:

The city’s most comprehensive study of curbside parking has found that 9 percent of all vehicle permits in lower Manhattan are phony, The Post has learned.

The yearlong study confirmed what regular motorists have been screaming about for years — that privileged parkers are creating havoc downtown.

Among the study’s other findings:

• Nearly one in eight vehicles with permits were parked illegally at a bus stop, crosswalk, fire hydrant, driveway or were double parked.
• Forty-two percent of vehicles with “official business” permits parked outside their designated spaces for more than three hours, a violation of their permits.
• On a typical day between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., more than 3,300 vehicles displayed a law-enforcement placard.
• Each parked an average of 41/4 hours, meaning they accounted for almost a quarter of all the “vehicle hours” available.
• Eighteen percent of meters weren’t available to the general public because privileged parkers hogged them.

Prostitution, the oldest of professions, amounts to little more than a victimless crime:

She left “a broken family” at age 17, having been abused, according to the MySpace page, and has used drugs and “been broke and homeless.”

“Learned what it was like to have everything and lose it, again and again,” she writes. “Learned what it was like to wake up one day and have the people you care about most gone.["]

. . . and then attack:

Tyrus, a 7-year-old, 60-pound female pit bull who lives in Apartment 708 in the former Olcott Hotel at 27 W. 72nd St., has run up a $90,000 tab, the building’s residents charges.

The condo is suing her owner for the amount, accusing Tyrus of chasing tenants, defecating in the halls, nearly killing a Pomeranian, and mauling several other pets.

Neighbors call the dog a “lunatic” who stalks the halls, leaving residents and management of the Upper West Side condo terrified.

They claim the owner never walks her but instead lets her out alone in the hall, where she goes to the bathroom and roams free.

“Every time I enter or exit my apartment, I am fearful that the dog in Unit 708 will be loose . . . or will attack,” wrote a neighbor as part of the suit filed late last month in Manhattan Supreme Court.

The owners of Pumpkin, a 4-pound Pomeranian, said they were walking in the seventh-floor hallway on Jan. 31, when Tyrus leapt through of an ajar apartment door and lunged at them.

“She knocked me to the ground and started eating my dogs,” said Elisa Schindler, who along with her boyfriend, Larry Frankel, was with Pumpkin and two other Pomeranians, Sugarplum and Marshmallow.

Frankel threw his jacket over Tyrus. But, he said, the attack stopped only after a visitor came out of Apartment 708, grabbed the pit bull and went back inside without a word.

Blood and fur coated the corridor after the attack, Schindler said. It took three surgeries and about 100 sutures to save the nearly eviscerated Pumpkin.

“I would have been mauled, except my boyfriend pulled me into my apartment and wouldn’t let me save my dog,” Schindler said.

The couple called 911, and responding cops hauled the visitor out in handcuffs. He was charged with possession of cocaine, a police report said.

Connecting with the people is about making promises and sticking to them:

No nationally known political figures graced the ninth annual St. Patrick’s Parade in Sunnyside and Woodside, and even Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave notice he wouldn’t be around this year, though once he had said he’d attend each parade faithfully, even after he had left office.

The cab driver who delivered an infant to safety after becoming the unwitting participant in a nurse-and-dash scheme seems to have made up parts of the story as a cover up and has been arrested:

In a stunning turnaround, the cabby hailed as a hero for delivering an “abandoned” baby to a Queens firehouse Thursday was arrested yesterday for making up the heart-wrenching story.

In a dramatic jailhouse confession to The Post, livery cabdriver Klever Sailema, 45, said he was only trying to help the infant.

“I feel really bad. It wasn’t my intention to hurt anybody,” a shaken Sailema said from a holding cell in Kew Gardens yesterday. “We did it so that the girl would be well cared for. I just wanted to help.”

The cabby, a father of three from Elmhurst said that he kept up the ruse because “every time I lied I thought it would end there.

“I felt terrible. In my heart I knew it wasn’t right. It was a mistake.”

Sailema allegedly teamed up with the child’s dad, Carlos Rodas, 27, and paternal aunt, Maria Siavichay, to enact a bizarre plot to get rid of the kid, dubbed “Lourdes,” but whose real name is Daniella Perez, after the little girl’s 14-year-old mother said she could no longer handle being a mom, police sources said.

The plot unraveled late Friday night, when a neighbor who spotted the baby girl’s picture in the newspapers called cops.

. . .

Sailema told The Post that Siavichay, a waitress in his neighborhood, asked him for a ride to work Thursday, as she frequently does.

But when he arrived at her apartment at 7:30 a.m., she walked out carrying a baby in her arms along with Rodas, whom he had never met. All three got in the back of the cab.

Sailema initially thought that the baby, whom Siavichay had mentioned before, was sick and therefore Siavichay was taking the tot to work with her.

“The father said, ‘I know you don’t know me, but I need to ask you a favor. Can you take my girl to the fire station?’ ” Sailema told The Post.

Rodas wouldn’t take the child himself, because he “had a problem with the courts,” Sailema said.

“At that point I knew they were talking about bringing her to a safe place,” the cabby added.

Sailema dropped off the dad, a construction worker, a few blocks away and then headed to Queens.

A few blocks from the firehouse, Sailema said, Siavichay became worried because “she did not have [immigration] papers” and asked Sailema to drop her at work and take the baby to the firehouse — Engine 289 in Elmhurst — alone.

Just before 10 a.m., the cabby arrived at the firehouse. “That’s when I invented the story,” he told The Post.

. . .

“I don’t know how I committed a crime,” said an exasperated Sailema.

Gypsy cab as impromptu safe haven:

A man carrying a 6-month-old girl flagged down a black car for hire in Queens on Thursday and left the baby behind after asking the driver to stop, the police said.

The driver immediately took the infant to a firehouse in Corona, the police arrived and the baby was taken to St. John’s Queens Hospital, where she was in good condition.

. . .

About 10 a.m., the driver, whose name the police did not release, was flagged down at Northern Boulevard and 106th Street by a man holding the infant. When the driver and his passengers reached Northern Boulevard and 83rd Street, the man asked the driver to stop so he could make a phone call.

The man then walked across the street to a pay phone and fled, the police said. The driver took the child to Engine Company 289 at 97-28 43rd Avenue.

The driver is an independent contractor affiliated with Tel-a-Car of New York, said the company’s manager, Rocco Sacramone.

“It was a great thing he did,” said Mr. Sacramone, who would not disclose the driver’s name. “He went out, he went to work, he did a great thing, and then he went home and went to sleep.”

Generally, only taxis are allowed to pick up passengers in the street; Mr. Sacramone said he did not know why the driver had picked up the man.

I understand why it’s wrong to make cracks about the silverware:

Moving to close the books on a long and ugly chapter in New York’s employment history, the city has agreed to pay more than $20 million to settle a federal class-action lawsuit charging that the Department of Parks and Recreation systematically discriminated against black and Hispanic employees in awarding jobs and setting salaries, lawyers for the plaintiffs said Tuesday.

In announcing the agreement, lawyers and the plaintiffs painted a portrait of an agency that under its long-serving commissioner, Henry J. Stern, routinely rewarded a handpicked coterie of inexperienced white workers with plum assignments at the expense of experienced black and Hispanic employees.

In addition, the plaintiffs charged, white employees earned more than black and Hispanic workers performing the same jobs, and those who complained faced punishments like being reassigned to dusty basement desks or to an office far from home.

. . .

According to court documents, statistics show that in 2000, 92.9 percent of employees earning less than $20,000 a year were black or Hispanic, while only 14.2 percent of those earning between $50,000 and $60,000 a year were black or Hispanic.

And, according to the papers, Mr. Stern and senior parks employees routinely made derogatory, racially charged remarks. Mr. Stern told one former employee, Tanya Bowers, who is Jewish and black, that although she looked black, he knew she was Jewish when he heard her talk.

“I can bring you home and know that the silverware will still be there when you leave,” he said, according to her deposition.

But what does that have to do with swimming (”Wasn’t that a requirement?”)?

The Bloomberg preoccupation with productivity goals continues to result in abuses of the system:

Alan Weiner, a 64-year-old amusement park manager, charges that after he got hit with a legitimate ticket on Queens Blvd. last spring, his car was then slapped with three bogus tickets in the same area over the summer while he was working in Maine.

A judge last month threw out the allegedly phony tickets after seeing Weiner’s proof that he and his car, which has Maine plates, were out of town at the time.

. . .

Weiner’s saga began last April when his Jeep Cherokee, registered to the Maine amusement company where he works, was hit with a well-deserved ticket on Queens Blvd. after he failed to get back to the meter in time.

Weiner said he paid the ticket and thought nothing more about it — until last month when the city sent him a letter saying he had three more outstanding tickets.

All three summonses turned out to be issued by ticket agents in the same Queens command that wrote the first ticket, T-402.

Earlier: At Some Point Isn’t It Just Easier To Simply Do Your Job?

You mean you don’t know who the Committee on Contract Compliance is? Pay up:

[T]wo thoroughly modern shakedown artists have been successfully looting hundreds of construction sites around the city — using little more than a pair of hardhats, a couple of official-looking clipboards and a cellphone, prosecutors said yesterday.

“These guys were pretty sophisticated,” Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said as he announced the indictment of alleged enlightened extortionists Anthony Lewis and Kyle Correll.

The alleged scheme started back in 2005 for Lewis, 38, of Brownsville, Brooklyn - an ex-con swindler weighing some 400 pounds — and his accused sidekick Correll, 36, of Far Rockaway, Queens.

That’s when the two decided to incorporate themselves as “The Committee on Contract Compliance.”

They had hardhats lettered — in blue — with the bogus but important-sounding name. They carried clipboards and video cameras.

Thus outfitted, prosecutors said, the hard-hatted hoods would show up at small construction sites around town, targeting mostly Asian and Middle Eastern operations, tooling around in Lewis’ Lincoln Navigator and hitting as many as a dozen a day.

“We’re the Committee on Contract Compliance,” they’d allegedly announce to the site foreman. “You have serious safety violations. Hand us some cash, and we won’t shut you down.”

Some forked over a couple of hundred dollars immediately, to make the nuisance go away. Go jump in a lake, many of their other targets would respond, easily realizing the pair had no governmental affiliation.

That’s when Lewis would allegedly get on his cellphone and start dialing city and federal agencies.

Lewis and Correll had learned the right vocabulary, how to report just the kind of false violation that would get a firetruck, a cop car or a regulator to descend on the site immediately, said DA investigations chief Daniel Castleman.

The resulting inspection would shut down the job at a ruinous cost. That’s when Lewis and Correll would show up again, prosecutors said — asking the frantic victims if they had thought things over. More likely than not, the victims had.

Victims forked over anywhere from $300 to $10,000, prosecutors said.

The first election in years that actually meant something actually ends up not meaning much:

Supporters expect Barak Obama to pick up one or two delegates when primary results from New York City are recounted.

The unofficial results were strikingly under-recorded in several districts around the city — in some cases leaving him with zero votes when, in fact, he had pulled in hundreds, Board of Elections officials have said.

Those results gave Obama no votes in nearly 80 districts, including Harlem’s 94th and other historically black areas — but many of those initial tallies proved to be wildly off base.

“Every election has problems, but in this case, all the problems seem to have been his,” said state Sen. Bill Perkins (D-Harlem). “He got all the zeroes and undercounting.

“Some gross mistakes have been made. Very often, there are clerical errors. In this case, it was strictly with regards to Obama.” Perkins told The Post the issue is more than the “one or two delegates” that could be added to Obama’s tally, noting that if the results were accurately represented, there would not have been a “false momentum” for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

How do we know that the market for CDOs is tanking? Law firms’ corporate structuring departments have way too much time on their hands these days:

In brief, it may have been legal, but it wasn’t appealing — at least not to some of the female lawyers unknowingly nominated for “Hottest Female Associate” at the city’s top white-shoe firm.

What began as an admittedly “sophomoric” contest by two no-name blogger employees at prestigious Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom last month turned into a nightmare for the famed law firm, which quickly saw its reputation veering in the wrong direction as word spread of the sexed-up, inter-office shenanigans.

. . .

It’s unclear how many of the women knew they had been nominated, much less were aware their mugs had been posted on the renegade Web site Skadden Insider, an unofficial source of company gossip and goings-on.

. . .

The bloggers eventually posted part of an interoffice e-mail fired off by a company executive earlier this month that ordered them to cease and desist, calling the contest “inappropriate” and saying it “does not reflect our values and standards of behavior.”

It’s going to take a lot more Operation Secret Riders to defeat the culture cab drivers have created:

More New Yorkers have come forward with stories of cabbies-gone-crazy when they tried to pay their fare with a credit card.

Sarah Snedeker, 24, says a driver locked her in a cab in Manhattan and spit in her face.

When his maniac driver refused to use plastic, Michael Blumenthal, 28, says he ended up running away from him through a Queens alleyway.

. . .

Snedeker and Blumenthal said they asked the drivers if they could pay with a credit card before hopping into the cab.

Snedeker wound up in a 5-minute argument when her driver suddenly said the credit card machine was broken as they sat outside her upper West Side apartment on Jan. 24. The driver locked the doors when she went to get out, trapping her “for what seemed like forever,” she said.

“He . . . put his face into the plexiglass separation, the section that is left open, and screamed ‘You f—— b—-!’ and spit at me, which I could feel spray all over my face,” she said. “I screamed the loudest I have ever screamed in my life: ‘Let me out of this cab!’”

Snedeker said she yanked on the door handle repeatedly as the cab idled on W. 89th St.

“Then, out of nowhere a man banged on the cab driver’s window and forced him to let me out,” she said. “It was horrifying.”

. . .

[Blumenthal's] ride turned hellish about three blocks from his Queens home when the cabbie also switched his story, saying the credit card machine was broken.

After the cabbie threatened to drive Blumenthal back to Manhattan, the account executive said he attempted to get out of the car, opening the door at two red lights. Each time, the cabbie hit the gas. He finally got out of the cab at a red light at Crescent St. and 41st Ave. in Long Island City on Jan. 17.

“He then jumps out to come after me and I start to run,” Blumenthal said. “He ran back to his cab and threw it in reverse. I run into an alley and he stops to go in after me with the car.”

Blumenthal said the cabbie couldn’t catch him because the taxi got stuck behind a street-cleaning truck.

That’s the “Patriot” bar, not the “Patriots” bar, you morons:

Another Patriot suffered a big loss yesterday, as unruly Giants fans shut down a bar of that name in Lower Manhattan for several hours.

“Fans got too hyped up,” the bar’s owner, Chardee Raymonde, said, describing the scene around 1:30 p.m., when patrons crowded onto the second-floor fire escape of the Chambers Street bar. Armed with pitchers of beer, some threw toilet paper onto the street below, where a crowd was tossing around an oversize beach ball. “Giants fans have a long history of wanting a Super Bowl win, and they finally got it,” she said, referring to the enthusiastic and, at times, rowdy celebration yesterday.

Even as crowds converged along the route of yesterday’s tickertape parade, revelers wreaked havoc downtown, clogging sidewalks and leaving trash in their wake.

. . .

Across the street from The Patriot bar, the owner of a photography store, Mark Mozaffari, closed his shop to avoid vandalism. “I’m afraid they’re going to break the windows,” he said, eyeing the crowd.

Cab drivers’ refusal to accept credit cards has finally gone too far:

There have been a number of reports of cab drivers balking at customers who try to pay with credit cards, but a woman is accusing a cabbie of actually punching her after she tried to charge a ride.

Tamara Perez tells CBS 2 HD she still can’t believe it happened.

The incident happened Tuesday after Perez ran to her East Village home to pick up some papers. Once in the cab, the 35-year-old realized she had no cash the pay the $10 fare. Instead, she pulled out a credit card, but the cabbie wasn’t having it.

“He wouldn’t let me use the card, he wouldn’t press the button,” she tells CBS 2. “I said, ‘You have to press the button,’ and he’s like, ‘No, no I don’t know, I don’t know how to use it.’”

Perez says the driver got out of the cab and told her to go get cash. She refused, said she wanted to use the machine and would tip well.

“I tried to walk past him and he pushed me back into the cab. I got up and told him I was calling my husband who is a professional boxer,” she says. “I started dialing the phone and he said, ‘I give you a punch in the mouth’ and he turned around and he socked me in the mouth.”

After initially indicating that the Red Hook Ballfield vendors would get priority with a new formalized RFP process, the city seems to go back on its word:

Despite significant hurdles to overcome, the vendors decided unanimously at a closed-door meeting on Wednesday night to submit a proposal under the city’s new open-bidding process for vending permits at the Red Hook ballfields, which are on Bay Street, between Clinton and Henry streets.

“They decided to stick on, which is good news,” said Cesar Fuentes, who acts as spokesman and advocate for the 13 vendors.

One of the food vendors, Rafael Soler, added: “This is a very important decision. We tried to keep it together because when everyone is together, we’re stronger.”

The decision to dig in culminates months of hand wringing that began after the city decided to put the vending sites, where the food hawkers have been operating for decades, up for open bid.

At the time, the Parks Department said its “request for proposals” would be written to give the existing vendors a leg up. But the RFP unveiled last month would bar the purveyors from setting up folding tables, tarps and grills as they have been doing.

Instead, vendors must get mobile units, licensed by the Health Department, which cost $15,000–$30,000.

“For a corporation, that’s pocket change,” said Fuentes. “But for hardworking people holding down two other jobs, it’s a lot.”

The city says it wants a lively marketplace at the ballfields, but a spokesman recently suggested that the city is less concerned with who actually runs it — the longtime vendors or a new corporation.

Location Scout: Red Hook Ballfields.

Name of group redacted because they’re total douchebags who don’t deserve any more press than they already get:

A fundamentalist group known for its virulent anti-gay stance is planning to picket the upcoming funeral of actor Heath Ledger, who played a gay cowboy in the 2005 film “Brokeback Mountain.”

Members of the [media-whoring Kansas church] said they would protest the funeral at the Frank F. Campbell Funeral Home in Manhattan. A date has not yet been set.

In a message posted on the group’s Web log, members promised to bring signs reading “Brokeback in Hell.” The message said Ledger was in hell because of his role in a film that taught the world “it’s OK to be gay.”

. . .

The ADL, which monitors anti-Semitism as well as the activities of hate groups, said the church gained notoriety when followers picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard with signs reading “No Fags in Heaven.”

Since 2005, church members have picketed funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to demonstrate their opposition to America’s tolerance of homosexuality.