In fact, city investigators only tumbled to Scotland’s thefts after they launched an inquiry last year into complaints by employees at NYC-TV. The wide-ranging gripes included charges that Wierson and other top officials were often absent and appeared to be using city staff and resources for their own private projects.

The results of that inquiry were assembled in a memo that was presented to City Hall shortly before Scotland’s arrest. Since then, in addition to Wierson, at least four other high-ranking aides at the network have also quietly resigned. Asked last week if they’d been fired, a City Hall spokesperson declined comment.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the money and drugs appeared to have been what the robbers were after when they burst into Special Moments Daycare in East Flatbush on Friday afternoon — while a dozen or so children were napping.

Three men were arrested at the scene, including a suspect who was shot by the police.

“It now appears the day care center was a drug haven, or where drugs in significant quantities were kept, primarily marijuana,” Mr. Kelly said . . .

The daughter of a man whose badly decomposed body was found inside a minivan said Thursday traffic cops should have noticed her father over the several weeks they covered the vehicle in parking tickets.

“He was my only family,” said Jennifer Morales, 29, about her father, whom she believes died from a heart attack while sitting in the family’s 2000 Chevrolet Ventura in Queens.

“The window was cracked open. I don’t understand how no one noticed him. They just gave him tickets,” she told the Daily News last night.

A movie chase scene got too realistic early today when a car jumped a curb during a film shoot and smashed into the entrance of a Times Square restaurant, injuring two people, police and witnesses said.

The action scene gone awry unfolded at the Sbarro at 47th Street and Seventh Avenue shortly before 1 a.m.

Street closing notices posted by the police indicated the shoot was for the Nicholas Cage film, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

. . .

Mark Watkins, a tourist from Birmingham, England, watched the live action chase from the top of the new TKTS booth.

“A black Ferrari and a silver Mercedes were chasing each other,” he said.

“The Ferrari took a route down the center of the road, swerving between cars. The Mercedes took the outside lanes.

“The Ferrari took a sharp right to the left and lost it, swerving across the lanes, taking out a lamppost and a news stand.

“One lady was knocked to the ground and a lamppost landed directly on top of a chap.”

Horrifying video at link.

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.

A convicted child molester was found naked and bleeding behind a Brooklyn building — a victim of sexual self-mutilation, police sources said.

“How he did it? Limber, I guess. Not the work of a sane mind,” a police source said.

Sources said that Damiene Iriarte, 26, was found in Fort Greene with the tip of his penis bitten off. He was taken to Brooklyn Hospital Center.

Iriarte was arrested in Suffolk County in 2003 and charged with raping a 13-year-old girl, according to court records.

Just as Michigan is scrambling to retrain laid-off auto workers, New York City officials have come up with a plan to find new work for the unemployed from one of its core industries: financial services.

Under a program unveiled on Wednesday by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the city wants to invest $45 million in government money to retrain investment bankers, traders and others who have lost jobs on Wall Street, as well as provide seed capital and office space for new businesses those laid-off bankers might create.

The plan is intended to stem a potential exodus of banking professionals from the city during the restructuring of the financial services industry, which has been the city’s economic engine for decades, and to speed the industry’s recovery, which will take at least several years, officials said.

. . .

The mayor announced the 11-part program at a building at 160 Varick Street that will house an incubator for start-up companies that might employ laid-off professionals. Trinity Real Estate donated the space for three years and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University will select the entrepreneurs who will occupy the space, beginning in April. A second business incubator is scheduled to open in Lower Manhattan later in the year, said Seth W. Pinsky, the president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation.

The agency plans to put $3 million into funds to make small investments in start-up companies, Mr. Pinsky said. He said that he hoped to attract twice as much money from private investors and that $9 million would be enough to help start hundreds of new businesses.

All told, city officials plan to spend about $15 million on the program, in addition to the $30 million of federal money. They estimate that over 10 years, it could stimulate the creation of at least 25,000 jobs and contribute $750 million to the local economy, but Mr. Bloomberg referred to those projections as a “guess.”

*And think of how many housing project roofs or elevators that could be fixed with $45 million . . .

“An all-glass building adjacent to the park is a deathtrap for birds,” said Glenn Phillips, executive director of NYC Audubon.

“The design is a set-up. It’s putting huge, uninterrupted, solid panes of glass adjacent to a landscape, and that’s a recipe for disaster.”

Chao Fu, 52, was driving the van for the China Chalet restaurant and catering service and double-parked the vehicle on the east side of E. Broadway near Catherine St., police said.

Fu thought the van was in park when he stepped out to make a delivery, he told cops, but it was actually in reverse and began to creep backwards on the busy street lined with shops and restaurants, police said.

The children, gathered on the sidewalk with two chaperones outside the Chatham Square branch of the New York Public Library, were about to walk back to the nearby Red Apple Day Care on Market St.

They were lined up against the wall, their arms linked, when the 9,400-pound van hit them, surveillance video shows.

Fu, who had a clean driving record and valid license, was not charged, police said.

Boats are converging on a USAirways plane that is mostly submerged in the Hudson River off the West 50’s of Manhattan.

According to Channel 4 television news, the plane, USAirways flight 1549, took off from LaGuardia Airport at 3:26 p.m. was bound for Charlotte, N.C. and had 146 passengers and 5 crew members. The plane, according to the news report, may have hit a flock of birds. The pilot tried to return to the airport when the plane fell into the Hudson.

Television reports show several boats around where the plane, an Airbus A320, was in the water. New York Police Department divers dove into the water to assist with the rescue as plane floated southbound on the river, possibly due to the tidal direction.

Seriously — this is a recurring problem . . . let’s shoot them.