Because if you didn’t buy counterfeit goods, then we would have more police to investigate the selling of counterfeit goods:

The city is poised to unveil a campaign to educate tourists and locals alike about the harsh realities of supporting the counterfeit goods industry, which officials say costs the city more than $1 billion in lost sales taxes each year.

Beginning Monday, posters adorned with messages that relay the lesser-known perils of counterfeiting will be plastered on phone booth kiosks in areas of the city infamous for harboring peddlers of fake name-brand goods, such as Chinatown and Times Square, officials announced yesterday.

Unveiled at the Harper’s Bazaar Anticounterfeiting Summit, the posters warn shoppers about the harmful consequences of counterfeiting with messages such as “when you buy counterfeit goods, you support child labor.”

Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler announced the two-month campaign in front of a room of executives from businesses wounded by counterfeiting, an industry experts say generates upward of $650 billion a year. He said the sales tax lost to counterfeit goods would provide the city with funds to hire 10,000 new police officers, firefighters, or teachers.

“This is a problem that is a little like weeds, we need to keep pulling them out,” he said.

Except that . . . if all sales taxes only generate $4.5 billion for the city budget (see, for example, this .pdf from the city’s Independent Budget Office), is it really possible that New York City is losing $1 billion in revenue from counterfeit bags? Doesn’t that basically mean that counterfeit bags account for 25% of all sales in the entire city? (Geez, maybe New York really has become the Tijuana of the U.S.)

This is not to say that buying counterfeit goods is some kind of harmless, victimless crime — I don’t believe it is — but, again, what is the city doing carrying the water for the fashion industry? Don’t the police have better things to do? And citing “lost sales taxes” isn’t enough . . . if that were true then we should crack down on all sorts of things . . .

A reminder that it’s generally considered bad form to start stealing seats before the end of May:

A Mets fan struck out in his attempt to take a piece of Shea Stadium home with him, cops said Tuesday.

Patrick Oriani, 18, of Jersey City, was caught stealing the bottom half of a red upper-deck seat after the Mets’ 10-4 loss to the Washington Nationals on Monday night, police said. He had the souvenir wrapped in a blanket.

Oriani was charged with possession of stolen property, criminal mischief and petty larceny, police said.

Location Scout: Shea Stadium.

. . . 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.

. . . it’ll be a great place to watch people pick their noses:

he city is planning a new $30 million “super high-tech” NYPD command bunker in lower Manhattan to serve as the nerve center for crime fighting, as well as emergency response to terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

The technology-intensive, 22,000-square-foot Joint Operations Command Center will be a 24/7 hub housed in an eight-story building connected to Police Headquarters at 109 Park Row, according to a city document detailing negotiations between the NYPD and architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

The center will allow the NYPD to “coordinate with other agencies — local, state and federal — to identify, manage, and respond to crises throughout New York City,” according to the “notice of intent” document.

“The need for such a facility is imperative,” the document said.

Sources told The Post that the “state-of-the-art, sophisticated” center will have walls of high-definition video screens showing surveillance footage from a variety of places, including underneath bridges and underwater.

Cops will continuously monitor the screens to pinpoint suspicious activity or zero in on specific areas in the event of breaking crime. Criminal databases linked to the center will instantly provide responding cops with critical data.

The NYPD currently has an operations center on the eighth floor of Police Headquarters that doubles as an emergency-response center in crises, but one counterterrorism detective said, “It could certainly be more high-tech.”

Let us have our raw milk:

Brooklyn raw milk enthusiasts are crying over the loss of their supplier — a horse and buggy-driving Amish farmer from Pennsylvania.

Mark Nolt of New Line, Pa., was arrested and shut down last Friday for selling the contraband.

“Oh God. My heart is pounding. I can’t believe what a God—- police state this is,” said one Brooklyn customer who made monthly pickups of raw dairy products from Nolt that the farmer had dropped off in Manhattan by workers.

“I gave him $100 last week for a huge delivery of stuff, including raw cream that I planned on using to make cream puffs,” she said.

The Brooklyn outcry came after six Pennsylvania state troopers raided Nolt’s farm and confiscated his illegal dairy.

“They swooped in on Friday morning like a bunch of Vikings, handcuffed me and stole $30,000 worth of my milk, cheese and butter,” Nolt told the Daily News.

Nolt is a devout Mennonite who sells raw dairy products at his farm and has them transported by truck to customers in Delaware and across New York City, where the raw goods are illegal.

It is a violation of federal law to transport raw milk across state lines with the intent to sell it for consumption. Nolt was arrested for not having a permit to sell the goods in Pennsylvania, where they are allowed.

He said he was working on the farm with his wife and 10 children when the agents cuffed him on charges of selling the contraband to an undercover officer.

“The government doesn’t have the right to dictate what I eat, and never will,” said an unrepentant Nolt.

Around the city, more and more parents are signing up to find out where dropoff points are to pick up raw milk they have bought online.

To get around the law, no money changes hands. Milk pickup spots are posted in Williamsburg, Queens and neighborhoods in Manhattan — where a milk truck waits.

And who killed the raw milk trade? You did!

. . . others push around a three-foot-tall crucifix in a granny cart:

She was depressed and needed Jesus, so she took Him home with her.

That was Dawn Piccolo’s explanation for her theft of a 3-foot wooden crucifix from St. Adalbert’s R.C. Church in Elm Park.

Ms. Piccolo, 37, of Elm Park was shipped off to jail yesterday following her guilty plea earlier this month to a count of fourth-degree grand larceny stemming from the theft of the crucifix.

Dressed in a black sweater and gray cargo pants, her blond hair piled atop her head, Ms. Piccolo did not speak when Justice Leonard P. Rienzi sentenced her to one year behind bars under the plea deal.

She’d been more forthcoming — and apologetic — following her arrest at her Morningstar Road home in March.

In a statement penned for police, Ms. Piccolo admitted suffering from anxiety and depression.

She denied “ever” using any illegal drugs, but said the medications prescribed to combat her depression “makes me turn into something I don’t want to be.”

“I am in need of help for my faults,” Ms. Piccolo wrote.

“I was in need of Christ. . . . Christ is the only thing that keeps me sane.”

The Rev. Eugene Carella of St. Adalbert’s noticed Ms. Piccolo when she showed up at the church on the morning of March 11. Discovering the theft of the crucifix, a staple at St. Adalbert’s for more than 40 years, he gave a description of the woman to police.

Cops canvassed the neighborhood, and three days later, a city Sanitation worker phoned Father Carella with word that a woman had been spotted with the crucifix in a pushcart.

The worker and Father Carella identified Ms. Piccolo through photos police took of the woman.

A detective returned the crucifix to the church in time for its Good Friday veneration, although the left arm was missing. It hasn’t been recovered.

As for Ms. Piccolo, “I hope one day to give Him my all,” she told cops.

And the church hopes that one day Ms. Piccolo will give all of Him back.

Except for the inconvenient facts that prostitution is often about sex slavery and it is very rarely a victimless crime, Eliot Spitzer might still be governor and Sean Bell might still be alive — since, after all, the reason undercover cops were there was for a prostitution sting — and we wouldn’t have to endure a big, lousy, tragic conclusion to the case:

A Queens judge on Friday acquitted three detectives charged in the shooting of Sean Bell, who died on his wedding day in a hail of 50 police bullets. He said that prosecutors had failed to prove their case and that wounded friends of the slain man had given testimony that he did not believe.

. . .

The detectives, all but obscured behind a human wall of courthouse officers, finally seemed to exhale deeply, even crumple, with relief. Detective Oliver — who reloaded his gun to fire a total of 31 shots and helped catapult the shooting from tragic mistake to a symbol, for many, of police abuse of force and poor training — closed his eyes and cried.

Except for a few scuffles outside the Queens Criminal Court building and shouted displays of disbelief and outrage, the day passed peacefully amid calls for calm delivered by the mayor, the police commissioner and other officials.

One more example this year makes it a trend, and we can pitch it to the editors of the Magazine . . .

As Rev. Sharpton gets geared up for a verdict in the Sean Bell case it occurs to me that it might not be the best time to remind people about the WWII-themed Operation Torch program, what with its submachine guns and all:

NYPD cops armed with rifles, submachine guns, body armor and bomb-sniffing dogs will start patrolling the city’s subways on Thursday — a first for mass transit in the United States.

Teams of six officers and a dog will patrol subway platforms and trains in 12-hour shifts.

The TORCH teams are being paid for by $151 million from the feds announced in February.

Similarly equipped NYPD units, known as Hercules teams, have patrolled Wall Street and other aboveground icons as part of the NYPD response to the World Trade Center attacks.

“The TORCH teams are Hercules teams with a MetroCard,” a police source said.

The elusive Ninja Burglar turns out to be up to three Albanians:

The NYPD has quietly closed the book on Staten Island’s so-called Ninja Burglar case, after authorities started deportation proceedings against at least one Albanian man they believe to be connected to the string of break-ins, police sources told the Advance.

About a week and a half ago, the police department dismantled the investigative team hunting for the serial burglar, those sources said.

“The investigation is dormant, with no new leads,” Paul Browne, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for public information, confirmed to the Advance yesterday afternoon. “Investigators believe that an individual suspected [but with insufficient evidence to make an arrest] of being the burglar is among three Albanian nationals currently facing deportation because of their illegal status in the United States.”

Browne did not name the three Albanian nationals.

The Advance broke the story on its Web site, silive.com, yesterday afternoon.

Police had linked the “Ninja Burglar” — who received the nickname from the media after a Dongan Hills man reported fighting off a nunchuk-wielding intruder in a ninja costume last September — to 19 separate break-ins, mainly in the Todt Hill and Grymes Hill neighborhoods, between May 2007 and January of this year.

Multiple law-enforcement sources close to the investigation told the Advance that investigators were first clued into a possible Albanian connection to the burglary pattern last fall, when they learned that several Albanian men from the same area in neighboring Macedonia had formed a loosely knit crew to commit burglaries.

In some instances, they would wait for the other members of their Albanian community to go out to cultural events, then strike their vacant homes, the sources said.

. . .

. . . [S]ources said, two other members of the group were believed responsible for several of the break-ins in the Ninja Burglar case, but were never charged.

With their forensic and investigative leads exhausted, police contacted federal immigration officials, who started deportation proceedings against several members of the group last month, according to police sources.

There is no better argument for congestion pricing, and the massive increase in transit revenue that will surely result, than a law-abiding man made crazy from irregular B13 service:

A Sing Sing prison guard has been busted for allegedly using his state-issued revolver to carjack three strangers in Brooklyn, The Post has learned.

Brian Duran, 46, was arrested Sunday at 12:20 a.m. after one victim flagged down a patrol car.

Duran allegedly smashed in the rear window of a Ford Taurus parked at 100 Bushwick Ave. in Williamsburg.

Sources said the three friends were waiting for a fourth when Duran, who had been standing at a bus stop, suddenly came over.

“What’s your f- - -ing problem?” driver Anthony Peña, 23, quoted him as yelling.

“Nobody has a problem. Just go about your business,” he was told.

To which Duran allegedly countered, “I’m going to show you a problem!” — as he pulled his state-issued Smith & Wesson and struck the window so hard that he dropped the gun inside the car.

Said Peña: “I got out and hid on the side and said, ‘What are you, crazy?’ ”

. . .

Duran, suspended without pay, was arraigned Sunday on charges of grand and petty larceny, menacing, criminal mischief, criminal possession of stolen property, and unauthorized use of a vehicle.

His estranged wife, who declined to give her name, was at a loss to explain his actions.

“There has to be more of this story. He’s never done anything like this,” she said. “I just can’t believe it. This has to be an [early] April Fool’s joke.”

Again, they act like this is a good thing:

Working largely on its own, the NYPD has transformed an unmarked Brooklyn warehouse into a counterterrorism center with a national and global reach. In a second facility in Manhattan, the department runs undercover operations, recruits spies and houses intelligence analysts.

Inside police headquarters is a high-tech situation room where rows of computer monitors give off a moody blue light and floor-to-ceiling television screens beam images from around the world. It’s staffed 24 hours a day with officers tracking local and international threats as well as the movements of as many as a dozen NYPD detectives on foreign assignments.

During a recent interview there, Mr. Kelly and the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence, David Cohen, were interrupted by a liaison officer calling from the scene of a suicide bombing in Israel to report on a new technique employed by the bomber.

Successes include the arrest in 2004 of two Muslim men on charges of plotting to blow up a subway station near the Republican National Convention, and the arrest and deportation in 2003 of two Iranian men who were filming a subway track in Queens, Mr. Cohen said. The former probe, in which one of the men pleaded guilty and the other received a 30-year prison term, was based on a year of undercover work by one of Mr. Cohen’s top detectives.

A subway station near the Republican National Convention . . . oh yeah, they’re talking about the two saps they entrapped back in 2004.

Make it a dozen long-stemmed, and fast:

Cops are hunting for an armed robber who hit a flower shop and a candy store in the Bronx.

The bandit held up Heavenly Treats Candy Bouquet in Morrisania about 2:40 p.m. on Feb. 28, flashing a handgun to rob the register and steal property from a 48-year-old woman, police said.

He struck again on March 2 at Diana’s Party Supply & Flowers in Longwood, holding up two teenage girls, 15 and 18.

After a lower court ruled that jumping off the observation deck of the Empire State Building is constitutionally protected free speech, an appellate court reverses the ruling:

The four-judge panel overturned a lower court decision that had found that Jeb Corliss, a professional skydiver who tried to leap from the 86th-floor observation deck in April 2006 did not violate any laws because, among other things, he was experienced and had carefully planned the jump.

The judges, however, reduced the charge in the indictment from a felony charge of reckless endangerment with depraved indifference to life to a misdemeanor charge of reckless endangerment.

See also: First You Tap That Building, Then You Tax It.

Do the police need something to do? Because doing the fashion industry’s dirty work seems like it has little to do with public safety*:

Cops launched a massive predawn raid on counterfeiters in Chinatown yesterday, seizing about $1 million in phony brand-name apparel.

Sunglasses, watches and handbags with fake Coach, Prada and Rolex labels were taken from 32 stores in what Mayor Bloomberg called “one of the biggest takedowns ever of trademark counterfeiters.”

“It has been one of the most notorious knock-off shopping malls in the five boroughs,” Bloomberg said of the three-building strip along Canal Street.

*And this link to public safety seems like a stretch for the NYPD to make.

You know things have turned around in New York when instead of the bad old days you have “You don’t expect this . . . especially not in front of Starbucks”

A brazen robber pistol-whipped a man yesterday on a Midtown street, wrestling a black duffel bag filled with $150,000 cash out of his hands as dozens of pedestrians looked on in horror.

Investigators are looking into the possibility that Seton Ijams, 50, was a victim of an inside-job robbery, and that someone may have tipped off the thief as to what time he would pick up the cash, a police official said.

Ijams, a vice president at Columbia Artists Management Inc., had just withdrawn the money from a Chase Bank branch on West 56th Street at Sixth Avenue shortly after 2 p.m., police said.

As he walked west along 56th Street, a young man followed Ijams and tried to grab his money bag.

When Ijams resisted, his assailant — described as a black man in his 20s and wearing a black coat — dragged him along the sidewalk while hitting him in the head with a silver pistol.

While he continued to whack Ijams in the head, the pistol went off, witnesses said.

. . .

Ijams, bleeding profusely from the head, fell to the sidewalk in front of a Starbucks as the robber got lost in the crowd carrying the bag filled with wads of bills.

“I saw the guy running” after leaving the victim on the ground, said Amado Delacruz, 34. “You don’t expect this — not on 56th Street, and especially not in front of Starbucks.”

And way to squeeze one off, asshole! If you’re going to beat someone over the head with your piece, try keeping the safety on . . .

Can anyone explain how Sewell Chan worked up a coherent news story about Heath Ledger’s death just 71 minutes after the masseuse found the actor unconscious? Get investigators over to Eighth Avenue — now:

At 3:31 p.m., according to the police, a masseuse arrived at the fourth-floor apartment of the building, at 421 Broome Street, between Crosby and Lafayette Streets in SoHo, for an appointment with Mr. Ledger. The masseuse was let in to the home by a housekeeper, who then knocked on the door of the bedroom Mr. Ledger was in. When no one answered, the housekeeper and the masseuse opened the bedroom and found Mr. Ledger naked and unconscious on a bed, with sleeping pills — both prescription medication and nonprescription — on a night table. They attempted to revive him, but he did not respond. They immediately called the authorities.

Yet another reason to eliminate city workers’ free parking privileges — keeping them out of trouble:

A Queens cop and several other city employees were busted for insurance fraud in a chop-shop scam, authorities said yesterday.

Officer Shantell McKinnies, 27, assigned to the 102nd Precinct, was one of 61 car owners busted in an undercover sting conducted by the NYPD and the Queens District Attorney’s Office.

McKinnies and the other vehicle owners would pay a middleman a small fee to take their cars to a chop shop to be stripped, a spokesman for DA Richard Brown said.

The owners would then allegedly file false insurance reports and receive a substantial reimbursement.

They didn’t realize undercover cops were running the chop shop as part of the 16-month operation.

McKinnies paid the undercover officer $12,000 to dispose of her car and received $26,000 from her insurance company, authorities said.

In addition to McKinnies, a city buildings inspector, a school safety officer, the security director of a city-run hospital, and one registered sex offender were also busted.

If so, this is cause for concern:

A Flushing Army veteran was arrested last Wednesday night after police found a staggering weapons cache in his apartment that included body armor, rifles and more than 20,000 rounds of ammunition.

According to published reports, Suwei Chuang, 36, of 135-11 40th Rd., Apt. 7A, was taken into custody in Manhattan’s 7th Precinct around 8:45 p.m. following a tip cops received from his girlfriend. Officers observed an AR-15 assault rifle fitted with a scope in plain sight in Chuang’s vehicle. After obtaining a search warrant for the vehicle, cops determined the weapon was fully loaded and that Chuang was also carrying 18 loaded 30-round magazines in the car.

An international cocaine ring is busted, threatening the city’s supply of first-person party reminisces and feature articles:

A major international cocaine distribution ring has been dismantled with the seizure of $10 million worth of cocaine, officials said yesterday.

An undercover investigation dubbed “Operation Final Voyage” began when a detective from the Kings County District Attorney’s Office learned that members of an organized cocaine smuggling ring in Panama were seeking a corrupt longshoreman to help unload shipments at a New York port. Kings County District Attorney Charles Hynes said the detective then posed as a longshoreman to intercept three shipments totaling 75 pounds beginning in November at Howland Hook.

“This was no nickel and dime operation,” Hynes said yesterday. “It was a remarkable seizure.”

To gauge the undercover detective’s ability to unload the narcotics without being detected, Hynes said the smugglers initially sent a Panamanian newspaper and a hat stashed aboard a container ship on Nov. 15. Three subsequent shipments containing cocaine were seized at the port on Nov. 23, Nov. 29 and Dec. 6, said Hynes, adding that the drugs were hidden so deeply in the enormous container ships that the defendants once provided a map to the detective.

A helpful reminder that when robbing banks, it’s sometimes good to think outside the box:

For Orlando Taylor, a 26-year-old Brooklyn man who apparently had a strange attraction to a couple of bank branches at the bustling Fulton Mall, three times was a charm. So was the fourth time. But according to the police, when he returned on Tuesday to commit a fifth robbery in five days, his luck ran out.

The police said Mr. Taylor first struck at 10:30 a.m. on Friday, robbing an HSBC branch at 342 Fulton Street of $450. On Saturday, the police said, he showed up two doors down at a Bank of America branch, and robbed that one too, making off with nearly $3,500.

On Monday, growing more brazen, the police said, Mr. Taylor showed up twice more at the same Bank of America branch, at 350 Fulton Street — first at 10 a.m. and then at 2:20 p.m. Each time, they said, he demanded that tellers turn over cash. He fled with more than $3,800 from the two robberies into the teeming crowds of holiday shoppers.

The police have rarely experienced a string of bank robberies in such quick succession and proximity. So when the two branches opened on Tuesday, dozens of officers in uniform and in plainclothes were on the lookout inside and positioned outside along the Fulton Mall’s sidewalks.

They would have little trouble recognizing Mr. Taylor if he showed up again, investigators said, because his image had been captured by bank surveillance cameras.

Despite the long odds against another successful holdup, the police said, Mr. Taylor was spotted shortly after 9 a.m. by plainclothes officers on the sidewalk outside his original target, the HSBC branch. Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, said Mr. Taylor was seen looking from the sidewalk through the branch’s windows, where he apparently spotted uniformed officers, and turned to walk away.

Think of it as “Operation Lucky Mailbag”:

A postal carrier pocketed dozens of greeting cards he was supposed to deliver to get at the cash inside, postal inspectors said.

He was found with more than 130 pieces of other people’s mail in his car, according to a court complaint.

Michael Olivio was released on his own recognizance Thursday following his arrest the previous day, court records show. The exact charges against him were not listed in court records available early Saturday, and a spokesman for prosecutors did not immediately return a telephone call.

. . .

Postal authorities started getting complaints in June about greeting cards getting lost en route to residents of a Brooklyn ZIP code, U.S. Postal Inspection Service Special Agent Stephen Dolloff said in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.

He set up stings involving decoy cards in September and again this week. The latest one included cash — and a hidden electronic transmitter. The transmitter showed that Olivio kept the card after finishing his mail route Wednesday, Dolloff said.

Or that maybe we need to rethink what constitutes chivalry:

The victim of the videotaped subway slugging that enraged the city and stunned straphangers is a handsome 27-year-old from Brooklyn who didn’t fight back because he didn’t want to hit a girl.

“I’m trying to get over it. It happened a month ago,” said Rafael Cruz, a manager at a Midtown H&M whom The Post tracked down yesterday.

He said he is mulling whether to press charges against the gang of teenage girls that attacked him, and will decide in the next couple of days whether to go to cops.

“Teenagers are allowed to make mistakes, but you need to learn from your mistakes,” he said.

The East New York native said he’s a “nonviolent person” and was never tempted to punch back at the girl bullies.

“I have a great family. My mother taught me the difference between right and wrong,” he said.

One acquaintance told The Post, “He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to hit a girl.”

The attack, in which the teen thugs berate and taunt Cruz before pummeling him with their fists and hitting him with a soda bottle, was captured on video and posted on the video Web site YouTube.

. . .

He believes it all began when he stepped on someone’s foot.

“They were getting loud, and I was just trying to ignore it,” he recalled, adding that he wasn’t hurt in the flurry of fists.

Meanwhile, an MTA spokesman urged Cruz to go to the cops.

“I’m fairly certain if he files a complaint . . . the NYPD will make an arrest, and those people will be brought to justice,” Paul Fleuranges said.

“It’s the only way the Police Department can do anything about what happened and send a message to others that you will be punished.”

See also: “A” Train Beat Down Video.

But maybe in jail he can get the speech therapy he obviously needs:

A bouncer who studied sword fighting and ninjitsu, adopted a Japanese surname and urged himself to become a “monster in the most positive way” was convicted yesterday of two 2005 murders but acquitted of a third.

The bouncer, Stephen Sakai, 32, was surrounded by 16 court officers as the verdict was announced in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. He rose, thrust his arms back to accept handcuffs and paced to the holding pens, the picture of discipline.

The split verdict, one juror said, apparently reflected acceptance of some of Mr. Sakai’s testimony, a wide-ranging account of conspiracy by police assassins who coveted his private security business. Though he was born Stephen Sanders in Queens and has no passport, Mr. Sakai testified in a thick, wavering accent, transposing L’s and R’s.

“It was laughable,” said the juror, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I brought it up multiple times, and the rest of the jury really didn’t see it.”

The verdict closed the last chapter in the improbable history of the Sweet Cherry, a sleazy strip parlor that lasted a decade, in defiance of the authorities, on the docks of Sunset Park. The scene of various assaults and a documented in-house narcotics trade, the club closed last year after Mr. Sakai’s arrest.

. . .

Mr. Sakai’s bizarre performance on the witness stand captivated the courthouse. All week, lawyers and stenographers, clerks and officers argued: Was his accent real? Why wasn’t it shared by his mother when she spoke out from the gallery? How did he develop it without leaving the country? Plans to test him with a Japanese phrase or two were abandoned for lack of volunteers.

“My dog will rip you apart”:

Tim, an 85-pound, 3-year-old German shepherd with a kindly demeanor, was taking his 7:30 pm constitutional near the corner of Clinton and DeKalb avenues with companion Nancy Peterson on Nov. 15 when a man walked by with what appeared to be a thick gold chain concealed under his jacket.

“And then I heard this woman behind me screaming and crying,” recalled Peterson, the president of the Fort Greene PUPS. “I don’t know how, but I knew he had stolen something from the woman.”

And then Peterson got mad.

“I thought, ‘How dare you do that to somebody in this neighborhood!’”

And so Peterson and Tim raced off after the apparent mugger, with Peterson screaming, “My dog will rip you apart!”

. . .

Afraid for his life, the young man dropped the item . . .

Two things — one, isn’t it “easy” to allow smuggled goods into the country if you set up a sting to do it? And two, when you think about it, the fact that an undercover customs agent can pose as a bribe-taking longshoremen’s union official and stay undercover sort of says something about the longshoremen’s union:

Federal officials announced the arrests yesterday of 10 people they said were members of an international smuggling gang that illegally shipped millions of dollars’ worth of counterfeit apparel into the New York region from factories in China, often in falsely labeled shipping containers.

The smuggling scheme, involving fake merchandise with a retail value of more than $200 million, was one of the largest smuggling operations ever discovered, the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan said.

The charges, revealed yesterday in a complaint issued in Federal District Court in Manhattan, followed a yearlong investigation in which an undercover customs agent posed as a longshoremen’s union official and took nearly $500,000 in bribes to let the illegal shipments pass through the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal in New Jersey.

The undercover agent had nearly daily contact with the smugglers, who included Chinese manufacturers, a customs broker and a husband-and-wife team that owned a Brooklyn trucking company, officials said.

While officials declined to say how the investigation started, the complaint said that in August 2006, Michael Chu, 70, of Manhattan, approached the undercover agent and asked for his help in moving the illegal containers through the port. Mr. Chu paid the agent $100,000 in cash bribes to smuggle about 20 containers carrying fake consumer goods with a value of more than $24 million, the complaint said.

The apparent ease with which the containers — 40 feet long, 8 feet wide and 9 ½ feet high — were moved through the port with false bills of lading highlights frailties in the security system at the region’s ports, said Michael J. Garcia, the United States attorney in Manhattan.

Anyone will tell you that when consorting with jailbait down at the park, it’s considered proper form to offer her a ride home afterwards:

As it is, Christopher Coppinger’s callousness after a 13-year-old girl performed a sex act in a South Beach park contributed to his prison sentence.

Coppinger, 18, of Bay Terrace, was sentenced yesterday to 10 months in jail under a plea agreement last month in which the troubled teen admitted to attempted second-degree criminal sexual act.

He and his friend Jason Talanquines, 18, were caught with two underage girls at Ocean Breeze Park in August.

Justice Leonard P. Rienzi granted Coppinger youthful offender status, which frequently indicates probation. The judge based the jail term on Coppinger’s criminal record, the youth of the two girls and “your failure to give a ride.”

. . .

Prosecutors charged that Coppinger and Talanquines picked up the two adolescents at the Grasmere train station, then drove to a wooded area in Ocean Breeze Park, where the girls serviced them. When Coppinger refused to drive the girls home and left them at the park, the 13-year-old girl called 911 and reported the incident.

There’s a new transparency in police investigations these days:

Since Thanksgiving week, a luxurious sport utility vehicle disfigured by bullet holes has been blocking a bus stop on Union Street in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, several local residents and store owners said.

The driver’s side seats of the Audi Q7 are draped with black and yellow plastic, the rear window is shattered, and it appears that some dried blood is on the back seat. The four bullet holes on the driver’s side back door are marked with police evidence labels.

“Something like this doesn’t make residents feel safe,” Nate Shaw, 38, who had previously noticed the vehicle while walking with his 4-year-old daughter, said. “My two sons would probably think it’s cool, but I think having to explain it got shot up would be worrisome,” a 40-year-old carpenter from Carroll Gardens, Greg Paul, said. “Why doesn’t the police department have more space to store shot vehicles?”

. . .

“An officer drove it into the spot and it has been there for at least two weeks,” the manager of Francesco Pizzeria, which has large windows facing onto the street where the car is parked, Anthony Caravello, said.

The vehicle was confiscated in connection with a homicide investigation, police said.

On October 6, an unknown number of suspects riding in the Audi shot at Andre Garcia in front of 66 Sullivan St. in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, which shares a police precinct with Carroll Gardens.

Garcia, 24, who was shot multiple times in the stomach, was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.

The “power problem” plaguing Lexington Avenue trains during rush hour last night was on account of this nitwit:

Subway service on the East Side was disrupted for nearly two hours yesterday after an above-ground thief turned tunnel rat to make his getaway.

The thug robbed a street-cart food vendor on 116th Street and Lexington Avenue and dashed into the nearby No. 6 station at about 3:45 p.m., sources said.

He then ran straight for tunnel and headed uptown, as cops ran toward him on the tracks from 125th Street, the sources said.

Local and express service was halted between 96th and 125th streets during a manhunt that included two K9 units.

Yet the perp still got away. There are at least three levels of tunnels in that stretch of subway, and he managed to “get lost” in them.

Service was restored a little before 6 p.m.

Hate crime charges dropped in Staten Island case:

Hate-crime charges were dropped yesterday against two white men accused of attacking a black man in Mariners Harbor earlier this week, as several black teenagers appeared in Stapleton Criminal Court to vouch for the suspects.

Police arrested Daniel Avissato, 24, of Westerleigh and Mark Vincent Maleto, 21, of Elm Park on a slew of charges, including assault as a hate crime, but the men were arraigned only on second-degree gang assault charges yesterday.

. . .

Attorney John Murphy, in his defense of Avissato, called on several black teens in the courtroom to vouch for Avissato’s character.

“The accused young man I represent is not a racist,” Murphy said in a prepared statement he distributed outside the courthouse. “The anecdotal evidence of his living and working in harmony with diversity is overwhelming.”

Murphy called upon a 14-year-old boy, who declined to give his name, to recount a time when Avissato offered the teen a ride during bad weather.

After authorities raided a Bay Ridge pharmacy that allegedly sold steroids, it turns out that some NYPD officers were customers:

As many as 30 cops were rounded up last night and ordered to an NYPD medical facility in Queens to take drug tests as part of a steroid investigation that has rocked the department, sources told The Post.

Six officers are under investigation for alleged steroid use after a raid on a Brooklyn pharmacy yielded information indicating they may have received improper prescriptions, police said in an official statement.

The statement said no officers have been arrested and no arrests are anticipated.

But the cops sent for drug tests will be placed on modified duty. They are assigned to precincts in Brooklyn and Staten Island, and one is a high-ranking member of the NYPD, The Post’s sources said.

The investigation stems from a Monday-night raid on Lowen’s Pharmacy in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.