Manhattan prosecutors are giving credence to the bizarre-sounding “assisted suicide” defense of an ex-con charged with brutally stabbing Long Island motivational speaker Jeffrey Locker — found dead and robbed in his car in East Harlem last summer.

. . .

“This is like a TV movie. You just don’t see this kind of thing happen. The sad thing is, he can’t do it himself. He goes to Harlem and he hires some beleaguered guy from the street, a down and out guy who’s a total stranger.”

The cabbie beat up by thugs dressed as Super Mario Brothers spoke out about his ordeal Sunday and demanded tougher laws against assaults on taxi drivers.

“I was really scared. . . . At the time, I really think I’m going to die,” said Ndiaye Serigne, 48, of Harlem, who was robbed and pummeled by four men dressed as Mario, Luigi and other characters at a gas station.

The only thing cooler than a pool party on a summer night in New York City is a secret pool party.

And the only thing cooler than that, as a few enterprising developers recently discovered, is a secret pool party in a pool made out of a Dumpster on the banks of the Gowanus Canal in industrial Brooklyn.

. . .

“The water’s amazingly fresh, for swimming in a Dumpster,” said Alexis Bloom, a documentary filmmaker from TriBeCa, after doing a few laps. She compared it favorably to the pool at Soho House, an actual urban country club.

It’s one of the most polluted waterways in New York — a fetid stew of oil, sewage and sludge.

But Newtown Creek is paradise for Max Mulhern.

The 47-year-old London-based sculptor is spending part of his U.S. vacation docked at the notorious waterway separating Brooklyn and Queens as part of a quirky family boat trip.

“I like to stay off the beaten path,” Mulhern said on Thursday aboard his 40-foot sailboat. “It leads to much more interesting encounters.”

Keeping his boat tethered to a crumbling cement wall in an industrial section of Long Island City has another key perk: he’s staying in the city rent-free.

Mulhern, an accomplished skipper on an artist’s budget, seeks out the desolate and sometimes very dirty nooks as he travels along the East Coast en route to Maine.

On this, his second such boating trip in as many years, Mulhern has already spent two days docked at another unlikely locale, Coney Island Creek.

Location Scout: Newtown Creek.

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 . . .

A subway dance troupe turned militant on May 25 when the dancers viciously mugged a 22-year-old straphanger on the J train.

The violent attack began when the victim started conversing with the dancers after they finished an acrobatic performance near the Lorimer Street stop at around 3:40 am.

That’s when one of the perps asked the victim if he would like to “see something mesmerizing.”

The victim said yes, so the perp pulled himself into the air on the train’s metal bars and unleashed a powerful kick to the victim’s chest. Two other dancers then joined in the attack and started punching and kicking the victim in the head and body.

The victim called out to the other two dancers for help, but his pleas only convinced the other performers to join in the walloping.

Eventually, one of the perps demanded that the victim hand over his belongings.

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 . . .

There’s no such thing as a bad penny in Barbara Humphrey’s mind.

The Staten Island mom is obsessed with collecting change she finds on the street and blogging about it — and it’s paying off.

With the help of her husband, an Army sergeant, and their two daughters, Humphrey has saved more than $1,000 in three years.

“We find it everywhere,” said Humphrey, who started keeping track of her small-change scores three years ago while waiting for a college class to start.

“I saw a nickel and two pennies on the ground,” she said.

“I thought, ‘Let me start a little blog about finding change.’ So that first day I found seven cents. The next day I found a dime. Then my husband started finding quarters here and there.”

Like his laidoff owner, Louie the 5-pound wonder dog is waiting for work.

Deborah Chusid, 46, lost her advertising job on Sept. 26, another New York casualty of the economic downturn.

If that wasn’t bad enough, when she phoned her ex to ask him to put their 14-year-old son, Jonah, on his health plan, there was another blow. He had lost his job the same day.

Now what?

. . .

Why not put the dog to work? Surely everyone would think Louie — a friendly black-and-white Mi-Ki named after Louis Armstrong — is as adorable as she and Jonah do.

. . .

Like people showbiz, it’s a dog-eat-dog world for animals trying to break in. [Linda Hanrahan, the president of Advertising for Animals and owner of the now departed Toonces the Cat of "Saturday Night Live" fame] advised that Louie not get his hind legs up too high, as the reality is often disappointing.

“I’ll try to get that poor little dog a week’s worth of dog food,” added Hanrahan, noting that most pet owners should not plan on their pooch becoming a meal ticket. Then in a whispered tone, she confided, “If she had a Jack Russell, it’s so much easier.”

The latest sign of the rising cost of everything greets shoppers at the registers of Eli’s fine-food warehouse on the Upper East Side like a slap with a wet fish.

“Attention customers,” the sign reads. “An energy surcharge of 1.8 percent will be added to every purchase.”

Look down at the receipt and sure enough, there it is, right below the totaled items: another add-on that yanks the price of an $8.99 pound of fresh figs to $9.15.

. . .

[Eli] Zabar, whose greenness quotient is such that he uses the excess heat from his bakery a few blocks away to warm his rooftop greenhouses, said that joking was the last thing on his mind.

“I could have easily just raised prices in the store — which we do all the time anyway,” he said.

“But I’m making a statement here. This is to make my customers aware of the differences of running a food business, as opposed to any other kind of business. The infrastructure that powers a supermarket is huge — the perishability, yada yada yada. The ice that keeps the fish fresh. It takes a lot of energy to roast coffee.”