“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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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[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.”

“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.

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