Roughly a dozen guard booths would be established at street corners where pedestrians or vehicles are most likely to enter the area, while the western lanes of Church Street would be reserved for emergency vehicles.

All service and delivery trucks for the trade center site would be directed to an underground bomb screening center at the south side of the complex. Tour buses would drop off and pick up passengers at Liberty and Greenwich Streets. But no bus would be summoned from the underground security center and garage until all the passengers are present, a requirement that could leave large clots of tourists waiting for stragglers.

The plan is designed to prevent a third terrorist attack on the site, said Paul J. Browne, deputy police commissioner for public information, and, he said, would have little effect on either traffic or pedestrians. It is among the more striking features of the Police Department’s overall plan for Manhattan security, which also includes measures to photograph every vehicle entering Manhattan, and scan its license plate, and then keep the information on file for at least a month. The department hopes to have the plan in place by 2010, by the time Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg leaves office.

Landlords, company executives, public officials and some urban planners acknowledged the need for security at ground zero, but worried that the procedures would undermine the effort to reweave the trade center site into the city’s fabric. They fear that the proposed traffic restrictions could create tie-ups in a congested neighborhood and discourage corporate tenants from renting space, or shoppers from visiting the stores in the area.

. . .

The security zone would extend west from Church Street, between Vesey and Liberty Streets, and include portions of several adjacent blocks.

Lured by fake ads in Arabic-language newspapers, the smugglers bought $6 million in contraband smokes from New York tax and federal undercover agents.

And a top elected official now warns that the untaxed cigarettes could be funding terror overseas.

All the profits of the smugglers — whose sales to hundreds of area stores exceeds the business of most legitimate wholesalers — “was shipped overseas to the Middle East,” said Deputy Commissioner William Comiskey of the state Taxation and Finance Office.

“We know that the money wasn’t kept here,” said Comiskey, whose agents conducted the elaborate sting, noting that “it’s a possibility” that the smugglers’ multimillion-dollar operations, which also include sales of guns and counterfeit tax stamps, could be at least partly funding terrorism.

. . .

Noting that the suspected smugglers ducked paying $10 million in New York taxes, [Rep. Peter King (R-LI)] added, “If this money is going overseas, and this money is going to Hezbollah and Hamas . . . we’re talking about life and death, we’re talking about a very serious terror issue.”

The sting led to the arrests of 21 out of 27 men named in money-laundering, trafficking and conspiracy indictments unsealed this week. Most of them are originally from Yemen and Jordan.

The case, which is being prosecuted by federal authorities in Virginia, was set in motion in early 2007 by New York state Tax and Finance agents, who set up a warehouse in King George County, Va., and stocked it with cases of untaxed cigarettes.

The warehouse was extensively wired for audio and video surveillance.

In the end, the small cardboard box was found to contain nothing more dangerous than about 20 hardcover and paperback books on myriad topics, including Middle Eastern culture and the Islamic religion.

Jacqueline DeJesus found the package, which had a shipping label from Riyadh, on the front stoop of her Princess Street home and immediately grew concerned.

“It had my eldest daughter’s first name on it and my address and that was it,” she said. “I’m Puerto Rican and American and have no family in Saudi Arabia, so I have no idea how it ended up here.”

Her daughter is married to a man who emigrated from the Middle East. But Ms. DeJesus said she wasn’t expecting any mail from overseas.

At about 7 p.m., cops evacuated Mrs. DeJesus, her family and neighbors, and stopped games in progress on the nearby West Shore Little League and Babe Ruth League fields.

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.