An employee of a major investment bank, who requested anonymity, said the company chef had been instructed to break out bottles of champagne so that the staff could party and swap jokes about “client No. 9.”

Meanwhile, at another giant firm, Merrill Lynch, “everyone broke into cheering on the trading floor,” an employee said. Merrill got socked for hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties, thanks to Spitzer.

In a dramatic jailhouse confession to The Post, livery cabdriver Klever Sailema, 45, said he was only trying to help the infant.

“I feel really bad. It wasn’t my intention to hurt anybody,” a shaken Sailema said from a holding cell in Kew Gardens yesterday. “We did it so that the girl would be well cared for. I just wanted to help.”

The cabby, a father of three from Elmhurst said that he kept up the ruse because “every time I lied I thought it would end there.

“I felt terrible. In my heart I knew it wasn’t right. It was a mistake.”

Sailema allegedly teamed up with the child’s dad, Carlos Rodas, 27, and paternal aunt, Maria Siavichay, to enact a bizarre plot to get rid of the kid, dubbed “Lourdes,” but whose real name is Daniella Perez, after the little girl’s 14-year-old mother said she could no longer handle being a mom, police sources said.

The plot unraveled late Friday night, when a neighbor who spotted the baby girl’s picture in the newspapers called cops.

. . .

Sailema told The Post that Siavichay, a waitress in his neighborhood, asked him for a ride to work Thursday, as she frequently does.

But when he arrived at her apartment at 7:30 a.m., she walked out carrying a baby in her arms along with Rodas, whom he had never met. All three got in the back of the cab.

Sailema initially thought that the baby, whom Siavichay had mentioned before, was sick and therefore Siavichay was taking the tot to work with her.

“The father said, ‘I know you don’t know me, but I need to ask you a favor. Can you take my girl to the fire station?’ ” Sailema told The Post.

Rodas wouldn’t take the child himself, because he “had a problem with the courts,” Sailema said.

“At that point I knew they were talking about bringing her to a safe place,” the cabby added.

Sailema dropped off the dad, a construction worker, a few blocks away and then headed to Queens.

A few blocks from the firehouse, Sailema said, Siavichay became worried because “she did not have [immigration] papers” and asked Sailema to drop her at work and take the baby to the firehouse — Engine 289 in Elmhurst — alone.

Just before 10 a.m., the cabby arrived at the firehouse. “That’s when I invented the story,” he told The Post.

. . .

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said plans are in the works for a victory parade and ceremony to take place on Tuesday following the big game.

Both men attended yesterday’s event, the first time they have been together at a public event since Molinaro went nuclear on his former deputy in the final weeks of Donovan’s recent re-election campaign.

But unlike Martin and Lewis, or Yogi and Steinbrenner, there was no public rapprochement between the two yesterday. They did not speak.

. . .

Molinaro said he didn’t see any incongruity between the theme of yesterday’s event and the feud that he set in motion. “I don’t dislike the man,” he said afterward. “I don’t hate the man. I felt what I felt. It is what it is.”