He just wants to prove he was born — before he dies.
A Bronx native is suing the city to force it to confirm what his mother told him as she was dying — that he had been “sold” to her as a baby by neighbors.
“I was a black-market baby,” said Albert Higgins, 67, a married father of five who filed the unusual suit against the Health Department in Manhattan Supreme Court this week.
“There was no adoption. There was money exchanged, and I was just handed over.”
Higgins, now living in upstate Sullivan County, wants city and federal authorities to recognize him as “Garry Swingle,” the name he says he was given by his birth parents and for which a birth certificate exists, then issue him a birth certificate as Albert J. Higgins, the name he has known his entire life.
The suit is the latest move in Higgins’ three-year fight to prove his origin.
It began when his application to renew his commercial driver’s license was rejected because he could not provide a birth certificate.
There is no certificate for an Albert J. Higgins born to a Morris Heights couple in 1945, despite his being baptized, voting and paying taxes under that name, given to him by his “parents.”
In 1995, Higgins’ dying mom, Mary, revealed her late husband, Albert, “purchased me as an infant from a neighbor who had an unwanted pregnancy,” his suit claims.
“She gave me a very old handwritten note which contained my real name, Garry Edward Swingle, and the names of my parents, Dorothy J. Herman and Harold Swingle” — both of now dead — the suit says.
He told The Post: “I kind of knew it all along. I didn’t look like part of the family.”
Ill with hepatitis and cirrhosis, he has lost his job, seen his house foreclosed on and knows that, even if his suit succeeds, he’s unlikely to work driving again.
Even so, he’s suing because “I’d like to say, here, I am Albert Higgins, born in 1945, son of Albert and Mary.”
The city Law Department said it is reviewing the case.