Metro

NY’s foster mon$ter

The city yesterday agreed to pay nearly $10 million as the first installment in the legal settlement of one of the most disturbing child-abuse cases in recent history.

The money is for 10 victims of Judith Leekin, who began mistreating foster kids 30 years ago in Queens, then moved to Florida, adopted 11 special-needs children from New York and tortured them — while collecting more than $1 million in government subsidies.

Convicted in 2008, she got a 20-year prison sentence after her serial abuse of society’s most helpless was catalogued in several trials. One autistic boy, now an adult, spent his childhood “essentially in a bucket, where [he’d] eat, sleep, urinate and defecate,” according to a letter used as evidence.

In 2008, her victims’ attorneys slammed New York state’s Office of Children and Family Services for lax oversight that they said enabled Leekin. “The process to foster and/or adopt children in New York during this time,” they charged, “was easier than buying a used car.”