Lock up your prominent wealthy men!
Accused Upper East Side madam Anna Gristina walked out of jail and into the arms of her family tonight after finally scraping together $250,000 bail collateral thanks to a family friend.
“Thank you, everybody,” Gristina told reporters as she walked out of Manhattan Criminal Court shortly after 9 p.m., ponytailed and blinking in the camera lights, her arm locked tight around her youngest kid, 9-year-old Nick.
The boy presented his mom with a bouquet of red roses; bail bondsman Ira Judelson presented her with a court-mandated ankle bracelet monitor that will let her travel in the tri-state area.
“I just want to be with my family tonight, please,” Gristina said, as the crowd of news photographers surrounded her, her real estate investor husband Kelvin also at her side.
Gristina has been in Rikers since prosecutors pulled her screaming off a Midtown street in February, unable to make her initial bail of $2 million and struggling to post a bond even when appellate judges lowered it two weeks ago to a quarter-million dollars.
“She kept saying, ‘Is it really true? Is it really true?'” Gristina’s lawyer, Norm Pattis, told The Post of the moment she learned she was finally making bail. “Moments like that are why you go to law school,” he added.
Pattis and Gristina faced the microphones briefly before the family sped off to her 200-acre pig rescue farm in upstate Monroe.
“The nightmare of her bond ends today, and trial preparation begins tomorrow morning,” Pattis said.
Judelson — who posted the bonds for Lil Wayne and Dominique Strauss Kahn — said Gristina’s bracelet will allow her to visit her lawyer in Connecticut and court in lower Manhattan.
“I don’t want her going to Queens, near any of the airports, but I feel she’s not a flight risk,” Judelson said. “She wants to be home with her 9-year-old,” he said.
“She’s very nervous,” the bondsman added. “She’s kind of shocked that she is out.”
Gristina had been scrambling to put together a bail package since last Monday, ever since drop-kicking her “family lawyer,” Peter Gleason, because she felt the $250,000 collateral he was offering came with too many strings attached, including his insistence on guiding her media and legal decisions, multiple sources have told The Post.
Gristina almost posted later last week, but a package secured by collateral provided by some of Gristina’s in-laws fell through.
The so-called “Hockey Mom” madam has been stewing in Rikers ever since February, when investigators for the DA’s official corruption office pulled her screaming off a Midtown street.
Prosecutors say Gristina’s Manhattan-based, $2,000-an-hour call girl ring made $15 million over the last decade — and operated with the guidance and protection of powerful Johns and unspecified members of law enforcement.
They’ve flipped her alleged money launderer and two of her alleged call girls to bolster their five-year investigation, which has yet to haul a single john or lawman to court.
Gristina counters that she ran a dating service for married men — and that prosecutors have promised to go easy if only she rats on her well-placed collaborators or clients, which she has refused to do.