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SPACE INVADERS PAY DIDDLY SQUAT

Sometimes crime does pay.

Nearly 30 years after an eclectic group of poets, performers, anarchists and artists illegally occupied a burned-out East Village tenement, they’ve officially become a Manhattan co-op.

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Last Monday, the group signed off on the final paperwork allowing them to legally call their one-bedroom apartments home. They’re now owners of the Bullet Space building — named after the art gallery and community space on its ground floor.

The cleaned-up, five-story cooperative at 292 E. Third St. is a far cry from the rat-infested hellhole into which they first moved in the 1980s as squatters. Back then it was so derelict, its owners chose to walk away rather than pay taxes. Now the city says it’s worth $2.2 million, and real-estate experts estimate its market value between $4 million and $5 million.

To its shareholders, the building was always a coveted prize.

“What is it they say, possession is nine-tenths of the law? That was our motto,” said artist Rolando Politi, an original Bullet Space squatter.

Politi lived through the building’s intense rehab, when residents refused to vacate out of fear they’d lose their toeholds in the neighborhood.

“The city would tell us to leave and let them make the renovations, but who’s to say we would ever have gotten back in?” Politi said from his fourth-floor unit, where he’s fashioning street trash into a June 21 art exhibition.

The building’s reddish façade no longer bears the graffiti marks and cracked windows from its past, when the city battled squatters fiercely.

Hundreds of people forced their way into abandoned East Village buildings and claimed ownership, until firefighters and cops showed up to clear them out.

In 2002, the city made the controversial decision to sell Bullet Space and 10 other East Village “squats” — including one where actress Rosario Dawson grew up — for $1 each to a nonprofit housing group, the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board.

The city told the group and residents they had to bring the building up to code before the residents could officially take ownership. As part of the city’s low-income program, residents get a 40-year real-estate tax exemption.

In exchange for the tax break, residents have to keep the building low-income, meaning units can only be sold at below-market rates to buyers who meet city income cap requirements. There’s also a “flip tax” residents pay for any profit on the sale of a unit–a minimum 10 percent has to go back to the building.

Bullet Space is the first one to make it through the conversion process begun in 2002. Another former squat, The Umbrella House, is expected to go co-op soon as well.

Some critics say the plan rewards illegal behavior.

“I’m outraged that property would go to squatters,” said former Port Authority Executive Director George Marlin, who ran for mayor in 1993 on the Conservative Party line.

“Look at all the hardworking people who are losing their homes right now. Is it fair for squatters who badgered the city into giving them a building to now be able to profit from it?”

Bullet Space residents paid for their building’s rehab, and carry a $668,759 mortgage taken to cover the cost of renovations.

Thirty years ago, when developers walked away from the dilapidated site, squatters moved in and contributed about $50 a month for basic costs. Now those fees are up to $614, said 67-year-old poet John Farris, who lives on the fourth floor.

Farris, who invested significant sweat equity and personal money into the building, remembers the days when the toilets were “bucket flush” and heat came from wood stoves fueled by flammable objects hauled in from the streets.

“We had water, but not much else,” said the poet, who will publish his first novel this fall. “The winters were rough.”

gotis@nypost.com