The disgraced political operative convicted of bilking then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg out of hundreds of thousands of dollars turned himself in Monday to begin serving 1¹/₃ to four years in prison.
John Haggerty, wearing shorts, a T-shirt, slip-on shoes and a smile clutched a nearly 600-page biography of Benjamin Franklin as he surrendered to correction officers in a Manhattan court.
He will be placed in protective custody, where he’ll have plenty of time to finish the tome on the American founding father.
Last month, Haggerty, 45, lost the appeal of his 2011 conviction for conning Bloomberg into putting up nearly $1.2 million in campaign cash for an Election Day poll-monitoring effort in 2009.
The GOP thief diverted about $750,000 of the funds to buy his childhood home in Queens. He also used more than $15,000 of the mayor’s money to back candidates running for party positions in Queens.
Before Haggerty’s financial misdeeds were exposed by The Post, he was an important player in Bloomberg’s re-election and was highly esteemed by the then-mayor’s campaign team.