Could Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly be considering a dramatic late entry into the mayoral race? With 19 days to go before the campaign finance certification deadline, the chatter that the 71-year-old commissioner will run to replace Mayor Bloomberg reached a renewed crescendo yesterday, insiders tell the Voice.

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The NYPD's stop and frisk campaign led directly to the surge in low-level marijuana arrests, figures released today by the New York Civil Liberties Union show.

For context, marijuana arrests are the top arrest category in the entire stop and frisk program. Last year, five percent--or 26,000--of all stops were for suspected possession of marijuana. Despite the fact that whites use marijuana at a higher rate, blacks by far bore the brunt of those stops--61 percent, in all. Incredibly, just 9 percent of marijuana-based stop involved white folks.

Here's the kicker: misdemeanor law requires that the pot be in plain view, and cops can only stop people they actually see with marijuana, and yet, the drug was seized in just 8.5 percent of the stops, which means cops were either wrong or willfully wrong in the other 91.5 percent.

The numbers, the NYCLU says, "strongly suggest that officers are stopping people for alleged marijuana offenses without any justification."

Out of those 26,000 stops, just over 5,300 resulted in marijuana arrests.

"Despite the NYPD's repeated claim that its stop-and-frisk program is valuable because it targets guns, the facts show that it is much more a marijuana arrest program," the NYCLU says.

Here's a little bit of Upper East Side intrigue: a fancy dealer took it upon herself to double down and sharply increase her profit margin by selling phony paintings and duping the Internal Revenue Service out of millions, federal prosecutors tell us.

The wily Glafira Rosales allegedly hid $12.5 million earned from the sales of "work" by abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning by hiding the cash in secret bank accounts in Spain, the U.S Attorney's office in Manhattan says. If only the IRS was so aggressive with large corporations: See Apple computer's many feathered tax shelters.

The feds busted her in Sands Point, N.Y. (aka F. Scott Fitzgerald's "East Egg" in "The Great Gatsby), early yesterday, and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, ever the man with a pithy quote, called her an "artful dodger" (see Dickens, Charles.)

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Once-powerful Brooklyn Assemblyman Vito Lopez has agreed to step down from his longtime post as his support collapsed this week on the heels of the Staten Island District Attorney's damning report which disclosed the unethical lengths that the legislature's leadership went in trying to hush-up his sexual harassment of staffers.

It is yet another embarrassing turn-of-events in a year that has seen a half-dozen state legislators indicted on a range of corruption charges.

Insisting on his innocence, Lopez said today he would step down at the end of the legislative session, June 20. Lopez claimed he was just pursing a plan to step down at the end of his most recent term in office to run for City Council.

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The race for Brooklyn District Attorney is becoming a bit of a slugfest. First, there was word that longtime Democratic incumbent Charles Hynes' office was getting a reality show right in the middle of the race. Then, Democratic opponent Abe George filed a lawsuit to block the show from airing. Then Hynes' office disclosed a review of 50 old Brooklyn homicide convictions tied to a particular NYPD detective, since retired.

And now, another Democratic candidate, Ken Thompson, wants Governor Andrew Cuomo to name a special prosecutor to do that review instead. "It has become clear that, considering this troubling pattern of prosecutorial misconduct and wrongful convictions, District Attorney Hynes is not capable of overseeing a truly independent review of his own cases," Thompson said in a statement.

Hynes' campaign blasted back with this rejoinder from spokesman George Arzt: "Mr. Thompson's bombast is irresponsible and clearly politically motivated devoid of any knowledge of the facts."

The cases in question involve the work of Detective Louis Scarcella, who has been retired for many years. Previous news reports alleged that the cases included fabricated confessions, improper interrogations, and the use of a prostitute as a key witness in six cases. The conviction in one of those cases, involving a man named David Ranta, has already been set aside, and Ranta has been freed after 20 years in prison. He has alleged that he raised repeated question about the facts of the case and the conduct of prosecutors, but Hynes office ignored him.

Not a huge case, just kind of amusing: Drug dealers went back to the future with a scheme revealed yesterday to deliver cocaine through a pizza delivery service, special narcotics prosecutor Bridget Brennan says. Let's hear it for synergy!

Just kidding. Brennan says there were two dealers arrested, one of whom worked as a delivery man for a Papa John's outlet in Brooklyn. That guy, dressed in his delivery uniform, sold coke to undercover cops some 19 times, including Wednesday night, when he handed over a kilo worth $27,500 to authorities, along with a pizza and chicken nuggets.

Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson is slamming a judge who dropped charges against a police officer in the fatal February 2012 shooting of an unarmed teenager. Meanwhile, the judge blamed the prosecutors for screwing up their grand jury instructions.

"It cannot be said more forcefully that we disagree with the court," Johnson said in a statement. He added he was weighing whether to bring the case to another grand jury or to appeal the decision to a higher court.

Judge Steven Barrett dismissed manslaughter charges against Police Officer Richard Haste yesterday for killing Ramarley Graham, saying that prosecutors erred in their presentation to the grand jury.

Graham's mother, Constance Malcolm, screamed, "They killed my child," as the judge moved toward his ruling from the bench.

After ejecting Malcolm from the courtroom Barrett said, "I regret that there are people who are hurt by this." He said he was required under the law to dismiss the case, but noted that prosecutors could re-file the case with another grand jury.

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If you weren't already convinced that prescription painkiller abuse is a major crisis in this city, the Health Department today came out with a range of shocking new numbers to hammer the point home.

Between 2006 and 2011, citywide overdose deaths linked to prescription painkillers jumped by 65 percent, the agency says, with a jump of 261 percent in Staten Island alone. In 2011, 220 New Yorkers fatally overdosed on pills, including 40 people from Staten Island.

Along with the spike in overdoses, the number of painkiller prescriptions jumped by 31 percent, from 1.6 million to 2.2 million between 2008 and 2011. Most of the increase came from people aged 25 to 34, and over 250,000 New Yorkers or 4 percent of the entire city population reported misusing painkillers.

The full Health Department report is here.

Well, we think it's fair to say that reporters at the Associated Press are none too happy with word that the government secured two months of phone records from the world's largest wire service for some murky leak investigation.

"Yeah, there's a bit of a freak out," an AP reporter tells us. "Clearly, I need to know whether it's specific to me in any way. They haven't told us specifically whose phones are on the list."

In an article on the seizures posted by the wire service, their top executive, Gary Pruitt, called it a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.

When they found out about it, AP officials dashed off a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding the records be returned and copies destroyed. The pages contain information on 20 phone lines with work and home numbers for reporters, incoming and outgoing calls and the length of the calls.

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After three years, Bernie's coming back.

Yes, folks, Bernard Kerik, jails commissioner, police commissioner, alleged adulterer, aborted Homeland Security secretary, tax fraudster and perjurer will emerge from federal prison in two weeks and finish out his four year sentence in a New Jersey halfway house, the Post's Cindy Adams tells us.

And at some point in the near future, Rudy Giuliani's former best pal will begin the second? Third? Fourth? act of his interesting life.

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