He's ready for crime time, feds

Charles Hurt - Inside Washington

WASHINGTON -- Hey, feds, do you need a road map?

Well, here it is. The charging documents in the sprawling House investigation into the shady, double-dipping deals of Charlie Rangel reads like a crime novel.

Granted, it is not the seedy street crime of most summertime page-turners. It is the flashy, white-collar variety.

The most obvious place for federal prosecutors to start in building a criminal case against Rangel might be the failure of the longtime top tax writer to properly report and pay his own federal taxes.

Rangel has admitted that he failed to pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income from his beach property in the Dominican Republic.

Normally, when somebody fesses up that they failed to pay taxes on $75,000 in income, that is just the beginning of the nightmare, not the tidy end.

Rangel turned his tax returns over to the ethics committee but the committee acknowledges that ensuring that federal tax laws are followed is not their thing.

Rangel's wild explanations about his Punta Cana property -- blaming his wife and claiming it was all Spanish to him -- have always raised more questions than they answered.

Does it take Dick Tracy to wonder if Rangel really did net only $75,000 in rental income on property he's owned for 20 years?

Who gets less than $4,000 in rent a year off their beachfront property in the Caribbean?

Raising even more troubling questions are the fudged financial-disclosure forms he filed with the House clerk year after year after year.

Based on his own admission, more than $600,000 in outside assets and income were left off those public reports. So was $3 million in various business transactions over just a five-year period.

Was Rangel trying to hide something from the public?

Were there connections to legislation before his committee that he did not want the public making?

Since he has such a hard time keeping track of his income and all his business dealings, does Rangel have even more secrets he is keeping from us?

Even the corrections he filed on all of his corrupted financial-disclosure forms drew scorn from the committee.

Rangel "has failed to establish that the amendments to his Financial Disclosure statements for calendar years 1998 through 2007 were submitted in good faith," the panel wrote.

If that is not the smoke of a burning fire, then nothing is.

And the committee itself acknowledged serious questions in its exhaustive report that even it could not answer.

"With respect to the allegations that [Rangel] violated federal tax law and federal criminal law, the Committee lacks jurisdiction to consider and rule on those allegations and they are hereby dismissed," the panel wrote.

But it is certainly not outside the jurisdiction of the feds.

churt@nypost.com