Mark Madoff should've given back ill-gotten gains from

Mark Madoff might have found salvation if he had been working for tips instead of giving the guys who park his Range Rover four $100 bills for the holidays, as if nothing had changed.

All that was different this year was that he usually did not appear at Mercer Parking with an envelope until four or five days before Christmas. He instead appeared on Friday morning.

"I think he go on vacation, that's why," parking attendant Anthony Diaz said Saturday.

The timing suggests that what the 46-year-old Madoff did later was not an act of sudden desperation in the middle of the night. He must have already been planning it when he handed 37-year-old Diaz a red envelope.

"He say, 'Thank you guys for taking care of my car,'" Diaz recalled.

The $400 was tucked into a cheerful card with cut-outs of penguins and a little bird. A message was written in a small, feminine hand.

"Thank you for the help this year.

Mark and Stephanie."

Madoff then returned to his $6 million apartment on the other side of Mercer St., a guy who had made sure to tip the parking attendants, but ultimately showed little concern for his 2-year-old son.

Even as he tucked the boy in for the night, Madoff apparently knew how he was going to mark the second anniversary of his father's arrest.

How could he have looked at this beautiful bundle of new life and not have understood the impact it was sure to have through all the years to come?

Why did he have to use the dog's leash, the one they used to walk the family Labradoodle, Grouper?

Did he not consider how all this would play out in his son's psyche, as well as that of his 4-year-old daughter, who mercifully was away with her mother?

Could he not have just used a few more $100 bills to check into a hotel?

The only possible answer is that he simply did not care, just as he felt no compulsion to renounce the ill-gotten gains he had received from his father, just as nobody in his family has felt compelled to return the stolen millions to the victims.

If he had, if he had gone to work doing something manifestly honest like parking cars instead of continuing to live like a prince and handing out $100 bills that were really not his to give, then he might have rescued himself.

He could have sold the $6 million apartment along with the $7 million beach house and whatever else he had and given the proceeds to his father's victims.

He could have started anew with only what was legitimately his, which is to say nothing at all.

Everything he made from then on would have been legitimate and would have had nothing to do with Bernie Madoff, who stole more than all the thieves in the city's history combined.