Family carries on late veteran’s fight against bogus NYC speeding tickets

He has traveled the highway to heaven, but friends and family of a Westchester veteran have been fighting to clear his last bogus speeding ticket.

John J. Maffucci sued the city in January after he started getting speeding tickets from the Big Apple in the mail — even though the then 90-year-old hadn’t set foot in the five boroughs in years.

But the Korean war veteran and one-time Westchester County corrections commissioner died at the age of 90 on May 12, before he could resolve the matter.

So his loved ones took up the charge.

“I know from first hand knowledge how upset my father was that he be charged with speeding through school [zones] at various locations within the City of New York,” Jacalyn Sala, Maffucci’s daughter, said in court papers. “It is very important to me and my family that my father’s reputation be restored.”

Maffucci made a career of catching bad guys. He was a probation officer who worked his way up. He served as state commissioner of parole before spending decades as a private investigator, author and screenwriter.

The tickets started arriving in the mail about 16 months after Maffucci lost his license plate in a January 2020 car accident. He reported the accident and the lost plate to authorities, but continued to get tickets even after providing that evidence to judges in New York City, so he went to Manhattan Supreme Court in a bid to get them overturned.

J.C.Rice

J.C.Rice

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It was clear to him, Maffucci said then, that no one in the city was checking state records.

“I’m at his mercy,” Maffucci fumed to The Post at the time of the scofflaw using his plate. “I watch the mail every day thinking, ‘Oh God, what is he going to do today?’”

He’d received at least five tickets for speeding in school zones and by the time Maffucci filed his lawsuit, he’d beaten them all but one — an October 2021 $50 fine for going 45 mph in a Staten Island school zone.

The city eventually agreed to settle the case, withdrawing the tickets and including a statement that “Maffucci did not in fact commit any of the violations alleged,” according to court papers.

The settlement is in the midst of being finalized, said attorney Donald Lee singer, a longtime friend of Maffucci’s who represented him for free.

“We’re in negotiations to settle,” said Singer, adding, “I lost a good friend.”