His stars aligned

NYPD ace who busted ’90s Zodiac killer retires

DEPUTY CHIEF Joe Herbert helped bust the city’s Zodiac killer more than 20 years ago, hunted terrorists and once fought off a knife-wielding maniac who stabbed his partner.

But he says his single proudest moment came in August 1986, when he earned his detective’s gold shield.

“It’s the only shield that I used to stare at,” he said. “I stared at that shield. I’d be sitting at home, laying in bed. I couldn’t believe they made me a New York City detective. It was the proudest day of my life.”

Herbert (photo inset), 60, now the head of the NYPD’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, will be walking out of the task force’s Chelsea headquarters for the last time Wednesday, and stepping into retirement.

A Brooklyn native who grew up in Bay Ridge, Herbert joined the force in 1981.

He remembered listening closely to conversations at home between his older brother, a Brooklyn North homicide detective, and one of his colleagues, about how they made their cases. “When I came on the job, I started seeing in real life what they were talking about,” he said.

In 1984, he helped solve the murder of an off-duty police officer shot to death in a private club, when he stopped a gun suspect and noticed the weapon he was carrying looked like a cop’s pistol. The man turned out to be a potential buyer for the slain officer’s weapon, and that led cops right to the killer.

A year earlier, he survived a brush with death, fatally shooting a man who stabbed his partner in the face with a large kitchen knife on Flatbush Ave. at Caton Ave. His partner survived.

Famously, in 1996, he arrested Heriberto (Eddie) Seda — a copycat of the notorious San Francisco Zodiac killer of the 1960s — who terrorized Brooklyn and Queens by shooting seven people, three of whom died.

Herbert served on the task force searching for the murderer (News front page inset), and in a twist of fate, he responded to the scene when Seda holed up in his East New York apartment, shot his half-sister and fired at cops.

“I was going to my first hostage job,” said Herbert, then a sergeant. Herbert realized Seda was the Zodiac killer after coaxing him out of the apartment — when Seda drew “a strange upsidedown cross” on his confession. Herbert saw the letter, and immediately recognized the handwriting and code Seda used.

His career took a new path after Sept. 11, 2001, when he joined the Joint Terrorism Task Force. “My world went from five square miles in East New York to the whole planet, the whole world,” he said. Despite his role on the global law enforcement stage, Herbert said he’s particularly proud of the work he and his fellow officers did in the 1980s and 1990s.

“I'm very proud of being a small contributor to the generation that turned the city around,”he said.