Judge falls upwardp

Booted, he’s back in sleazy Dem deal

Civil Court Judge Noach Dear — who was booted from the Criminal Court bench three years ago after making insensitive racial remarks and headscratching rulings — is up for a promotion thanks to a backroom political deal.

Brooklyn Democrats voted Thursday night to make Dear a candidate for the higher state Supreme Court in a horse trade between socialreform and establishment factions of the party.

Orthodox Jews backing Dear, a Borough Park political fixture for three decades, agreed to drop their opposition to Debra Silber, Brooklyn’s first openly lesbian Civil Court judge, whose term is up, sources said. In return, reformers who had been touting Silber for five years held their noses and approved Dear’s can didacy, after blocking it a year before.

The deal disgusted some Democrats.

“The reformers are a bunch of whores. The reformers should be better than this,” said one city Dem who believes Dear should not be near a courtroom. “I should just move out of the state now.”

The 61yearold jurist was booted from the Criminal Court bench in July 2012 by Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman after Dear ruled that cops must prove a beverage contains alcohol through lab tests — rather than using the sniff test — before handing out opencontainer tick ets, and asserting that he had never arraigned a white person for public drinking.

In August 2012, creditcard companies demanded his recusal from debtcollection lawsuits in civil court because they said he dismissed nearly every company claim in favor of alleged deadbeats, saying the creditors couldn’t prove the identities of the debtors.

Despite his résumé, several hundred party loyalists signed off on Dear and four other candidates at their judicial convention at St. Francis College Thursday.

Dear, who skipped the vote, did not return calls seeking comment.

The nomination amounts to a coronation; Brooklyn Republicans also voted Thursday to crossendorse the Democrats’ judicial slate.

As a Supreme Court justice, he would make $167,700 and handle bigger criminal or civil cases, with a term that runs through 2030. Dear is a political survivor. As a city councilman in the 1980s, Dear pulled down between $20,000 and $60,000 from a charity he directed that flew his family to Israel, Europe and the Soviet Union.

Dear was the subject of a federal complaint alleging a sixfigure campaign donation from straw donors after mounting two unsuccessful congressional campaigns in 1998 and 2000.

And he also once organized a junket to South Africa that the whitesonly Johannesburg City Council funded, drawing the ire of his colleagues.

County political leaders said Dear is fit to wear the robes.

“He was recommended by the vast, vast majority and he has done a really decent job,” said Brooklyn Democratic Party attorney Frank Carone.

Reformers shrugged off Dear’s ascension.

“Noach pretty much had the votes no matter what,” said Democratic District Leader Josh Skaller. “We might not have gotten Debra without the package. It was pretty much a calculation.”

The reformers are a bunch of whores ... I should just move out of the state now

— Democratic source move to promote Judge

Noach Dear (right )