Those are only the latest in a series of busts of large-scale smuggling rings supplying the city's illicit cigarette market. That market got a big boost last year when Mayor Bloomberg hiked the city's cigarette excise tax from 8 cents to $1.50 a pack.

That hike, coupled with increases that brought the state excise to $1.50 per pack, have pushed the price of legal brand-name cigarettes to more than $7.50 a pack. As a result, smugglers can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars with every truckload of cigarettes.

Also suppling the city's illicit market are thieves who target businesses that distribute and sell cigarettes. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms reports a dramatic rise in tobacco theft in the metro region in recent years. Law-enforcement officials as far away as Virginia and North Carolina also report a rash of heists that they believe were committed to supply Gotham's booming black market for butts.

This wave should have been no surprise: The same thing happened after the state doubled its cigarrette tax in the late '60s. That tax hike - to 10 cents a pack, roughly 57 cents in today's dollars - encouraged organized crime to ruthlessly push aside competitors and quickly dominate the smuggling racket. By 1967, officials estimated that a quarter of the cigarettes smoked in the Empire State were bootleg. The problem was thought to be even more pervasive in the city.

The doubling of the state excises, with added state and city hikes in the late 1960s and 1970s, also spurred crime against legitimate businesses. The chairman of a state commission that probed the illicit tobacco trade told Congress that the tax hikes had created a situation where workers in the legal sector were "confronted almost daily with the risk and dangers of personal violence which are now inherent in their industry."

To the dismay of other states, the crime wave rapidly spread beyond New York's borders. Across the country, trucks carrying cigarettes were hijacked and businesses selling them were robbed to supply New York's black market.

State and city officials experimented with a variety of ways of reigning in the tax-induced crime, including mandatory prison sentences for cigarette bootleggers, expanded police powers of search and seizure and more regulation of the industry. But none of those measures had much effect.

Finally, by the mid 1970s, with tobacco-related crime rising and governments and business losing millions to bootlegging each year, a special state commission recommended that the city's cigarette tax be repealed. Gov. Malcolm Wilson enthusiastically embraced a trial version of that recommendation, saying: "One major incentive to organized crime is the high New York City cigarette taxes, piled on top of the state tax, which have made that city the promised land for cigarette bootleggers."

While the governor fought hard for repeal of the tax, parochial politics scuttled its passage. But escalating violence - including a series of homicides resulting from turf battles and efforts to silence witnesses - discouraged lawmakers from further tax hikes in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This allowed the era's high inflation to reduce real cigarette-tax rates by more than 40 percent, which sapped the profitability of bootlegging and so reduced smuggling and related crime.

But lawmakers' memories are woefully short when it comes to the harmful effects of taxation. By the late 1980s, state cigarette taxes were again on the rise - prompting Robert L. Shepherd of the state Department of Taxation and Finance to note in 1989, "In New York, it is literally more profitable to hijack a cigarette-delivery truck than an armored truck."

Today, at least half of the cigarettes smoked in the city have somehow avoided state and city excises. And it's not just the mob: ATF officials report street gangs and terrorist groups are now also involved in the city's illicit cigarette trade.

Mayor Bloomberg stands by his historic tax hike: "We all know that smoking kills. And increasing the cigarette tax saves lives." But, as history so clearly demonstrates, it isn't that simple. The widespread availability of cheap cigarettes via the black market undermines the mayor's claim that hiking cigarette taxes reduces smoking.

Worse, his paternalistic effort to protect smokers from themselves has placed other Americans at greater peril.

Patrick Fleenor, former chief economist of the Tax Foundation, is author of the study "Cigarette Taxes, Black Markets, and Crime," published by the Cato Institute, www.cato.org.