Somewhere in this hardened city, a few hearts must be aching for Dennis (the Pig) Kozlowski. After all, the poor fellow can't even get cash from an ATM machine, and so today he is scheduled to depart for the austere confines of Rikers Island.

He still might avoid this fate, but he shouldn't really fear it. In its steel tiers and sour exercise yards, Dennis the Pig, former chairman and CEO of Tyco International, might meet a few fallen executives from other conglomerates, such as the Latin Kings or the Bloods and Crips. If so, he could try to explain his predicament: All his assets have been frozen by those who are prosecuting him, and therefore he cannot raise cash to make bond. Poor fella, someone might say. Bad stuff.

But it might be harder to explain what he did with the money he allegedly robbed from Tyco International and its stockholders. If only he had cut down the overhead of his life. If only he'd gone downtown. If only he had found his way to a place like Canal Self-Service, at 395 Broadway, on the corner of Walker St. This is an old-fashioned variety store (now called a discount store), and it's a marvelous place, full of bargains and surprises. If only Dennis the Pig had known of its existence, he could have saved untold thousands in expenses, thus reducing his need to steal.

For example, Kozlowski once spent $2,200 on a wastebasket and charged Tyco, according to a company report. At Canal Self-Service, he could have bought the top-of-the-line wastebasket for $29.95. Kozlowski spent $6,000 on a shower curtain. At Canal Self-Service, he could have gotten a heavy-duty shower curtain - with a window - for $5.99. That is, for the money Kozlowski spent, he could have bought a thousand shower curtains.

Allegedly using Tyco money, he spent $2,900 on coat hangers. At Canal Self-Service, that sum would have bought him about 1,450 coat hangers at two for $3.99. These are good, sturdy wooden hangers. They would look perfectly fine in any closet.

Sewing kit deluxe

At one point, while furnishing his new Fifth Ave. apartment, Kozlowski spent $6,300 on an Italian sewing kit, an item that Fred Goetz, who runs Canal Self-Service, didn't have in stock yesterday. "Figure $15 tops for a sewing kit," Goetz said.

Kozlowski laid out $445 of purloined money for a Venetian pincushion shaped like a turtle. At Canal Self-Service, a pincushion goes for 99 cents. And on the corner of Canal and Broadway, you can get an actual turtle for a dollar.

But Kozlowski lived in a world where life is performed more often than it is lived. You buy all sorts of expensive stuff because it's expensive, not because you love it, and the reason is simple: to impress the people who come to visit. Drug dealers with expensive cars and gold chains do exactly the same thing, which is why they get caught, and why Dennis the Pig will find people like himself in the yard at Rikers.

He shares something else with common hoodlums: the endless need for more. More money. More stuff to show. More swindles. I've known hoods with $2,000 in their pockets who couldn't resist stealing a Hershey bar from a candy store. Kozlowski had plenty of legitimate money. Three years ago, he earned $30,644,179, including $1,350,000 in salary and a $3,200,000 bonus. That is, in an apparently legal way, he took in more money than the entire population of Rikers Island.

But according to prosecutors and Tyco's own internal report (prepared by big-time lawyer David Boies), that wasn't enough. In cahoots with Tyco's then-chief financial officer Mark Swartz, the Pig allegedly concocted an immense scheme that netted the two men $600 million. About $170 million was stolen directly from Tyco, the rest through fraudulent stock sales. Other Tyco officers were drawn into the escalating swindles. The indictments are now flowing, and the Manhattan district attorney says Kozlowski and others turned Tyco into "a personal piggy bank."

Among other frauds, prosecutors said, Kozlowski bought works of art (some of them good, but overpriced, because the dealers must have seen him for the mark he was). He said they were for Tyco's offices in Exeter, N.H. But they went to the walls of the $17 million Fifth Ave. apartment while empty boxes were shipped to the company headquarters in Exeter, to establish a paper trail of deliveries. This helped him avoid $1million in sales taxes.

Two nice spreads

Along the way, Kozlowski got himself a $5 million home in Nantucket, Mass., and a $30 million compound in Boca Raton, Fla. Under Florida law, any property a felon owns in Boca simply can't be seized. You can go off to do some time (usually brief), and when you come home, there's the spread, with the white columns, the bougainvillea, the palm trees and the swimming pool. There's only one problem: Socializing can be difficult, since ex-cons usually can't associate with known criminals. Still, it's a better place for criminal retirement than the postprison destinations of most of the boys at Rikers.

And who in Rikers could ever brag about the great wedding party in Sardinia, where Kozlowski spent a cool $2.1 million to celebrate his marriage to a new wife? This was the soiree where he hired somebody to make an ice sculpture of Michelangelo's David. Vodka streamed into crystal glasses from the poor fellow's penis. The Medici would have blushed.

There are no ice sculptures for sale at Canal Self-Service, but when told that Kozlowski once spent $1,650 for a notebook, Fred Goetz pointed out that he could have bought the most expensive notebook in the store for $7.99.

And what if Kozlowski would show up to buy some things: What would Goetz try to sell him?

"Hey," he said, cutting off the speculation, "we only take cash."