Fearful of a takeover of their party organization and of the ouster of their leader, state Senator Serphin Maltese, some Queens Republicans accused the Bloomberg campaign of attempting a vengeful “power grab” in the borough, which has the city’s largest number of Republicans. They are framing the battle as nothing less than a struggle for the soul of the state Republican Party.

The furor centers on a powerful Queens political family, whose patriarch, John Haggerty Sr., was chief counsel and adviser to a former Senate majority leader, Warren Anderson of Binghamton, and was an influential leader of the Queens Republican Party. Mr. Haggerty’s sons, John Jr. and Bart, are longtime activists in Queens Republican politics. The brothers founded the Forest Park Republican Club, an unofficial GOP organization in Forest Hills that endorsed the mayor last month, and are described by Mr. Maltese and other party leaders as “insurgents” who have consistently opposed the borough’s Republican establishment.

The younger John Haggerty – until March a legislative aide to Governor Pataki – is also a deputy campaign manager for Mayor Bloomberg, responsible for shoring up Republican support for the mayor in Queens. The mayor lost the borough GOP’s endorsement in February to a former City Council minority leader from Middle Village, Thomas Ognibene, who is close to Mr. Maltese.

A spokesman for the Bloomberg campaign, Stuart Loeser, said Mr. Haggerty is coordinating the campaign’s ballot petitioning efforts in the Republican primary. Given the vast financial and human resources to which Mr. Haggerty thus has access, Queens Republicans fear an escalation of what they describe as the Haggerty family’s long-standing attempts to seize power in the borough.

Since the mid-1990s, Queens GOP leaders said, Bart Haggerty has run unsuccessfully for a county committee position in the 28th Assembly District, which includes Mr. Ognibene’s neighborhood. But this year, they said, he has the advantage of his brother’s institutional connections and resources, plus the Bloomberg name.

According to Queens Republicans, the many volunteers carrying petitions for the mayor are also carrying petitions for Bart Haggerty, who is making another bid to unseat one of the district’s two GOP leaders, Richard Metzger. Each Assembly district has two party leaders – one male, one female.

According to Mr. Loeser, Mr. Bloomberg appears on petitions only with incumbent Republicans at the level of borough president and City Council races – although he does not appear on ballot petitions with Dennis Gallagher, an incumbent Republican councilman from Middle Village who backs Mr. Ognibene.

But the spokesman said Bloomberg volunteers may also choose to circulate petitions for candidates for the district leader posts.

Bart Haggerty declined to comment yesterday, referring press inquiries to the Bloomberg campaign.

Further infuriating Queens Republicans is the Haggerty brothers’ efforts to unseat the other leader of the 28th District, Marguerite “Marge” Adams, 87, who has worked for the Queens GOP for more than half a century. That challenge, Mr. Maltese said, “puts the onus on the mayor to at least indicate that he is not behind this drive to reward years of faithful service with a primary challenge on an Assembly district level.”

While Queens Republicans said they were upset by John Haggerty’s efforts against Ms. Adams and in behalf of his brother, they express more concern at what they see as his self-promotion.

Mr. Ognibene and others said it was a long-understood premise of Queens politics that John Haggerty sought leadership in the borough GOP.

“John Haggerty is someone who had a father who was one of the most powerful people in the state of New York, and he wants to achieve that level to prove to his father he’s a worthy individual,” Mr. Ognibene said.

Indeed, the Bart Haggerty campaign is probably part of a larger effort to fill the lower levels of Republican leadership with Haggerty and Bloomberg sympathizers, because those party committee members will determine whether to replace Mr. Maltese with John Haggerty, Queens Republican regulars said.

“Whoever controls the county committee positions will control who becomes chairman of the county,” the vice president of the Rockaway Republicans, Stuart Mirsky, said.

In Rockaway, Mr. Mirsky said, the loyalists the mayor’s forces were trying to install were strangers to local politics.

“We were astonished to find Bloomberg volunteers coming around carrying the names of people we’d never heard of before,” he said.

Wariness of the purported effort to elevate John Haggerty to the Queens GOP chairmanship spread to the 30th Assembly District, where, the president of the Woodside Republican Club, Patrick Hurley, said: “People are apprehensive about any challenge to Maltese and obviously we have our guard up.”

“I’ve heard that Bloomberg is very upset and vindictive about the fact that Queens endorsed Tom Ognibene, and he’s interfering and trying to put his own people in there,” Mr. Hurley, a strong backer of Mr. Ognibene, said.

Mr. Maltese said it was possible the mayor was being exploited by John Haggerty for the purposes of the latter’s political ambitions.

“I would only say that the mayor may be unaware of what his hireling is doing,” the senator said, but he acknowledged that Mr. Bloomberg had reason for disagreement with the Queens GOP.

“Certainly, we’re a burr in his side. We’re gadflies,” Mr. Maltese said.

Other leaders in the county, however, framed the Haggerty push as an attempted coup by the mayor, which they decried as an attempt to quash the last bastion of real conservatism within the party.

Mr. Hurley said there was a “fault line” in the state Republican party that put Mr. Bloomberg, the Haggertys, Mr. Pataki, and the state Republican chairman, Stephen Minarik, on one side, and Messrs. Maltese and Ognibene, the Queens Republican leadership, and “grassroots” Republicans statewide on the other.

“People are very concerned about the future of the party … they’re adamant that the party has to go back to first principles and mean something again,” Mr. Hurley said.

“I think Bloomberg and Pataki are going to have a very tough fight on their hands, in 2005 and 2006, within the party,” Mr. Hurley, who is also a member of the Queens GOP executive committee, said, adding that the alleged Queens Haggerty takeover was a strategic move in advance of those elections.

Mr. Metzger, too, cited strong popular opposition to the Bloomberg and Pataki agendas. “Most of the people I speak to are rank-and-file Republicans, real Republicans, conservative Republicans, and they are a little upset with what’s going on in City Hall right now: property-tax increases, the gay-marriage issue, not seeing the president of the U.S. take the oath,” Mr. Metzger said, referring to the mayor’s decision to skip President Bush’s inauguration.

Mr. Loeser disputed these assessments.

“The mayor has the support of the overwhelming majority of Republicans in this city,” he said. “Four out of five Republican county committees, and a very significant number of district leaders in Queens, are working together to re-elect a mayor who has brought jobs to their communities, crime down, and reform and accountability to the schools after decades and decades of finger pointing.”

John Haggerty, Mr. Loeser said, would not issue a comment to the press.