Abe Hirschfeld, who died yesterday at 85, lived the prototypical immigrant rags-to-riches story – as if on acid.

A Jewish refugee who made a fortune with free-standing, open-air parking garages and later in health clubs and other real estate transactions, and went on to be a perennial candidate for elective office, Hirschfeld seemed, at least in a limited sense, to embody the American dream.

But there were also convictions for tax evasion and for plotting to have a business associate murdered, as well as accusations he had attempted to put out contracts on the lives of a state Supreme Court judge – and on his own daughter.

On a lighter note, there was the attempted takeover of the New York Post in 1993, which culminated in a staff mutiny in which a rogue newspaper produced by a rump staff had the headline “WHO IS THIS NUT?” and included a portrait of Post founder Alexander Hamilton shedding a tear.

There was his 1998 offer of $1 million to Paula Jones, who had accused President Clinton of sexual harassment, if she would drop her lawsuit. Hirschfeld later reneged on the payment but, characteristically, took credit for having saved Clinton’s presidency.

In 1999, evidently still enjoying waving cash around in public, Hirschfeld offered $2,500 each to the 10 members of a jury that deadlocked on whether he was guilty of tax evasion, leading to new state legislation prohibiting such gifts.

Erratic and curmudgeonly, Hirschfeld was often sued for neglecting to pay bills. In 1976, Hirschfeld spit in the face of state Democratic leader Stanley Steingut for refusing to back him for Senate. He twice spit on a Miami Herald reporter because of her “lying” reports. At one point, he pocketed a $92,500 down payment from ex-President Nixon on the purchase of a Fifth Avenue apartment after tenants’ protests queered the deal.

Although much given to publicly questioning his own mental health, Hirschfeld never failed to take himself seriously.

In his autobiography “Crazy and in Charge,” he wrote, “I have, at the very least, saved the economy of the United States three times.”

He also took credit for the election of Presidents Carter, Reagan, and the elder Bush, although he regretted the last.

He claimed to have invented the magnetic rubber strip that keeps refrigerators closed, and an electric car engine “that needs no recharging and, of course, no gas to run on.”

“Yes, I am crazy, or meshuga, as my people say,” Hirschfeld wrote. “Everybody should be so crazy. Only if they were, then I wouldn’t be half as rich as I am because then I wouldn’t be so much smarter than everybody else.”

Hirschfeld was born in Poland. With the rise of the Nazis, his family moved to Palestine in 1935. Hirschfeld was in the metal-importing business in Israel, then emigrated in 1950 to America, where he soon found success building parking garages. He credited the garages with stimulating business enough to pull the American economy out of recession.

He later opened the pioneering Vertical Fitness and Racquet Club on East 61st Street and had substantial investments in apartments and offices in the New York area. He also owned property in Miami Beach, where he had a second home – and claimed to have played a major role in the rejuvenation of South Beach.

Hirschfeld served as treasurer for the New York State Democratic Committee in the 1960s and was an important financial supporter of the party and of Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential bid.

In 1974 he threw his own hat into the ring for the first time. Even in that election there were charges of impropriety, when it was alleged he had offered each of his opponents in the Democratic primary, Allard Lowenstein and Ramsey Clark, $10,000 to drop out of the race. Both candidates acknowledged receiving offers of money from Hirschfeld, but Hirschfeld insisted he was offering campaign contributions and just wanted voters to have a wide choice. Mr. Clark won the primary.

Later, Hirschfeld ran, always unsuccessfully, under the moniker “Honest Abe” for Congress, for City Council, for state comptroller, and, in 1998, for mayor of Miami Beach. When, in 1986, he ran for lieutenant governor, Governor Cuomo said: “I only sleep three or four hours a night now. How much sleep do you think I’d get if Abe Hirschfeld was elected lieutenant governor?”

He had slightly more success in Florida, where he won a term as a city commissioner in Miami Beach.

Much of Hirschfeld’s political campaigning seemed a sop to his vanity, and his promises could be nothing less than supernatural. When he challenged Senator Schumer in 2004, Hirschfeld said he had “a plan that in one month will create the perfect school system.” He pledged to eliminate all individual city and possibly state taxes, and said he had a plan “which would after 5764 years create peace in Israel in a few weeks.” His campaign literature added, “As a practical person and as a result of his own experience, Mr. Hirschfeld knows that there are billions of dollars being wasted in the jail system because of mismanagement. Honest Abe has the full solution for this.”

His brushes with the legal system had a similar madcap quality. At one point while he was in prison for putting a contract out on a business partner, Hirschfeld was sued by his own daughter, Rachel, for failing to pay her for a business deal. During the trial, Hirschfeld was alleged to have tried to have his daughter, and state Supreme Court Justice Ira Gammerman, killed by issuing a jailhouse contract.

“I thought he may or may not have developed an interesting judge-shopping technique,” the judge said. He recused himself anyway.

Hirschfeld later called his two years in prison “the best two years of my life.”

Several times Hirschfeld represented himself in court, including during the 1999 tax evasion trial. During the course of that trial, he regaled jurors with his plans to revitalize Yankee Stadium, and he told Jewish jokes. When the state Legislature made it illegal to give gifts to jurors, Hirschfeld took credit for changing “for the better the entire legal system in New York.”

Thus it went with Abe Hirschfeld, a zany roller-coaster ride, a media circus, and a train wreck all in one.

“Sometimes it may seem as if he’s lying,” his wife, Zipora, told Newsday in 1992.”But it’s the way he really sees the world.”

Abraham Jacob Hirschfeld

Born December 20, 1919, in Rymanov, Poland; died August 9 of cardiac arrest after suffering from cancer, at Mount Sinai Hospital; survived by his wife, Zipora; his son, Elie; and daughter, Rachel; eight grandchildren, and a brother, Menashe.