Accused Ponzi schemer Philip Barry, Brooklyn's Bernie Madoff, tries to keep confession out of court

The man dubbed Brooklyn's Bernie Madoff is fighting to keep a damning note out of his federal trial that admits what the feds say they already know.

"I'm just a crook running a Ponzi scheme," accused fraudster Philip Barry jotted down on paper and later inadvertently turned it over to investigators.

Charged with fleecing $40 million from mostly blue collar investors, Barry's lawyers insist the note was just a series of random talking points, not a confession.

In the note, he writes that he may be "incompetent" but also reveals he may have lined up several new deep-pocket suckers to invest in his money-losing Ponzi enterprise.

"The only $ I have comes from new investers [sic]," Barry scibbled down, desperate to convince them not to turn him in.

"You said all you care about right now is your family and your family's money, wouldn't it be better then if I obtained a tiny percentage of (the new investors') assets to replace yours and your family's investments?"

"Why then put something on the Internet which could sabotage that?" Barry warns in the memo to himself. "If you pile on and contribute to the run on the bank and crisis atmosphere, then it will quickly become a regulatory matter."

Defense lawyers say it was one of thousands of documents he turned over last year as he tried to stave off a criminal indictment. Barry operated out of a storefront in Bay Ridge where most of his clients were blue- collar types promised 10% returns on their investments.

His legal mouthpieces say the notes are not what they seem.

"Mr. Barry swears ... that he created the document to gather his thoughts and to prepare himself for conversations with disgruntled investors," lawyers Lisa Hoyes and Michael Weil argue in court papers.

"It may mean no more than that he took investors' criticisms to heart or is an introspective person willing to look at himself critically. ... There is significant risk that the jury will wrongly construe Mr. Barry's statement as some kind of confession," the lawyers say.

At the time he handed over the memo, Barry was representing himself in bankruptcy proceedings and allowed agents to search his office.

Free on $500,000 bail, he recently filed a defamation suit against the Securities and Exchange Commission for accusing him of operating a mail order pornography business.