November 29, 2007 -- A crooked cop who acted as driver and armed protector for his drug-pushing brother - making coke deliveries and picking up dirty cash - got a 10-year prison term yesterday.

Disgraced former Manhattan Transit Officer José Torrado, 32, received the mandatory minimum for conspiring to distribute cocaine and marijuana.

"The defendant was an officer of the New York City Police Department," said Manhattan federal Judge Shirley Wohl Kram. "He violated this trust and abdicated his responsibility and he carried a firearm in conducting the criminal activity."

Torrado pleaded guilty in March after surrendering to authorities, and admitted to helping his brother Edwin's Bronx drug crew from 2002 to 2005.

The cop's role in the operation surfaced after his brother and four other ring members were busted in September 2005, when authorities seized 135 kilograms of cocaine - worth about $4 million on the street - that had been stashed behind a false wall of a truck.

"I would like to apologize. I've had time to think in the last two years," said Torrado, who has spent the past eight months behind bars bars at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center and appeared in court dressed in rumpled tan prison togs.