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Brooklyn, NY - President Bush turned Brooklyn's Isaac Toussie into a poster boy for outrageous presidential pardons, granting, then rescinding, the order in 24 hours.

The mystery is how the administration ignored Toussie and his father's background - a tale of payoff and corruption allegations spanning more than 45 years - in pardoning the son for a massive housing scam.

White House officials did an about-face after they learned - by reading it in the Daily News - the father of scamster Isaac Toussie donated $28,500 to the Republican National Committee.

The rags-to-riches story began with Toussie's father, Robert, who clawed his way out of poverty to build empires in the clothing and real estate businesses.

Although the Toussie family record is filled with suits and scam allegations, as well as the fraud conviction that drew the pardon, it is also a story of triumph and contradiction.

Robert and the now-37-year-old Isaac enjoyed the high life, complete with Rolls-Royces, Bentleys and Jaguars.

Robert Toussie, 67, has made numerous charitable contributions, including $50,000 to New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell.

The Toussies seem to win as many suits as they lose, prevailing against then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in an alleged land sale fraud case, among many others.

It all started with Robert Toussie, who was 7 when he began buying candy wholesale and selling it for a profit to his friends.

At 10, he had a paper route, and at 15, he graduated as valedictorian of his high school class.

Instead of going to college, he joined his older brother in the baby clothes and children's wear businesses - and soon became a millionaire.

From there it was on to business school and then real estate development.

Beginning in 1970, Toussie - later joined by his son - began buying thousands of parcels of land for development on Long Island, mostly in Suffolk County.

He bought the famed 39-acre Chandler estate in Mount Sinai for $500,000 in 1997 and sold it to Suffolk County for $5 million three years later.

That sale triggered charges of collusion with two Suffolk County officials and investigations by Spitzer and the federal government. Robert Toussie emerged unscathed.

In all, the Toussies have developed more than 5,000 parcels of land in an assemblage that reads like a conductor shouting out station stops on the Long Island Rail Road: Amityville, Hauppauge, Port Jefferson Station, Bellport, Center Moriches, Mastic, Manorville.

The big suits against the Toussies involve charges of inflated prices and misleading advertising for some of the Long Island developments and others on Staten Island.

A look at the ads, which appeared in metropolitan area newspapers including the Daily News, shows that with the hindsight of recent mortgage scandals, they are, indeed, too good to be true.

A 1999 ad offers single-family detached homes with backyards on Long Island and townhouses on Staten Island for "only $1,000 down and $999 per month."

"Includes home, land, principal and interest," the ad reads.

Those ads are part of an ongoing class action suit by more than 400 families alleging that the Toussies deceived them into buying overpriced, badly built homes.

It was brought seven years ago in federal court in Islip.

The Toussies have won preliminary rulings in that case, which is pending.