Carlos Gimenez and the Hialeah boletera smile for the camera

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Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez has repeatedly said he doesn’t know the boletera caught red-handed collecting AB ballots in Hialeah this week.

But here is our Golden Boy mayor posing for photographs with Daisy Cabrera at the opening of his campaign office on West 68th Street on July 15. She is the second from left standing next to Sen. Rene Garcia in the bright blue polo, who is standing next to Gimenez. I don’t know who those other two people are between Gimenez and Hialeah Councilwoman Vivian “I’ll Notarize That” Muñoz, who seemed to take great pains to distance herself (take a cue, Mayor) from Cabrera, who has worked on her campaigns as well, by letting them in between her and the mayor. Who knows? Maybe they collect ABs, too.

Like I’ve said a few times already in this blog: If you sleep with the dogs, mayor, you are going to get fleas.

And ticks. And ringworm.

Cabrera was also photographed wearing a Gimenez t-shirt at the Fourth of July celebration in Milander Park — and nobody can tell me that doesn’t mean she works for the campaign. T-shirts are given to campaign staffers and volunteers and Ladra knows there was an official campaign team of both handing out literature that very-important-day-for-candidates at the park. It was one of the more high-profile, high-priority stops on their schedule, which I saw. Logic dictates, then that she was among them.

Gimenez needs to stop denying, denying, denying and start distancing and denouncing.

He can’t continue to say she has nothing to do with his campaign when she obviously does. He needs to own up to it, find out who is responsible — and then distance himself from the diabolical deal he struck with the Hialeah hoodlums. And he needs to do it fast before he loses all credibility.

He’s already lost a couple of votes.

One Hialeah woman posted on my Facebook page earlier this week that she will no longer vote for him because of his ties to the corruption in her city. Another, retired Police Det. Ricky Garcia, was also barred, like Ladra and Hialeah Fire Vice President Eric Johnson (who is so in love with the mayor that he’ll still vote for him), from the unholy alliance celebration at La Carreta.

“Good thing I haven’t mailed in my ballot yet,” Garcia told me in the parking lot, where those prohibited personas non grata — and I say that with honor — were made to wait.

And Ladra herself is considering leaving that box for mayor unchecked in protest — for now, I can vote in November — and hope Gimenez is forced into a runoff. That will give the cops and the State Attorney’s Office time to go through this and determine what really happened — and who is beholden to who — before we decide if we really want the mayor around for another four years (even though he keeps bragging he’ll be mayor til 2020) owing something to the Hialeah politiqueporqueria and Herman Echevarria, too, who apparently brokered the endorsement.

Unless, again, Gimenez takes quick action to denounce these people and their scary tactics. And I mean quick as in before Cabrera and her driver, Matilde Martinez, are charged — which Ladra hears is today. In fact, I think the warrants for their arrests have been signed.

That’s the only way he can save his political soul from the devil.