Academy Award-winning actress Tatum O'Neal, who chronicled her recovery from drug addiction in a shocking 2004 memoir, was busted Sunday for buying crack on the lower East Side, cops said.

The 44-year-old daughter of actor Ryan O'Neal was nabbed after she was spotted handing money to a street dealer - three blocks from where she lives on East Broadway, police said.

A stunned O'Neal initially told cops she was "doing research for a part," a police source said. When cops searched her and found two bags of drugs - one with crack, one with regular cocaine - and an unused crack pipe, she changed her story, sources said.

"I've been clean for a long time," the teary-eyed actress pleaded as she asked cops to give her a break, sources said. "Today was the first time I was relapsing, but you guys saved me! Can you let me go?"

A narcotics team was conducting a drug sweep on the lower East Side when O'Neal walked up about 7:30 p.m. and solicited the drugs, police said.

She was arrested in front of a Chinese restaurant on Clinton St., between Grand St. and East Broadway, and was taken to the 7th Precinct stationhouse.

O'Neal was charged with seventh-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance, a misdemeanor, police said.

The alleged dealer, Allen Garcia, a 33-year-old man who told cops he's homeless, was also arrested and charged with felony sale of a controlled substance.

O'Neal's arrest comes eight months after she publicly warned Britney Spears to seek "recovery and get her disease of addiction together."

"I relate to her and feel really sad for her," O'Neal told "Entertainment Tonight.

"I did everything that she doesn't want to do."

At 10, O'Neal won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in "Paper Moon" as Addie Loggins, a child con artist.

She married tennis star John McEnroe in 1986 and had three children before they divorced in 1992. In her memoir, "A Paper Life," O'Neal revealed that her addiction to heroin in 1995 led to her losing custody of her children to McEnroe. She also claimed that her mother, Joanna Cook Moore, was a raging alcoholic and that her father physically and emotionally abused her.

Ryan O'Neal called the charges "malicious lies told in order to become a 'best seller.'"

O'Neal, who took a turn on the hit TV show "Dancing With the Stars" in 2006, wrote in her book about her long road to recovery.

"For years I could hardly look people in the eye," she wrote. "Now that I've burned away the painful debris of my life, I feel courageous and open, less a celluloid image of a woman than purely, authentically Tatum."