The Genovese crime family – grudgingly admired as “The Rolls Royce of organized crime” by law enforcement – is about to get a new CEO, Gang Land has learned.

He is none other than Mario Gigante, older brother of imprisoned, crazy like a fox boss, Vincent (Chin) Gigante.

Mario Gigante is 80 – an age at which most still surviving wiseguys are winding down. But sources say that next month he’ll step up to serve as his brother’s keeper, when he completes the “supervised release” provisions of his latest federal conviction.

Gigante went to prison in June 1998, serving three years for tax charges in a plea bargain that covered decades of labor racketeering in the waste hauling industry. He completes an additional three years of post-release supervision requirements on June 25. Starting this summer, he’ll be free to meet with anyone he chooses, including family wiseguys.

The last time Mario Gigante made news it was an embarrassing episode for a number of influential people. Convicted of loansharking, he received an eight year sentence in 1984. But former Senator Alfonse D’Amato lobbied then-U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani to reduce Gigante’s sentence. Then, Genovese

turncoat Vincent (Fish) Cafaro alleged that, at Chin Gigante’s request, he approached Roy Cohn, the late power broker, to “fix” a Judge to get Mario’s sentence cut by two years.

After it was reduced in 1985, Cafaro said, he delivered a $175,000 “payoff” to Cohn in three installments, dropping off the final $50,000 with Cohn’s law partner, Thomas Bolan, a member of D’Amato’s judicial screening committee. This all surfaced in 1989, when Giuliani first ran for mayor. It caused a ruckus, and an investigation, but no charges were ever lodged.

Unlike Peter Gotti, who served a similar caretaker role for his late brother John, the elder Gigante brother is a gangster in his own right, one who has done hard time and earned respect from his peers during a career that spans more than 50 years.

“There’s no comparison,” said one law enforcement official, “one was a garbage man, the other controlled the entire industry (in the northern suburbs) for decades.”

Indeed, Peter Gotti worked as a New York City sanitation worker before his brother brought him into the Gambino family. Mario, (right) a “made man” for decades, controlled the private sanitation industry in Westchester, Rockland and Orange counties from the 1950s until 1996, when the feds nailed him for racketeering. The charges included extortion, arson, beatings and

bribery. In 1998, the feds dropped those charges, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the IRS, paid a $40,000 fine and agreed to pay $1.2 million in restitution. 

Two weeks ago, in a comprehensive report about organized crime in New Jersey, the State Commission of Investigation (SCI) listed Mario as acting family boss, but Gang Land sources say he won’t begin to handle the responsibilities until he can meet more freely with other top mobsters.

The SCI report, and other sources, say Lawrence (Larry Fab) Dentico, Dominick (Quiet Dom) Cirillo (left) and John (Johnny Sausage) Barbato are a “strong” core group of top family gangsters currently serving as a committee doing Chin Gigante’s bidding.

The SCI cautions that the “old mob,” led by the powerful Genoveses, “is rebuilding” to regain a “share of the underworld empire they dominated until its dismantling by prosecutions and infighting in the 1980s and 1990s.”

Its size – the largest in the country – and a diverse nucleus of labor racketeering schemes in the demolition, recycling and asbestos removal industries, are only part of the reason for the family’s dominance, according to the SCI. The family is “committing more sophisticated crimes, such as computer fraud, stock/securities fraud and health care fraud,” often partnering with Russian and Cuban organized crime groups.

Meanwhile, as Mario Gigante waits in the wings, he keeps on trucking. “He’s doing the best he can,” said his lawyer Richard Asche, to meet his commitment to pay $1.2 million in restitution, as required, adding that he wasn’t sure what his balance was. Told that the official court docket sheet indicates that his client was paying it off at $200 a month, about $15,000 so far, Asche said: “He’ll be paying that as long as he lives.”

It doesn’t measure up to Abu Ghraib prison-style torture, but the procedure known as “administrative detention” as practiced at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn on Genovese tough guy Liborio (Barney) Bellomo sounds downright inhuman.

It began Mar. 31, right after a “legal visit.” When Bellomo, a former acting boss whom the feds and the NJ SCI expect to rise to the top when he gets out in a few years, returned to his unit, he was told to pack his things. Without any explanation, he was handcuffed, and taken to a Special Housing Unit.

The next day, he was visited by his lawyer, Flora Edwards, and then by his family, according to court papers the attorney filed in Brooklyn Federal Court, noting that Bellomo had never been hit with any disciplinary charges in eight years,  and charging that the new conditions were dehumanizing, degrading, and cruel.

“In order to downplay the psychological impact of my removal from general population and to spare my family additional stress and anxiety,” said Bellomo in an affidavit, “I remarked that it could be worse since I am in a regular cell and not a maximum security cell which has a light on 24 hours a day and 24-hour camera surveillance, depriving the occupant of sleep and of any privacy whatsoever.”

That was apparently the wrong thing to say. For whatever reason, as soon as his family went home, it was maximum security, lights, camera and action, so to speak, 24/7, until last week. That’s when MDC Warden Michael Zenk caved in, and returned Bellomo to general population, rather than try to justify his actions to a judge.

Two months ago, Ronald (Monkey Man) Filocomo, a former resident of the MDC now confined across the East River at the MCC (Metropolitan Correctional Center), scratched out a note pleading for Gang Land to “write something nice” about him and squash a “rumor” that he had tried to cooperate against Joseph Massino, the Bonanno boss whose racketeering trial starts next week.

Gang Land had heard rumors about the note, dated March 24, but didn’t actually see it until very recently when it turned up in the court file. For some reason, the letter had been sealed by Judge Nicholas Garaufis. How it wound up in the file, we have no idea, but Monkey man, here it is:

“I was never involved with that,” wrote Filocomo, (right) who faces 30 years for murder. He is not cooperating against Massino, (above, left) or anyone else for that matter.