After three rousing performances for the feds in Manhattan, a real life Soprano songbird is primed to make his hometown Brooklyn debut at the racketeering and murder trial of acting Colombo boss Joel (Joe Waverly) Cacace, Gang Land has learned.

Sources say turncoat DeCavalcante capo Anthony Rotondo (right) will be a key witness against Cacace, a 62-year-old career gangster who is charged with four 1987 murders – including the slaying of a 78-year-old Administrative Law Judge, George Aronwald. Cacace is also a key suspect in the 1997 slaying of police officer Ralph Dols, who was married to Cacace’s ex-wife.

All told, the feds will feature testimony from three mob turncoats who will tie Waverly to the murders, according to sources.

On the surface, Rotondo’s testimony concerns what would appear to be the least of Cacace’s crimes: the 1994 extortion of a Greenwich Village sex club. In fact, the shakedown tale will be crucial to the case. More on that in a minute.

For those unfamiliar with late-night goings on in the Village’s meat-packing district in the mid-1990s, the Vault was a much whispered about, and now defunct, coed-sex club that featured chess-playing topless bartenders and hard-core porn on huge video screens.

In 1994, the club’s owner, Janet Carpenter, was allegedly under the protection of the New Jersey-based DeCavalcantes. A family soldier told Rotondo that the

club owner was in trouble because she “had borrowed money from a motorcycle gang (that) was threatening Carpenter,” according to FBI documents obtained by Gang Land.

Rotondo tackled the problem on two fronts, according to a report by FBI agents Nora Conley and Michael Rosanova. He reached out to “Hippie,” the New Jersey president of the Pagan motorcycle gang and told him to “look into the situation;” he also told mob associate Billy Perrotta to investigate.

Hippie came up empty. But Perrotta learned that a rival motorcycle gang had loaned Carpenter $50,000 and “wanted the money that was owed them.”

As Rotondo, a college grad with a degree in business administration who followed his old man into the Mafia, pondered his next move, the answer came when a gang member “approached Perrotta and said that Joe Waverly of the Colombo family sent his regards.”

At a sitdown at a Gravesend, Brooklyn diner, the agents wrote, “Waverly said the motorcycle gang pushed out money for them.” After conferring in a business-like manner, the two lifelong Brooklynites “set up a payment schedule for Carpenter, and the full amount was paid back to the motorcycle gang.”

Wiseguys call the relatively amicable result a “knockdown loan,” one the customer happily agrees to pay rather than suffer a beating or worse. In legal

terms, however, that translates into the crime of extortion, according to the indictment against Cacace. (right)

What makes the Vault episode so crucial is spelled out in court papers. Cacace’s lawyers Michael Macklowitz and Gino Josh Singer charge that the 1987 murders were too old to be included in the racketeering case, since they took place 14 years before 2001 gambling charges that Cacace is charged with.

Prosecutors Patricia Notopoulos, Joseph Lipton and Katya Jestin counter that because the Vault extortion took place in 1994 – seven years after the murders and seven years before the gambling charges – the murders fall well within the ten-year limit between alleged predicate acts (crimes) required by the racketeering statutes.

In other words, in order for jurors to even consider the government’s evidence regarding the 1987 murders, they must believe prosecutors have proven that Cacace extorted money from Carpenter, as Rotondo will testify. The trial begins in September.

If his prior testimony at three trials is a guide – five defendants, all guilty – Joe Waverly will regret sending his regards to Rotondo ten years ago.

Cacace, who was inducted into the Colombo family more than 20 years ago, represented his family at a Mafia Commission meeting in 2000, according to undisputed testimony at the ongoing racketeering and murder trial of Bonanno boss Joseph Massino.

Turncoat underboss Salvatore Vitale (left) testified that the meeting of leaders of all five families took place at the home of longtime Bonanno soldier Louis Restivo (right) and not at Massino’s CasaBlanca Restaurant, as Gang Land reported 18 months ago. Gang Land regrets the error. 

Andrew Filone, the last civilian witness at Massino’s trial, a restaurateur from Milford, Pa., testified about a dinner engagement he had at CasaBlanca a few years ago.

Filone – whose mother-in-law lives in Maspeth – had nothing bad to say about Massino or CasaBlanca, but his recollection seemed to buttress prior testimony that Massino had spent two years hiding out in Northeast Pennsylvania during the early 1980s.

Back then, Filone knew Massino as Joe Russo, a customer who regularly dined at the Milford restaurant he co-owned with his brother Tony. When he visited CasaBlanca, he testified, the man he had known as Joe Russo more than 15 years earlier, came over with a smile, asked Filone if he remembered him, and said, “How’s your brother Tony doing.”

All the evidence is in. Yesterday, Massino (right) heard prosecutor Mitra Hormozi recount the government’s case and tell jurors why they should find him guilty of seven murders from 1981 to 1987 and a litany of other crimes he is charged with committing over the last quarter of a century.

As Massino listens to lawyer David Breitbart try to pick apart the prosecution’s seemingly overwhelming case in his closing argument today, the burly Bonanno boss knows that things can only get worse.

Even if his skilled attorney convinces the jury that the government and its eight key witnesses played fast and loose with the facts, and it acquits him, Massino knows the feds will soon look to kill him, for another murder he is charged with, the 1999 slaying of capo Gerlando Sciascia. That killing occurred after federal laws were amended to include capital punishment for certain murders.

What’s more, Massino surely believes what many legal experts have told Gang Land: that Attorney General John Ashcroft will order Brooklyn prosecutors to bring Massino to trial for Sciascia’s murder and seek the death penalty even if the feds prevail at this trial, and Massino were destined to die in prison.