John A. (Junior) Gotti always looked up to Nicholas (Little Nick) Corozzo. Junior often sought advice from Little Nick, a veteran Gambino wiseguy who helped the Junior Don run the crime family in the years after his late father – the onetime Dapper Don – was convicted of racketeering and murder in 1992. 

If the feds have their way, Junior will soon be working closely with Little Nick again – this time as codefendants trying to beat a racketeering case that includes the kidnapping and attempted murder of Curtis Sliwa, the outspoken radio host and founder of the Guardian Angels. 

Sources tell Gang Land that in the near future, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office expects to add Corozzo as a defendant to the indictment it filed last week charging Gotti and two family soldiers with taking part in a 1992 murder plot against Sliwa. 

The sources say that New York FBI boss Pasquale D’Amuro had Corozzo in mind when he told a news conference that additional defendants were “likely to be named down the road as the acts charged today may well have been sanctioned at the highest levels of the Gambino hierarchy.”

If so, it will be bad news for Corozzo, who was released from federal prison last month after serving seven and a half years for racketeering. Corozzo went away on that rap after he served on a committee of capos that helped Junior run the

family after his father was convicted of five murders and other charges in early 1992, according to court records. 

As Gang Land has previously disclosed, turncoat capo Michael (Mikey Scars) DiLeonardo (left) has tied Junior and Little Nick – as well as Gambino soldiers Joseph (Joey D) D’Angelo and Michael (Mikey Y) Yannotti – to Sliwa’s shooting.

Gang Land learned yesterday that Mikey Scars, who was inducted into the crime family on the same night as Junior – Christmas Eve of 1988 – and was a member of young Gotti’s crew in the early 1990s, has also implicated Junior in two other murder plots a year before the effort to whack Sliwa. 

At the time, said one law enforcement source, “Junior was really feeling his oats. His old man made him a capo as a wedding present (Married on April 22, 1990, Junior (right) was promoted to capo that June.) and he couldn’t let any so-called half assed wiseguys show him up.”

In one murder conspiracy – it lasted from March 1990 until early 1991, according to the indictment – Gotti plotted to kill mob associate James (Jimmy Easy) Saracco when he refused to heed Junior’s order to take

his gambling, loansharking and fireworks businesses out of Gotti’s home turf in Howard Beach and Ozone Park.

Saracco, then a member of a Brooklyn-based crew headed by late DeCavalcante capo Rudy Farone, refused.

“After months of missing him, four guys in Junior’s crew finally caught up with him on Cross Bay Boulevard and beat him within an inch of his life,” said one source. “They almost killed him and he says they left him for dead.”

Jimmy Easy, now 40, has agreed to testify against Gotti. Sources say Saracco began cooperating with the feds after he was nailed for extortion and other charges four years ago and was facing extra heavy time because the arrest came while he was on federal supervised release from a previous drug case.

Ironically, the drug case stemmed from the same three-year FBI sting operation into truck hijacking that snared Corozzo and 45 others on a variety of racketeering charges including extortion, loansharking and gun sales in 1997.

A year later, on orders from Junior, Yannotti, (left) a member of Corozzo’s crew, allegedly shot Sliwa after he entered a cab on the morning of June 19, 1992 on the way to his talk radio show. Yannotti is also charged with

the murders of a low level drug dealer and a buddy who happened to be with him on Jan. 26, 1996.

D’Angelo, (right) a onetime protégé of Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano, was the wheelman during the Sliwa shooting and took part with Gravano and others in the 1990 slaying of mob connected builder Edward Garafalo, according to the indictment.

D’Angelo, 35, and Yannotti, 41, pleaded innocent and were held without bail pending a detention hearing before Manhattan Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin.

Meanwhile Junior Gotti, who has two more months to serve for his 1999 racketeering conviction, has been relocated from his upstate federal prison to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan and will be arraigned on the new charges tomorrow. Sliwa will attend the proceeding, he said yesterday.

Gotti's attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, said Junior denies each of the allegations and is looking forward to a speedy trial, complete vindication and returning home to his wife and five children.

Sliwa, said Lichtman, is “nothing more than a huckster, a snake oil salesman who wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit him on the ass. His entire being is a lie. He’s admitted that his crime fighting adventures were fabricated by him. His latest nonsense that he is being threatened by John or anyone else is pure fabrication, a pathetic attempt to get his face on TV and his name in the papers. I can’t wait to question him under oath.”

Acting Colombo boss Joel (Joe Waverly) Cacace, (right) whose racketeering and murder trial is set for September, is a health food nut. He takes fish oil pills, and when he has a glass of wine, he eats a mozzarella stick to absorb the sugar. 

Last year, when a task force of cops and agents arrived at his home to arrest him at 6 AM, a specially prepared breakfast was in his refrigerator. 

While retrieving a knife, two shotguns and ammunition from his home, they allowed him to enjoy perhaps the last home prepared meal of his life.

En route to FBI headquarters for processing, however, Cacace told Detective Investigator Robert Intartaglio that because he knew he would soon be arrested and could easily spend the rest of his days in prison, he had been cheating, according to a report by Detective Sergeant Fred Santoro of the NYPD’s Organized Crime Investigative Division.

“I’ve been eating like an animal,” said Joe Waverly. “I almost got everything in except for a lobster. I wanted to eat one lobster before I went in.”