Here’s a switch: Gand Land has learned that Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano, the dandy former acting boss of the Bonanno crime family, has agreed to wear a wire for the feds. 

Sorry if we made you spill your morning espresso. It’s not that kind of wire. Basciano hasn’t “gone bad,” as one wiseguy might say about another becoming an informant. Vinny Gorgeous, desperate to avoid a possible death penalty result at his upcoming federal murder and racketeering trial, has volunteered to strap on a set of electronic wires connected to a lie detector.

His lawyer, Ephraim Savitt, hopes the test results will convince the Justice Department that the notion that Vinny Gorgeous ever plotted to kill three witnesses, along with the judge and the prosecutor at his last trial is “preposterous,” as he puts it. 

It’s not the first time a Bonanno big shot has used a polygraph exam – the results of which are not usable at trial – to make his case to the government. Ex-boss Joseph Massino (left) did the same thing in 2004 when the feds didn’t believe him when he told them that Vinny Gorgeous was seeking to whack a federal prosecutor.

Basciano will have his encounter with a court-authorized polygraph machine today. He will be questioned about a list of five names written by Basciano and given to the feds by an informer. Prosecutors say it was a hit list, and have kept him caged 23 hours a day since last year. The list has become a key factor being weighed by a Justice Department panel that will decide whether Brooklyn prosecutors will seek his execution at trial. 

“The allegations are preposterous,” said Savitt, noting that the presiding judge at

Basciano's prior and upcoming trial, Nicholas Garaufis, (right) found the list of names to be “inconsistent with the government notion that this was a real hit list.” 

In court papers, Vinny Gorgeous has offered an explanation for the list that carved new ground in Mafia lore. He claims that he wrote the list and gave it to an inmate whose mother was a Santeria priestess, in the hope that she could cleanse the five persons of any animosities they had against him during the trial.

“There’s a big difference between some Voodoo mumbo jumbo and a good old-fashioned gangland-style killing,” said Savitt, who hired noted expert Paul Minor, a former FBI chief polygraph examiner to conduct the lie detector test. 

The stakes are much higher for Vinny Gorgeous than they were for Massino.  

Massino flunked his polygraph test, but until Gang Land disclosed that many months later, no one but the feds knew it, and he was able to convince them to let him wear a wire despite the test results. In the end, he managed to snare Basciano in conversations that the feds say will prove that he plotted to kill prosecutor Greg Andres. 

But if Vinny Gorgeous were to fail his test, the Justice Department will surely find out about it, and liable to be more than a little upset about it.

A Brooklyn federal judge who cut a backsliding mob turncoat a major break two years ago has signaled that he won’t be fooled a second time.

Judge I. Leo Glasser didn’t say exactly what he has in mind for Frank Smith. (left) But at a proceeding earlier this month, the veteran jurist uttered the two most dreaded words a defendant can hear when his sentencing is being discussed: “upward departure.” 

Glasser’s words left little doubt that the sentence he imposes for probation violations stemming from two recent grand larceny arrests will be a lot tougher than the sweet one year of house-arrest that he gave Smith in 2005 for crimes that included five murders. 

The slayings included the bizarre 1987 contract killing of the elderly father of a former federal organized crime prosecutor. 

In a colossal blunder, Smith and two cohorts had stalked and killed George Aronwald, a slight, 78-year-old retired civil lawyer instead of his broad-shouldered, 46-year-old son, William. The younger Aronwald had been marked for death by Colombo mobster Joel (Joe Waverly) Cacace. (right)

Twenty months ago, Glasser stated that he knew he would be “very severely criticized” for giving Smith a lenient sentence, but was going to do so anyway because without his cooperation Cacace, (right) the family’s underboss, would not have been brought to justice for ordering the slaying.

At a brief proceeding two weeks ago, an obviously perturbed Glasser alerted Smith that he intended to “upwardly depart” from the recommended guidelines

of four years if Smith were found guilty of three violations of the conditions of his original sentence, which included five years of probation.

At the session, Smith, 40, pleaded guilty to leaving the state where he was living under the federal Witness Protection Program without permission. He pleaded innocent to stealing a load of Plasmas TVs in Illinois in November, and to switching a price tag on a Plasma TV at a Florida store in December.

Glasser (left) rejected a request by defense lawyer Robert Race that Smith, who has been incarcerated for two months, be released on bail. The judge set a status conference for next month, after an appearance in Florida where Smith faces grand larceny charges. Similar charges in Illinois were dismissed last month.

Since different standards of proof are involved, dismissals of state court crimes often have little impact on federal probation violations. Assistant U.S. attorney Joey Lipton declined to discuss the government’s position in the federal case.

Aronwald, (right) who initially argued that Smith should receive 20 years, sees no reason why he shouldn’t get that now. That would still be a substantial reduction from the life sentence he now faces for violating the terms of his cooperation agreement, and his lenient sentence.

“He is a professed criminal,” said Aronwald, “a thug who has no respect for the law and has thumbed his nose at the judge who gave him a lenient sentence as well as the government that made a deal with him.”

When Glasser gave Smith house arrest, the judge took into account that the former mob associate had served 15 years in prison on drug charges for which he had been wrongly convicted by state narcotics prosecutors in Manhattan.

All things considered, you might think that Smith, who survived a contract on his own life by being in prison from 1988 to 2003 – not to mention that he had killed five men by the age of 21 without a peep from the law – would have been happy to move on and let bygones be bygones. (Murder victim Frank Santora at left.)

In fact, at the time, Smith paved the way for his drug conviction to be vacated by stipulating that he would not file a civil suit seeking monetary damages for his years behind bars.

Smith either changed his mind, or had his fingers crossed when he made the deal. In a malicious prosecution lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court, Smith is seeking $20 million in damages from the NYPD and the City of New York.

Attorney Race, who has said that while Smith was incarcerated, he acquired a “debilitating disease which is permanent and conceivably fatal,” put it this way to Gang Land: “The waiver wasn’t valid. The bottom line is that there are some rights that you cannot waive. What they did to him was illegal, and he deserves compensation.”

Reviews of the first two episodes of The Sopranos began appearing online and in the newspapers this week. For a special pre-season scouting report that Gang Land filed last week, check out The New York Sun's online edition.