Jurors at the racketeering and murder trial of Alphonse (Allie) Persico won’t hear about it, but back when the mob scion was beginning to flex his mob muscles he had a big interest in FBI agent R. Lindley DeVecchio and his since-discredited accuser, Linda Schiro. 

During the mid-1990s, when Persico (right) was heir-apparent to his jailed-for-life old man, Carmine (Junior) Persico – still the family’s official boss – he was meeting pretty regularly with Schiro, whose murderous longtime lover, Gregory Scarpa, died of AIDS in June of 1994.

Before Brooklyn District Attorney Joe Hynes dropped the case against the ex-agent, Schiro testified that she “deserved” money from Scarpa’s rackets for her 30-plus years of service to him, and that Persico said he’d help her get it. Schiro never admitted a quid pro quo for Allie’s help, but after her initial meetings with Allie that October, she first told of corrupt dealings between DeVecchio and Scarpa, according to FBI documents obtained by Gang Land.

“Amazingly,” said DeVecchio attorney Mark Bederow, “on December 7, 1994, she completely contradicted a statement she made to the FBI in August in which she said she knew nothing about any corrupt relationship between Lin DeVecchio and Greg Scarpa.” 

In December, Schiro contacted FBI agent George Gabriel and reported that in addition to receiving information from Scarpa, DeVecchio also took part in

criminal activity with Scarpa, according to an FBI report about her account. 

DeVecchio alerted Scarpa of “potential rats” to stay away from, had told Scarpa of imminent arrests of several crew members, and had accepted jewelry from a bank burglary that Scarpa and his crew had pulled off in the 1980s, according to the report.

“Obviously, that strongly suggests that in exchange for Allie Persico’s help in collecting Greg Scarpa’s money for herself, she agreed to help the Colombo crime family by smearing Lin DeVecchio,” said Bederow.

In a knee-jerk reaction to the stunning end to the DeVecchio trial, federal prosecutors quickly moved to stop the defense from raising any aspect of it at the retrial of Persico and his top aide, John (Jackie) DeRoss, which began last week at the federal court in Central Islip. The first case last year ended with the jury hung 10-2 for conviction.

Trial judge Joanna Seybert agreed that the charges and outcome of the DeVecchio trial – he was charged with four murders from 1984 to 1992 – were

irrelevant, and could confuse the jury. She declared the entire case off limits at the retrial. Prosecutors  most likely wanted to prevent the defense from bringing out Judge Gustin Reichbach's post-trial criticisms of the FBI's use of murderers as informers.

In addition to the suspect information Schiro gave about DeVecchio, however, Schiro (right) did furnish some solid information to the FBI, including some that relates to Persico’s current indictment, in which he is charged with the murder of underboss William (Wild Bill) Cutolo. 

On February 21, 1995, for example, Schiro told her control agent that “word on the street is that Wild Bill Cutolo is acting underboss of the Colombo family,” according to an FBI report obtained by Gang Land.

Four years later, when Persico was about to begin a short prison stretch, according to federal prosecutors, he murdered Wild Bill to prevent his longtime mob rival from taking over the leadership of the crime family during Allie’s incarceration. 

So much for those best laid plans. Cutolo’s body has never been found, and the feds have uncovered no evidence linking anyone to his death, but Allie has been incarcerated ever since. And even if he beats this case, he’s not due out until 2011. 

Except for the first few days of testimony, the current trial of Persico, 54, and DeRoss, 70, (left) will be pretty much of a rerun of the case that ended in a mistrial last year.

A total of eight mob turncoats are set to testify at the trial. One, mobster Joseph (Joe Campy) Campanella, a longtime Cutolo ally, could take the stand as early as today.  

One major difference, were the appearances of Cutolo’s daughter, Barbara Jean, and his widow, Marguerite, who concluded her testimony yesterday. The feds hope that their testimony – despite  the combative, seemingly deceptive account by Marguerite Cutolo about the whereabouts of $1 million of her late hubby’s cash – was a giant step towards establishing that Wild Bill is actually dead, and not on the run as the defense contends.

A less crucial prosecution foray, but one that was contested by Persico’s attorney Sarita Kedia, involved the government’s successful effort to inform the jury that Cutolo’s demise coincided with the city’s 12^th annual Fleet Week celebration.

To do so, prosecutors jogged a seemingly innocuous new fact from its leadoff witness, auto mechanic Joseph Gorga, and then came up with a legal

mechanism to permit the trial judge to essentially corroborate the detail from Gorga, the last known person to have seen Cutolo (right) alive.

The new factoid: Gorga saw ships in the Narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island when he was driving along Shore Road in Bay Ridge after dropping Cutolo off on 92d Street at around 3 PM on May 26, 1999, the day Wild Bill disappeared.

Gorga, who was also the leadoff witness last time, never mentioned the ships at the first trial.

But prodded by assistant U.S. attorney Jeffrey Goldberg, Gorga said he noticed the ships as he drove Cutolo’s Ford Expedition along Shore Road on his way back to his garage on 65^th Street, where he was going to work on it to repair a sticky gear shift.

When Gorga stepped down, Seybert told the jury that Fleet Week in 1999

officially began at noon on May 26 when “a parade of ships began in the vicinity of New York’s Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.”

The ships included “vessels of the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard” that sailed “into New York harbor for a week’s stay,” said Seybert, noting that her words on the subject was a “judicial notice” that was “not subject to reasonable dispute.”

Over objections by Kedia, Seybert agreed to take judicial notice of Fleet Week after prosecutors filed copies of eight-year-old press releases by the Navy and then-Mayor Giuliani that detailed the planned festivities.

The judicial notice not only backs up Gorga’s recollection of the time and place that he last saw Cutolo, it also jibes with the account by Marguerite Cutolo. She testified that her husband told her that he was going to 92d Street to meet Persico that fateful afternoon.

Gang Land was surprised to read a story by Daily News reporter William Sherman this week that quoted DA Hynes as saying he had no idea that Schiro had spoken to reporter Tom Robbins and me about DeVecchio.  

It’s one thing for Hynes to try to minimize the impact of the DeVecchio debacle on his career – the DA said it was more like a “bump in the road” than a legal “black eye” – but it’s a little strange for Hynes to claim to Sherman that he “never knew” that Schiro had spoken to us.  

After all, four months ago, Gang Land filed a six-page affidavit that related all the circumstances surrounding Schiro's discussions with me in 1997, and forwarded a courtesy copy of the affidavit to Hynes’s office, information The Daily News reported in its August 3 editions.