driver-turned union leader (left) is charged with obstruction of justice, extortion, and accepting illegal gratuities from Gatto and three other bus company owners. Trial is set for January 14 before Manhattan Federal Court Judge Kimba Wood. 

Sources say Gatto, 58, agreed to testify against Battaglia after learning that Bernstein, who died at age 86 two months ago, had begun cooperating with the feds and had implicated Gatto in payoff schemes. In August, 2006, Bernstein secretly pleaded guilty to 40 years worth of labor crimes in a criminal career that spanned six decades. 

Back in 1979, Gatto helped eight mob-connected owners secure new bus routes for special education kids outside Staten Island in return for an agreement by the group to refrain from bidding for routes in Gatto’s home base of Staten Island, according to an affidavit by an investigator with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. 

The initial allegations about Gatto’s involvement in the bid-rigging came from Robert Bering, a former Transit Cop who operated several bus companies from 1966 until 1987, when he pleaded guilty to three murders, and began cooperating with authorities. He died in prison in the mid 1990s. 

Bering reported that Gatto had secretly met with three major bus company owners to discuss bids they would make for the new routes, and then shared that information with Bering for use by him and his partners. Gatto told Bering that the meeting

with the three owners was arranged by Gatto’s father, a Gambino associate also named Domenic, the affidavit said. 

Bering’s partners, the affidavit said, included Bonanno mobster Frank Coppa. (right) In 2003, Coppa, the first Bonanno member to break his vow of omerta, detailed his partnership with Bering and disputes his family had with Spike Bernstein “in attempting to assist bus companies that could not afford Local 1181 labor,” according to FBI reports obtained by Gang Land. 

In 1989, based on then-current Board of Education records, phone records and details from two confidential informants, the DA’s office suspected that Bernstein and Gatto had formed “an unholy alliance” that enabled Gatto and two others to “buy out” rival bus company owners “at artificially low prices,” the affidavit said. 

This was accomplished by moving on two fronts to increase labor and other costs of their targeted rivals, and push them to the brink of bankruptcy, the affidavit said. 

Corrupt Board of Ed inspectors were enlisted to deluge the targeted companies with “costly safety violation summonses,” while at the same time, Bernstein (left) began an aggressive drive to recruit the workforce into Local 1811, thereby raising salaries and benefits and increasing company costs.  

The double barreled assault often succeeded – as many as 12 owners succumbed, the affidavit said – because once drivers were organized, Bernstein opted to enforce "the collective bargaining agreement to the letter”

instead of his usual policy of taking cash payoffs to overlook the more costly company expenses mandated by the new union contract.   

The affidavit was used to secure several wiretaps, including one on Bernstein’s home phone, but eight months of electronic surveillance by the DA’s office – as well as a follow up probe by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn – failed to generate enough evidence to prosecute any suspects. 

Citing the failed probes, and the violent background of Bering, Gatto’s lawyer Peter Silverman ripped Gang Land for raising the 1989 allegations. Even though Gatto will testify that he made payments to Battaglia, and Bernstein has pleaded guilty to accepting labor bribes since the 1970s, Silverman said he was considering legal action against Gang Land for “doing a hatchet job” on his client.

Few specifics of Bernstein’s labor racketeering activities are public. Prosecutors Elie Honig and Benjamin Gruenstein declined to discuss them, or Gatto’s expected testimony. 

Silverman denied that Gatto paid Battaglia any bribes, but declined to detail his expected testimony. The lawyer did not dispute that the elder Gatto was a mob associate who met with late Gambino boss Paul Castellano (right) in the 1980s, but said it was a “low blow to bring up his father’s history that goes back more than a quarter of a century.”  

In addition to crediting Gatto’s father with arranging his son’s 1979 meeting with three bus company owners, the affidavit states that during a 1983 meeting at Castellano’s home, the elder Gatto and the late Mafia boss were tape-recorded “discussing Castellano’s dealings with, and payments to, an unidentified union.”

Before moving to the more sophisticated labor racketeering field under Genovese capo Matthew (Matty The Horse) Ianniello, Bernstein was a blue collar hoodlum in the John Gotti mode. Like the late Dapper Don, Spike earned his stripes as a truck hijacker.

According to recently unsealed court documents. Bernstein pleaded guilty to hijacking five truckloads of goods from the 1950s through the early 1970s.

During that same period, Spike also did double duty supervising a bookmaking network for family capo Frank (Funzi) Tieri, who was the first gangster convicted of being a Mafia boss under the racketeering statutes.

Like Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno in 1986, Tieri’s conviction in 1981 was somewhat flawed because he was not the family’s real leader but merely a titular “up front” boss whose role was created to keep the identity of the family’s elected chief insulated from prosecution. 

Vincent (Chin) Gigante, for whom Fat Tony bit the dust in 1986, was later found guilty of commanding his rightful post, and died in prison. Tieri did spare the boss of his era – Philip (Benny Squint) Lombardo [right] – the indignity of being convicted and exposed as Genovese family boss, at least during his lifetime.

After a four-day Christmas break, jurors returned to Central Islip Federal Court yesterday and resumed discussing whether top Colombo mobsters Alphonse (Allie) Persico and John (Jackie) DeRoss killed former underboss William (Wild Bill) Cutolo.

So far, jurors have submitted six notes about trial testimony and evidence. Most of their questions relate to records of phone calls and pages to and from phones used by Persico and Cutolo on May 26, 1999, the day Wild Bill was last seen alive.

The panel began its fourth day of deliberations today.