some kind of apparent nervous breakdown. Leto had been sleeping with his head back and his mouth wide open, but as he stood up, blood emerged from a corner of his mouth.  

“Get the nurse, get the nurse” someone shouted as Leto’s wife, lawyer and court personnel, including Judge Spatt, (right) did their best to calm and comfort him until medical personnel could respond. 

“He woke up, and went bananas,” is how one participant described the events of the day before final arguments were scheduled to take place.  

Unlike Gigante’s rants, however, Chickie’s breakdown appeared real, according to all accounts.  

“Leave me alone. I want to kill myself,” Leto kept repeating, until he was transported to the Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center, where the former leatherneck was treated for severe depression and placed under a 24-hour suicide watch.

Chickie has had frequent bouts with depression over the years. They stem from a terrifying event that took place more than 50 years ago when he was on a military base in North Carolina

and was struck by lightning. He was believed to be dead, and placed in a body bag for nearly eight hours, according to his attorney Marion Seltzer.

Following Leto’s breakdown, trial was suspended. He is still hospitalized, but he was back in court Monday for closing arguments, courtesy of a daily shuttle from the hospital to court by FBI agents. Judge Spatt has been checking with the defendant’s doctors each day. 

During the investigation that led to his indictment, ironically, FBI agents followed him and took pictures of Chickie (left) going to the same VA Hospital, where he gets regular checkups and prescriptions for medications he takes to combat his depression. 

In her closing arguments, Seltzer was not permitted to mention her client’s breakdown that occurred outside the presence of the jury. But she did play a sympathy card by getting in that he was a “veteran who suffers from various health problems” by reminding jurors of a  prior document that the prosecution had introduced into evidence.  

The attorney stressed that the alleged extortion victim – Huntington Townhouse former executive Eliot Hurdy – testified that he hadn’t been threatened by Leto (r) to retain Fenza’s (l) limousine company for catering hall affairs and that when Hurdy no longer wanted to use Fenza’s limos, he closed the office he had on the huge complex and moved. 

Seltzer also noted that in conversations between Leto and Colombo mobster Frank (Frankie Camp) Campione that were tape recorded in 2000, there was much talk about the bloody 1991-92 Colombo war, and its aftermath, and other violent

activities, but no discussions about the alleged catering hall extortion that had taken place a year earlier. 

“The words ‘Huntington Townhouse’ are never mentioned during any of those conversations,” the lawyer said. “Why?  First, because Mr. Leto’s connection to the Townhouse did not involve criminal activity, and second because his connection to Louis Fenza’s (left) limousine business had nothing to do with the affairs of the Colombo Family.” 

In their closings, prosecutors Allen Bode and Nicole Boeckmann recalled Hurdy’s testimony that when he first met Leto in 1989, onetime Colombo acting boss Victor (Little Vic) Orena was there, and the businessman had been intimidated by his presence. 

That same year, John Gotti, the late Gambino boss who would support Orena’s efforts to take over the family two years later, introduced Leto as a “friend of ours” to former DeCavalcante capo Anthony Rotondo. From the stand, Rotondo fingered Leto in the 1999 shakedown of a fuel oil supplier, another charge in the racketeering indictment. 

To underscore that Leto had a larcenous, vicious streak during that same period, the prosecutors also recalled tape-recorded words he uttered on October 24, 2000 about what he would do to prevent wiseguys like Rotondo (right) from turning on the mob: 

“Anybody who becomes a rat, kill their wife, kill their kids, kill ‘em all. The next time, you gotta think, ‘Hello. Look what they do to rats and their families.’’’ 

The jury began deliberating the fates of Leto and Fenza late Tuesday. They resume today. 

Unlike the newly appointed U.S. Attorney Benton Campbell, (left) veteran Brooklyn Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis got the message that his Chief Judge sent out about the feds’ controversial decision to relate a 62-defendant Gambino family case to Garaufis.

In a seven-page ruling that reads like a so-called “consent decree” in a civil case whereby one party agrees not to do something again without conceding any wrongdoing, Garaufis sent the monster case into the “wheel” for random assignment.

As Gang Land reported two weeks ago, while Garaufis was considering a defense motion seeking just that, Chief Judge Raymond Dearie issued an administrative order that eliminated the practice that had allowed Brooklyn federal prosecutors – there is no such rule in Manhattan Federal Court – to “relate” cases to a particular judge.

Lawyer Joseph Corozzo, (right) who represents his father Joseph, the crime family’s reputed consigliere, contended that the Brooklyn practice enabled prosecutors to engage in “judge shopping” that undermined the public’s faith in the judicial system. 

A spokesman for Campbell, whose office had pressed the issue with Garaufis despite the very public pronouncement by Dearie eliminating the practice beginning this month, declined to comment about Garaufis’s decision, or the ultimate assignment of the case to maverick federal jurist Jack Weinstein. 

As the New York Law Journal noted in its report, Weinstein, who reversed the murder convictions of Mafia Cops Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa on statute of limitations grounds, is “high up on the list of judges that the prosecution had likely hoped to avoid in relating the case to Judge Garaufis.”

Watching Jimmy Breslin covering the Mafia Cops trial had Gang Land looking down the line for an intriguing, always unique, fun-filled, yet riveting read by the irascible Pulitzer Prize winning columnist-author. 

The Good Rat is all that, and more. 

In addition to his word pictures and insights about Good Rat Burt Kaplan and murderous detectives Lou Eppolito (big, brazen and brawling) and Steve Caracappa (slender, stealthy, silent), Breslin gives breadth to many so-called minor players in the compelling saga. 

There’s the illiterate auto mechanic who feared for his life as he dug a grave for the dirty duo’s first murder victim and lived with that fear for 19 more years, and the sister of a 26-year-old hoodlum they kidnapped and sent to his death. Before trial, when she found out Caracappa was living around the corner from her mom on Staten Island, she rang his bell and told him: “You motherfucker. I want to see you when they put handcuffs on you and take you away for the rest of your life.” 

Breslin discloses, as only he can, that the mob tradition of respectful kissing began when Sonny Franzese met Joe Brancato on the corner of Lorimer Street and Metropolitan Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and that after losing the last race at Aqueduct one day, jockey Con (Scamp) Errico rode his mount right into nearby Pep McGuires, “the greatest bar in the history of the city,” and the horse proceeded to drink water from a bucket that legendary gangster Jimmy Burke had placed on the bar. 

For the purists, there are countless pages of Kaplan’s spell-binding trial testimony that sunk the rogue cops. For the rest of us there are Breslin’s personal dealings with Tony Pro, Fat Tony and Tony Café as well as his account of how U Couraga, an Italian pit bull bested a challenger from The Bronx in a memorable battle at a mob graveyard near the Brooklyn-Queens border. 

For everyone, there’s Chapter Nine. It's a riveting, terrifying account of a $4000 dispute between the money-hungry Mafia Cops and a cheapskate mob psychopath and how it led to the tragic wrong man execution of a loved and loving, hard-working Brooklyn man with the same name as a mob hood who had been marked for murder.

Amazon's got it for $16.47.