federal penitentiary, he was secretly making sure that Gotti would stay there until cancer would get him transferred to a prison hospital. 

Several months earlier, Kasman had spoken glowingly to Larry King on CNN about Gotti’s resolve to “stay strong” despite persecution by the feds, and he proudly displayed the prison photo at left to show the public how well his adoptive father was holding up. 

On Mar. 12, 1997, however, Kasman told former FBI Gambino squad supervisor Bruce Mouw that Gotti was using lawyers to send messages to his son Junior to help him resolve “family beefs,” determine which wiseguys should be promoted, which wannabes should be inducted, and how the crime family proceeds should be divvied up. 

In a perverse, remarkable aside, the double-dealing Kasman told Mouw and agent Robert Vandette that by “utilizing an attorney” to deliver messages to his crime family, the incarcerated Mafia boss had thrown “all the rules of La Cosa Nostra …by the wayside.” 

Over the years, Kasman claims he gave Gotti’s wife Victoria $800,000, according to documents obtained by Gang Land. 

At the same time, the valued family friend apparently had no shame. While Victoria Gotti was recovering from surgery 

following her second stroke last year, Kasman tape-recorded a two-hour visit with her and her daughter, according to an FBI report.  

“The guy’s on the cover of Lowlife Magazine,” said one criminal defense lawyer. 

“It’s appalling that he would insert himself into her life when she was recovering from life-threatening surgery,” said Seth Ginsberg, an attorney for Junior Gotti. 

“I’ve listened to the conversations. He used her illness as a guise to engage her in conversations about her family members for his purposes. I visited her after her surgery. She was in no shape to be interrogated like that,” said Ginsberg.

During his years as a turncoat, Kasman admits, he double-crossed the feds during the period from the fall of 2005 to the

fall of 2007, when he was a potential cooperating witness armed with a manually controlled recording device. More about one $80,000 scam later.

From 2005 to 2007, Kasman recorded discussions with many mobsters, including Gambino consigliere Joseph (JoJo) Corozzo and three lawyers, including Corozzo’s son, Joseph. (right)

A March 27, 2007 talk Kasman had with the Corozzos – it concerned his extortion of the owners of a Freeport L.I. bar – led to the disclosure of his turncoat status and the younger Corozzo’s ouster as his father’s lawyer in a pending racketeering indictment. 

Before Kasman could testify, Booklyn Federal Judge Jack Weinstein removed Corozzo for an unrelated conflict of interest. Now, sources say, it’s doubtful the feds will ever use Kasman as a witness.  

The other lawyers – Joseph Bondy, an attorney for family boss Peter Gotti in 2004, and Jeffrey Lichtman, who defended Junior Gotti a year later – each accepted cash payments from

Kasman that approached but did not exceed the allowable limit of $10,000 for unreported cash transactions, according to FBI reports. 

Years before he wore a wire, Kasman, who has admitted a potpourri of crimes including bribery, obstruction of justice, extortion, assault, and tax evasion from 1986 to 2005, claims he gave “hundreds of thousands” of dollars in cash payments to eight well-known attorneys who represented Gotti & Co. over the years. 

Kasman, 51, earned $51,000 for his FBI informant work, and received a total of $338,486 in expenses for his efforts as both an informer and a wired-up cooperating witness, according to court documents.  

Today, the onetime multi-millionaire Garment Center businessman who told the feds he laundered approximately $11 million for Gotti from 1986 to 1993 – he said he held from $1.5 to $3 million at a time – claims all that money is gone, and that he is broke.  

Initially promised a top sentence of two years, Kasman could face more time because of crimes he committed while cooperating, but if he pleads guilty to them by tomorrow, he won’t face much additional time, according to a complicated plea deal worked out by the feds and his attorney a few days before he was slated to testify last month. 

JoJo Corozzo (left) pulled a page out of Colombo boss Carmine (Junior) Persico’s playbook yesterday when he told Judge Weinstein that he wants to represent himself now that his son has been bounced from the case.

We don’t know about his lawyer skills, but the diminutive Gambino consigliere did a good job of bursting Kasman's bubble during his undercover work. He unknowingly alerted the FBI that the sleazy turncoat was working his own schemes at the same time he was on the FBI’s payroll.  

It happened in the middle of a tape-recorded conversation when he angrily called Kasman on the carpet for stealing $80,000 in cash from a retired businessman in September, 2006. Corozzo had introduced Kasman to the man a few months earlier. 

“Why did you rob my friend Harvey?” Corozzo asked, said one source familiar with the tape recorded discussion between the men. “He’s a legitimate guy, a friend of mine,” said an exasperated Corozzo. 

For nine months, Kasman lied to the FBI and denied fleecing the businessman. But, according to a report by FBI agents William Johnson and Robert Herbster last June, Kasman owned up to conning the retiree with a phony tale: he was to get a 12 to 13% return on his money, and an immediate $2500 a week payback of his $80,000 investment. 

Ultimately, months after the businessman complained to Corozzo, and the gangster dressed down Kasman, the turncoat told the agents he took the cash during a meeting that he did not record. And he not only stole the cash. “He was not in a position to pay it back,” the agents wrote.

Persico, (right) now 74, didn’t fare too well when he defended himself in the 1986 Commission trial, being convicted and sentenced to 100 years. He did no worse that the other Mafia leaders who went down with him, though. They got 100 years too.

Des Moines-area newsmen have uncovered intriguing info that backs up Gang Land’s exclusive report that identified an accused Indianola, Iowa con man as the same scam artist who fleeced East Coast investors of $10 million and received a new identity for helping the feds crack an embarrassing case involving a Colombo mob associate. (Photo by Michael Rolands, Indianola Record-Herald)

Both men, Nicholas Palazzo, (left) of Indianola, and Michael (Karate Mike) Tessari, are martial arts experts who were born on the same day in 1956. Their wives are both named Deborah, and both were born on the same day in 1950, according to a story that appeared in the Des Moines Register and the Indianola Record-Herald. 

Despite those, and other new details, including complaints by six alleged Palazzo victims who reported being told by the feds not to discuss the case, authorities declined to comment to reporters Aaron Jaco, Jeff Eckhoff and Grant Schulte. 

Meanwhile, it turns out that the sperm smuggling caper by Kevin Granato wasn’t the only New York mob case that Tessari learned about while he was in federal prison.  

Tessari passed along some inconsequential gossip about several Bonanno gangsters, including acting boss Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano, (right) to the feds before they cut short his 11 year prison term and deposited him and his phony investment scams in the American Heartland, according to records filed in Brooklyn Federal Court. 

In jailhouse conversations with Bonanno soldier Anthony (Bruno) Indelicato, according to the court papers, Tessari learned that Vinny Gorgeous “locked up” the drug business in the Bronx after Gerlando (George from Canada) Sciascia (left) was whacked in 1999. Tessari did not testify at the racketeering trial of Basciano and capo Patrick (Patty from the Bronx) DeFilippo.