BOP also moved Gene Gotti – who is still doing time for heroin trafficking – and onetime acting boss John (Junior) Gotti, (right) then serving 77 months for racketeering, into segregated housing at their facilities. 

The three Gotti gangsters remained in solitary confinement from mid-August to mid-November, when, in the words of one law enforcement source, “we felt relatively certain that they decided to call it off.” 

Lawyers for Peter Gotti and Junior Gotti say the notion that their clients plotted to kill Bill Hedrick, who was the warden at the prison hospital from 1999 to 2004, is utter nonsense.

Authorities disagree. One law enforcement source noted that Peter Gotti was convicted of plotting to murder turncoat Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano, and that at trial, his cohorts were shown to have used “fairly sophisticated techniques” and might have pulled it off if Gravano wasn’t nailed for drug trafficking and jailed in 2000. 

“I never got the specifics (of the warden plot),” said the source,

“but the information was that it was more than just idle talk.” 

Ironically, Kasman – he flew the late Mafia boss’s body from Missouri to New York on a chartered Lear jet – had fueled the ire of the entire Gotti family against the warden in the months before, and the days after the jailed-for-life mob boss succumbed to cancer. 

In interviews, Kasman (left) blasted Hedrick, who also had been warden at the Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois at the same time Gotti was housed there, for reputedly breaking a promise to the Gotti family by having an autopsy performed before releasing the body, and for not allowing Kasman to visit Gotti during his last days. 

He even got venerable Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel to write a letter to Hedrick’s Washington superiors asking them to allow Kasman one last visit to the dying don “to say goodbye.” 

While the FBI, the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s office, and the BOP took the alleged death threat very seriously, Brooklyn Federal Judge Frederic Block (right) was skeptical, even after being provided details in secret. He ordered Peter Gotti removed from isolation, but was overruled by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In November, 2002, after the BOP determined the threat was over, Gotti was returned to general population.

Killing the warden may have been off limits for Kasman, but the longtime mob associate was well versed in jailhouse justice – and not averse to doling it out when it suited him.

One of the many crimes he admitted, according to court documents obtained by Gang Land, was an assault against Bonanno associate Randolph (Randy) Pizzolo while both were inmates at the federal prison in Lewisburg PA in early 1995.  

The beating was “pretty severe,” sources say. But of course, Kasman didn’t administer it himself. He hired others to do his dirty work. 

At the time, Pizzolo, then 35, was a little-known tough guy serving a year for possessing stolen securities. Kasman, then 38, was almost a celebrity inmate, doing six months for perjury, for being a standup friend of imprisoned mob boss John Gotti. 

Kasman paid members of the Latin Kings to assault Pizzolo after the wannabe wiseguy had embarrassed Kasman with a single slap in the face and angry glare during a dispute in

front of a crowd of other inmates, according to a usually reliable Gang Land source. 

In the beginning, the men were buddies. “The guy looked out for Lewis,” the source said. “He knew he was a friend of Gotti’s. He bought him cigarettes, made sure no one abused him, but then Lewis starts taking advantage, giving him orders, turning him into a lackey. He does it in front of people, so Randy gets angry and slaps Lewis.” 

After using his Gambino cohorts to exact a promise of retaliation from the Bonannos when Pizzolo got out of prison that August, a furious Kasman “contracts with some Latin Kings in the joint to give the guy a beating,” said the source, adding that the assault inflamed family tensions that were ultimately resolved at a sitdown between the families. 

“Sounds like vintage Lewis Kasman,” said a law enforcement official who was not privy to details about the incident but has had dealings with Kasman over the years. 

Unfortunately things went downhill from there for Pizzolo. In 2004, he was whacked, allegedly on orders from then-acting Bonanno boss Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano (right) – who is now facing the death penalty if convicted of that murder. 

Efforts by a New York City school transportation magnate to file and litigate a defamation suit in secret against Gang Land for a series of articles that linked him and his company to the mob over the years have been rejected by a New York state appeals court. 

In a brief decision earlier this month, the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn denied an appeal by Domenic F. Gatto and his Atlantic Express Transportation Corp. of a lower court ruling that had previously rejected Gatto’s bid to conduct a libel suit in secret. 

In a follow up letter, Gatto’s lawyers notified the original judge in the case, Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Anthony Giacobbe, that they were withdrawing their legal action “in its entirety.”