Never let it be said that the Bonanno family’s acting boss, Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano, ever shirked the down and dirty grunt work required of the lowest-ranking members of his organization.

Whether it was pulling the trigger and burying the body of a murder victim or making special-order sandwiches dripping with oil and vinegar, Vinny Gorgeous was never afraid to get his hands soiled, court records show.

A few years after he killed an East Harlem bookmaker, one of many mob hits the feds credit to him in court papers filed last week, Basciano threatened another bookie with the same fate while he was making a sandwich for a police officer who was on his way to work at a nearby police precinct.

According to papers filed by prosecutors, it happened in 1989 or 1990. Basciano, who owned a Blimpie restaurant in the Bronx at the time, was making the off-duty officer’s sandwich when the bookie came in and told Vinny Gorgeous he didn’t have the money he was supposed to turn in that day.

That’s when Basciano invoked the 1987 murder of Anthony “Tony Coles” Colangelo, whom Vinny Gorgeous shot to death and dumped in a wooded area in the Westchester town of Greenburgh, N.Y., about 20 miles north of the Bronx, prosecutors Greg Andres, Amy Busa, and Winston Chan wrote.

“We’ll take care of you the way we took care of the old man from Pleasant Avenue. You’ll find your ass in the woods in Greenburgh,” Basciano allegedly told the bookie as he wrapped up the order and smiled a pleasant good-bye to the officer.

Colangelo, an ex-con who also worked at a video rental store Basciano owned a block from Pleasant Avenue, was reported missing on May 24, 1987. His car was found near the store four days later. His badly decomposed body, wrapped in black plastic bags, was recovered July 2.

At the time of the murder – one of many killings that turncoat Mafia boss Joseph Massino claims Basciano has told him about – Tony Coles was 48, not what most people would call an “old man,” but that’s what he was to the 27-year-old, up-and-coming, take-no-prisoners gangster.

Citing evidence supplied by Massino, prosecutors have asked Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis to allow the turncoat don to testify that Basciano committed “in excess of 10” murders, even though his racketeering indictment charges Vinny Gorgeous with only one slaying.

In addition, prosecutors want to inform the jury that if not for Massino – who was convicted of seven murders 18 months ago, but according to prosecutors was a docile don by comparison – Basciano’s body count would have been much higher.

In recent years, Vinny Gorgeous allegedly plotted to kill the girlfriend of one wiseguy, the parents of a turncoat mobster, and the sons of two other defectors. Massino refused to authorize those slayings, the prosecutors wrote.

Bacsciano’s attorney, Barry Levin, labeled the added starter allegations as “self-serving statements by Joe Massino” that the “the government is using [as] an end run to introduce inflammatory allegations that will prejudice my client to the jury. If they had sufficient evidence of these absurd allegations, why isn’t it in the indictment?”

If the feds have their way, Massino also will voice an allegation that Basciano plotted to kill capo Patrick “Patty From the Bronx” DeFilippo, a co-defendant also on trial for one murder and many other racketeering charges, including bookmaking and loansharking.

While Massino will tell fewer murderous tales about DeFilippo than about Basciano, prosecutors say the erstwhile Mafia boss will give Patty From the Bronx equal billing when it comes to plotting to kill his co-defendant.

As Gang Land reported last month, both gangsters hate each other with a passion, and Massino is prepared to testify about the mutual hatred of his former subordinates if Judge Garaufis rules that he can, the prosecutors wrote.

When it comes to penalties, the defendants are also on equal footing. If convicted, they each face life in prison. Testimony is not expected to begin until February 6.

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If John Gotti could come back as the owner of a football team, there’s little doubt he would choose the Oakland Raiders, the perennial bad boys of the National Football League who maintain a well-earned reputation as a tough-as-nails outlaw team.

And if he did, he’d probably see a picture of himself wearing a black and silver Raiders jacket hanging in the McAfee Coliseum in Oakland, where the Raiders play their home games, or in the team’s front office in Alameda, where owner Al Davis hangs his hat, and pictures, too.

At either place, he also might see a photo of his son Junior similarly clad, but it was the shot of the silver-haired Dapper Don wearing the black Raiders jacket with the silver logo over his heart that Mr. Davis coveted and had to have when he first laid eyes on it.

That happened, sources said, when the Brooklyn-born Mr. Davis was sitting on a plane with a Raiders senior executive, Mike Lombardi, and glanced at a monster 765-page book that Mr. Lombardi was reading, “Five Families: The Rise, Decline and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires,” by a former New York Times reporter, Selwyn Raab.

It was love at first sight for Mr. Davis, who has cultivated an outlaw image for the Raiders ever since he took over the team in 1963 and brought in a gaggle of ex-convicts, drug users, and other rejects and transformed the cellar dwelling 1-13 Raiders into a 10-4 team.” The nine-win turnaround in one season remains the greatest such accomplishment in pro football history,” the team’s Web site boasts.

“I gotta have that picture,” Mr. Davis said when he saw an FBI surveillance shot of Gotti wearing a Raiders jacket during a walk-talk in Ozone Park with mobster Anthony “Tony Lee” Guerrieri in 1986.

Like Gotti, whatever Mr. Davis wants, he usually gets.

After a few phone calls by Mr. Lombardi, Mr. Davis had the Gotti photo he had seen in the book, as well as a bonus shot of Junior in similar attire.

Contacted by Gang Land, Mr. Lombardi was reticent about Mr. Davis’s love for the photo, or his reasons for wanting it.

“I was reading the book – I’m still reading the book, as a matter of fact,” he said. “I saw the picture and got a copy of it. That’s all.”

In addition to the pictures, though, Mr. Lombardi acquired more insight about the fashionable outerwear the Dapper and Junior Dons were wearing, insight that was confirmed by law enforcement sources.

“I understand those jackets were stolen from a heist,” Mr. Lombardi said.

“He’s right,” a law enforcement source said. “The whole crew was wearing them back then.”

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Last week, Gang Land overstated the case in writing that author Sandra Harmon was “largely” responsible for furnishing allegations to the Brooklyn district attorney’s office that a retired FBI agent, R. Lindley DeVecchio, was involved in four mob hits committed by gangster-informer Gregory Scarpa. In fact, according to Ms. Harmon and law enforcement sources, she supplied information about one of the murders in question, the 1990 slaying of Patrick Porco.

This column and other news of organized crime will appear later today at www.ganglandnews.com.