It was a chilly night in December 1975 when a telephone rang in the newsroom of a New Jersey newspaper.

“You ought to get out to Brother Moscato’s dump,” the voice said. “There’s something very interesting going on.”

“Brother” Moscato, as Philip Moscato was called, was a well-known and well-connected associate of the Jersey branch of the Genovese crime family. He was also the owner of a huge toxic waste dump under the Pulaski Skyway in Jersey City.

What was taking place there was a mob-related archaeological dig: FBI agents, local police, and state troopers with backhoes and shovels were moving the earth around in search of Jimmy Hoffa’s body.

A tipster had told them Hoffa was encased in a 55-gallon drum buried deep in Moscato’s dump.

It made a certain amount of sense, because Moscato was tied to the Genovese clan, as was Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, a Jersey Teamsters boss believed to be behind the plot to kill Hoffa to prevent him from retaking control of the national union.

Moscato had ties to mobsters who were linked to, among other things, a bar near Giants Stadium frequented by Lawrence Taylor and the topless joint that went on to serve as the model for the Bada Bing Club on “The Sopranos.”

While he also had ties to shady lawyers and their political cronies, the mob ties were golden. Once, Anthony “Little Pussy” Russo, a mobster who operated out of Long Branch, went to his mob superiors to seek permission to rough up two people who owed his loan sharking operation money – lots of money. One was a low-level mob hanger-on; the other was Moscato. The mob’s version of an appeals court quickly issued its ruling: Russo could do whatever he wanted to the low-level guy, but he couldn’t touch Moscato.

So law enforcement officials were confident they would find Hoffa in Moscato’s dump, and the digging went on for days. The local papers were full of the story, and predictions abounded that the Hoffa mystery would soon be solved.

But the diggers found nothing more sinister than animal bones and the Brother Moscato theory took its place alongside speculation that Hoffa was under Giants Stadium, beneath a swimming pool outside Detroit, or had been crushed in a Michigan auto compacting plant and incinerated.

Now, nearly 30 years later, a mob dig in Queens is yielding some real bodies and showing Mafia guys for what they are – vicious thugs and callous killers – instead of the romanticized Hollywood version.

Lawmen believe the Queens dig, also the result of mob turncoats and informants, has yielded the bodies of two Bonanno crime family captains, Dominick “Big Trin” Trinchera and Philip “Lucky” Giaccone.

They were murdered because they and another man, Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato, were plotting to take control of the crime family from the boss, Joseph Massino. Because the mob doesn’t believe in early retirement for such offenses, the plotters were lured to a meeting, shot dead, wrapped in drop cloths, and buried in a vacant lot on Ruby Street, near the Brooklyn border. On Monday, after a full week of digging, police and FBI agents retrieved some bones, a Piaget watch, an old credit card, and eyeglasses from a muddy hole just yards away from where Indelicato’s body was found more than 20 years ago. They found bones in the arm of a leather jacket and even inside some shoes.

Authorities joyfully announced their findings, saying it verifies the credibility of their informants and allows them to keep searching.

This dig is more important than any that has gone on before because lawmen believe they will find the body of an innocent victim – a man they say was murdered because he accidentally ran over John Gotti’s 12-year-old son, Frank.

The innocent man was a furniture store manager named John Favara who had the misfortune of slamming into Frank Gotti after the bike-riding youngster darted into traffic. There was no indication Favara was drunk or in any way at fault, but Gotti wanted – and got – his form of revenge.

Mob turncoats have said Favara, a law-abiding, hard-working man, was abducted after work, murdered, and dumped like a piece of garbage. Gotti was conveniently – and probably – in Florida at the time and was never brought to justice for the murder.

Favara’s murder is what mob guys are all about. They’re not Marlon Brando’s cuddly “Godfather” or James Gandolfini’s conflicted “Tony Soprano.” They are predators who not only kill each other but will murder anyone who gets in their way or, in their twisted version of reality, crosses them or accidentally runs over the child of a Mafia boss.

A quarter of a century ago, a few years after the fruitless dig at Brother Moscato’s dump, a newspaper reporter struck up a relationship with a mob hit man named Anthony DeVingo, who was on trial on a murder charge he would ultimately beat.

They would chat, swap yarns – DeVingo was a great story-teller – and even share a meal at a luncheonette near the courthouse.

Someone watching all this said to the reporter, “I see you and DeVingo are becoming friends.”

“Yeah,” the reporter replied dryly. “About as friendly as you can be with somebody who would kill you if the right guy told him to.”

That’s the real mob.