“What’re you gonna do now, tough guy?”

Those were the words hanging in the air 30 years ago by a rookie Genovese soldier, Michael “Mikey Cigars” Coppola, after his silencer-equipped .22 pistol allegedly misfired two times. His alleged intended victim, mobster John “Johnny Cokes” Lardiere, uttered his mocking retort as he moved toward his would-be killer.

It was a classic line — one that has lived in Gang Land lore for decades since the Easter Sunday showdown in 1977 between the two gangsters on Route 22 in Bridgewater, N.J. Unfortunately for Lardiere, Coppola had a deadly nonverbal answer. He quickly pulled a .38-caliber revolver from an ankle holster and fired five shots into Johnny Cokes, killing him instantly, according to court records.

Eleven years ago, when New Jersey state prosecutors first raised the issue of Johnny Cokes’s demise with Coppola, he had another nonverbal response. He disappeared into the underworld, but he was nabbed last week.

Now, as Mikey Cigars awaits trial for Lardiere’s murder in Somerset County Court, he’s got other problems as well: Sources say the FBI and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have zeroed in on him as a suspect in the slaying of a Genovese mobster, Lawrence Ricci, who was killed in October 2005 while he was on trial in Brooklyn for labor racketeering.

Sources said Coppola’s suspected role in the execution of Ricci is what led to his arrest Friday evening by state and federal agents on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, not far from an apartment where he had been staying and where authorities later seized about $15,000. As Gang Land reported last week, the feds suspect that a powerful Genovese capo, Tino Fiumara, a longtime close associate of Coppola, authorized the Ricci rubout.

Sources said a court-ordered wiretap enabled the feds to determine that Coppola might be in the area of Broadway and West 74th Street.

It’s not easy looking for a fugitive whose mug hasn’t been seen in 11 years. But when an eagle-eyed rookie FBI agent on his first such assignment saw a short, unassuming guy walk into a health food store, he perked up. “Hey, that could be the guy,” he said.

A more seasoned member of the stake out team, an NYPD detective, was dispatched inside to eyeball the suspect, and when he exited he gave his state and federal colleagues the high sign: It was him.

When Coppola was confronted on the street, he gave a New Jersey investigator a phony name, sources said. But when the investigator frowned and said, “Come on, Mike, we got you,” the gangster conceded his identity and surrendered peacefully. He was not armed, and no weapons were found at the apartment he was using, sources said.

On April 10, 1977, after he allegedly killed Johnny Cokes, Mikey Cigars discarded his two guns, and also his ankle holster and his cap. These items were recovered by police and stored away until the possible identity of the killer could be determined.

That came 19 years later from a turncoat Luchese soldier, Thomas Ricciardi, in discussions with numerous law enforcement officials, including Detective Paul Smith, a supervisor for the New Jersey Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau who is now retired.

Ricciardi recalled that Coppola had related his role in Johnny Cokes’s murder to him and another Luchese soldier, Michael Taccetta, at a Newark bar in 1983, and that all three had laughed about Mikey Cigars’s effective response to Lardiere’s mocking taunt.

When Detective Smith dusted off the evidence, and the FBI extracted a DNA sample from hair on the discarded cap, the New Jersey attorney general’s office subpoenaed a DNA sample from Coppola. At his arraignment, Coppola, 60, was ordered held on $1 million cash bail.

Knowledgeable sources told Gang Land that Coppola was spared an easy jab after he was arrested last week. No one asked the obvious question: “What are you going to do now, tough guy?”

***

The father and son both cried like babies last week in Brooklyn Federal Court. But later they both had big smiles as the woman in their life and dozens of federal agents gathered around them at a veritable love fest.

The occasion was the sentencing of Michael “Cookie” D’Urso, a turncoat Genovese crime family associate who wore a wire for three years and helped the feds convict more than 70 mobsters and associates, including the family’s late boss, Vincent “Chin” Gigante, and two acting bosses, Liborio “Barney” Bellomo and Ernest Muscarella.

D’Urso, 37, burst into tears when Judge Sterling Johnson gave him a sentence of five years’ probation and a fine of $200 for his role in the murder of a young mob associate 11 years ago.

D’Urso’s son, about 2 years old, cried and shouted, “I want my daddy,” as he heard his father telling Judge Johnson that he was “sorry and ashamed” for the crimes that he committed and the pain he had caused his victims.

“I have nothing but bad memories of that life,” D’Urso, who survived an execution attempt in 1994 when he was shot in the head at point-blank range at a card game in a mob social club, said. He returned to his life of crime for four more years before he turned on the mob.

In 1996, he supplied the murder weapon and drove a getaway car for the execution slaying of John Borrelli by a notorious Colombo mobster, Vito Guzzo, who is serving a 36-year sentence for several murders, including the Borrelli slaying.

D’Urso’s testimony led to federal murder convictions — later overturned — of two other mob associates allegedly involved in the Borrelli shooting, Carmelo “Carmine Pizza” Polito and Mario “The Baker” Fortunato. D’Urso is scheduled to testify against them in state court later this year. First, however, New York’s Court of Appeals must decide that a retrial would not violate double jeopardy provisions of state law.

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