A few months ago, a single mother in suburban New Jersey was being hailed in tabloid stories as an amateur sleuth who helped crack one of the FBI’s dirtiest secrets: how a top agent helped a mob hit man carry out murders.

Today, however, cops are wondering whether Angela Clemente was spinning tales about a mysterious beating she suffered in the parking lot of a Brooklyn shopping center two weeks ago. They are also investigating possible financial ties that the 41-year-old self-styled “forensic investigator” may have with associates of the Colombo crime family, Gang Land has learned.

There are “gaping holes” in Ms. Clemente’s story, a law enforcement source said. Another said detectives have “serious doubts” about her account of the beating.

A spokesman for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, which also interviewed Ms. Clemente, said the office disagrees with the NYPD’s assessment of her account and stands by her report of the events that led to her hospitalization.

Ms. Clemente, whose tip spurred the District Attorney’s Office to file a set of shocking murder charges against a retired FBI supervisor, R. Lindley DeVecchio, claimed she was punched, kicked, and choked by a burly, bearded assailant after she told him she would continue to investigate the ex-agent.

Ms. Clemente was lying half in and half out of her car in the Caesar’s Bay parking lot on Shore Parkway about 5:45 a.m. June 16 when cops responded to a 911 call. Her story, told to both police officers and reporters, was that she was attacked about 3 a.m. while probing Mr. DeVecchio’s alleged ties to a 14-year-old double slaying in Long Island. Mr. De-Vecchio, 65, is charged in four Brooklyn murders between 1984 and 1992, allegedly carried out with Colombo mobster Gregory Scarpa, a longtime top-echelon informer for the former G-man.

Ms. Clemente told cops that an anonymous source who she believed was a former NYPD detective had lured her to Brooklyn by leaving her a series of three notes, the last a few hours before the attack. She said the notes promised her information tying the ex-agent to the March 1992 murders of John Minerva and Michael Imbergamo.

At Lutheran Medical Center, where Ms. Clemente was treated and later released, Assistant District Attorney Michael Vecchione, the lead prosecutor in the DeVecchio case, left no doubt that he believed the attack was linked to the ex-agent’s prosecution, and that former FBI agents who have supported Mr. De Vecchio may have been involved.

“Let’s put it this way, it’s not unrelated,” Mr. Vecchione told the New York Post, adding that his office would thoroughly explore the possibility that former agents were involved.

After about 12 hours of questioning by Mr. Vecchione and several teams of NYPD detectives, Ms. Clemente checked out of the hospital. She announced that she was suspending her probe into the double homicide because she had received a threat that frightened her even more than the beating she had suffered.

“I’m in danger,” Ms. Clemente told the Daily News the following day. “What happened to me today is far worse than the attack,” she said, declining to elaborate further because “the threat was so intimidating,” the newspaper reported.

Since then, however, law enforcement sources say Ms. Clemente has missed two scheduled follow-up sessions with police sketch artists. The investigation is ongoing, a police spokesman said, declining further comment.

Sources familiar with interviews of Ms. Clemente by several detective units – including Brooklyn South Homicide and the 62nd Precinct Detective Squad – say detectives believe that Ms. Clemente was less than forthright about the events that took place between midnight and 5:45 a.m. on June 16.

“There are a lot of points in her story that we haven’t been able to confirm,” a source said, adding, “If we determine she lied, and we think we can prove it, we certainly could charge her with filing a false report, but that’s a little premature at this point.”

Ms. Clemente stands by her story. “I really don’t have any comment about their reaction to my interview,” she told Gang Land. “I just hope they do their job and continue to investigate the attack. I understand the district attorney’s office and the police are pursuing it vigorously.” The police canceled her first sketch artist appointment, and she canceled the second one when her mother suffered a stroke and was hospitalized, she said. Ms. Clemente categorically denied any financial ties with any mobsters.

In addition to her failure to meet with the sketch artists, sources cited several aspects of her account that have made detectives skeptical. “They just don’t make sense, even for an amateur investigator,” a source said.

Ms. Clemente claimed she was at a fast food joint near Atlantic City when she found a note on her windshield about 12:30 a.m. She said the note stated that if she wanted more information, she should proceed to a location in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, at Thirteenth Avenue and 82nd Street, half a block from where Scarpa lived in the early 1990s. Ms. Clemente said the note listed a meeting time of about an hour earlier, at 11:30 p.m.

Even though she realized that she wouldn’t get to the meeting spot until hours later, she told detectives that she decided to go anyway, believing that the tipster might still be waiting for her.

When there was no one at the designated location, Ms. Clemente said she decided to drive around in the hope she would somehow find the mysterious source. She told detectives she ultimately wound up in the Caesar’s Bay parking lot. There, sources said, she got out of her car when a bearded man driving a black SUV pulled alongside her and stepped out of his own vehicle to speak to her.

He identified himself as her anonymous tipster, Ms. Clemente told detectives, but then pummeled her when she said she was going to continue her investigative work, knocking her back into her car, a law enforcement source said. Then, she told detectives, her assailant climbed over her to the passenger seat, grabbed a manila envelope on the car seat, and opened it to snatch the three notes he had left her. He then placed the other papers back into the envelope and left.

As Len Levitt noted last week in his column at www.nypdconfidential.com, Ms. Clemente never alerted the Brooklyn D.A.’s office of her plans to meet the mystery tipster that night, but she did notify a freelance reporter she had never met, Angela Mosconi, about the venture. In a 2:18 a.m. phone call, Ms. Clemente told Ms. Mosconi to contact the D.A.’s office if she hadn’t heard from Ms. Clemente by 6 a.m.

Even more troubling, sources said, was information detectives gleaned from Ms. Clemente’s answers to various questions indicating that she had ties to a son of an imprisoned Colombo mobster, Victor “Little Vic” Orena, and to a second mob family associate. The sources declined to detail those ties, except to state that they were “financial in nature.”

An attorney for Mr. DeVecchio, Mark Bederow, declined to speculate about the mysterious events involving Ms. Clemente in the early morning hours of June 16, but said Mr. Vecchione’s “suggestion or innuendo that any ex-agent affiliated with Lin DeVecchio was involved in the alleged attack on Ms. Clemente is beyond ludicrous.”

Meanwhile, Mr. DeVecchio’s lawyers filed their final briefs in an effort to move the case into federal court because the indictment alleges that Mr. DeVecchio and Scarpa plotted to kill four victims during discussions that Mr. DeVecchio had with his then-informer in the course of the FBI agent’s official duties as a federal employee.

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