Bonanno soldier Anthony “Ace” Aiello was born into a life of crime in 1976. He honed his wiseguy skills on the mean streets of Middle Village, Queens. So last month, when he suspected he was about to be hit with federal murder charges, Aiello knew exactly what to do.

He took a page from a lesson he learned from his old man when he was 8 and his father, Antonino, was a major heroin trafficker: He took off and never looked back.

Aiello, 28, is the object of an international manhunt by FBI agents looking to arrest him for the execution slaying of mob associate Randolph “Randy” Pizzolo, whose bullet-riddled body was found in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn on December 1.

Aiello’s ability to avoid arrest was aided by a questionable strategic decision by the feds, one that tipped Aiello off that he was liable to be arrested and enabled him to flee, much the same way his father did two decades ago.

Aiello, who was released from federal prison in July 2001 after serving 39 months for a 1997 armed robbery, obviously had no desire to go back – especially for a murder charge that could mean life behind bars, or even the possibility of a death sentence.

He disappeared on January 28, sources say. That was a day after Bonanno boss Joseph Massino was identified as a turncoat, and capo Dominick Cicale and acting boss Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano were charged in a murder indictment with Pizzolo’s murder.

Federal prosecutors did not seek to charge Aiello with murder until a week later, even though Basciano had identified Aiello as one of the killers during the same tape-recorded discussions with Massino in which he fingered Cicale, according to court papers.

By the time the FBI began looking to arrest him, Aiello was long gone. Last week, when the FBI could not develop any solid information regarding his whereabouts, federal prosecutors publicly proclaimed him to be a fugitive. His last known address was 69-34 66 Rd. in Middle Village.

According to an arrest warrant filed by FBI agent Jeffrey Sallet in Brooklyn Federal Court, Basciano reported to Massino on January 3 that he had given instructions “who to use” in the murder and that he believed “Dominick and Ace” had done the job.

Four days later, said the warrant, “Basciano reiterated his belief [to Massino] that the murder was carried out by ‘Ace,’ meaning Aiello.”

In a taped conversation 13 months earlier with another informer, Basciano had praised Ace as a “tough kid” whom Basciano was schooling, the warrant said. Basciano also noted that Baldo Amato, a Sicilian-born Bonanno soldier, had known Aiello for “for eight or nine years” and had groomed him to be a wiseguy during the 1990s, when Ace was still in his teens.

“Anthony was a nice kid growing up, but he had punk tendencies,” an old friend told Gang Land, recalling that young Aiello often hung out on the corner of 78th Avenue and 74th Street in Glendale, flexing his muscles and trying to impress girls at Junior High School 119. “He worked at Hot Bagels on Metropolitan Avenue for a while, but he ran with the punks in the Giannini crew and the Middle Village Boys.”

At the time, the Giannini crew included dozens of wannabe wiseguys who were loosely connected to three crime families, according to court records. Amato owned the crew’s base of operations, the Caffe Giannini in Ridgewood, and Aiello, like many Sicilian-born hoodlums and sons of Sicilian gangsters and drug dealers, gravitated to Amato.

Even though Aiello was a Middle Village Boy – each neighborhood had its own gang with distinct jackets – he was at ease on the Ridgewood Boys’ turf. The Caffe Giannini was a couple of doors away from the Cafe Aiello, a restaurant that had doubled as his father’s headquarters when he was trafficking in heroin during the early 1980s.

Antonino Aiello,a heavyset and muscular man, also owned four pizzerias around the city and was called commerciante, or businessman, by his heroin-dealing colleagues. He was a millionaire several times over. Agents had seen him meeting Bonanno capo Salvatore Catalano and other major heroin traffickers at the Cafe Aiello during the massive FBI-DEA Pizza Connection investigation, but for tactical reasons they opted not to nab Antonino in April 1984 when they rounded up Catalano and 30 others.

Seven months later, on November 14, 1984, when a task force of detectives and federal agents raided his Middle Village home, they seized nine rifles and handguns and $91,000, but not Antonino. He wasn’t at his father’s home either, where agents seized $900,000 and $30,000 in “buy money” that an undercover cop had used to purchase heroin at a Harlem pizzeria that he owned, Tony’s Pizza Parlor. They arrested his father, Vito, who would serve eight months in prison for holding the cash and guns for his son.

Two years later, on November 16, 1986, cops and FBI agents nabbed Antonino, who had changed his name, lost weight, grown a beard, and dyed his hair, in Patchogue, L.I. They also arrested his wife, Elizabeth, who was later convicted of harboring a fugitive and sentenced to three years’ probation.

Antonino was convicted in 1988 as a heroin kingpin. Today, at age 66, he is serving life plus 140 years at Marion Federal Penitentiary. Several appeals of his conviction and severe sentence have failed, and in a landmark 1990 ruling, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a forfeiture of more than $5 million in cash, jewelry, businesses, and properties.

At least he had those last two years of freedom.

Meanwhile, his son Anthony, who authorities say has much less money than his father had 20 years ago when he became a fugitive, has a long way to go before he can match his father’s effort, let alone improve on it.

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In another father-and-son affair, Gambino capo Salvatore “Tore” Locascio and five cohorts in a $700 million phone-sex and Internet-porn rip-off copped guilty pleas Monday that call for Tore to serve seven years in prison and his co-defendants to receive terms of two to 10 years.

The pleas were entered after the feds arranged for Tore to confer with his father, Frank, in a highly unusual telephone call to a prison hospital in Massachusetts where the elder Locascio is serving a life sentence on a disputed conviction for a 1990 murder that was authorized by John Gotti.

Next week, Frank Locascio’s lawyer in his 1992 trial, Anthony Cardinale, is scheduled to testify at a hearing that he did less than his best for Locascio at trial because Gotti threatened to kill him if he didn’t make Gotti his primary focus.

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In another Gambino family affair, capo Vincent “Vinny Butch” Corrao, who took over his late father Joseph “Joe Butch” Corrao’s rackets when he passed away in 2001, pleaded guilty last week to racketeering and related loan sharking and extortion charges.

As part of his plea bargain, Vincent, 38, will receive up to 63 months in prison to cover a potpourri of charges, including threats of violence he lodged against a gambler who had the temerity to insist that Corrao fork over $75,000 the gambler had won from Corrao.

Corrao’s plea also covers shakedowns of a nightclub in Fort Lee and a restaurant in Brooklyn, as well as a beating he gave to a loanshark customer who fell behind on his payments to the gangster.