Fearing conviction and the possibility of up to 30 more years behind bars, John A. “Junior” Gotti sought a plea deal a few hours before a jury acquitted him of securities fraud and deadlocked on kidnapping and other charges, Gang Land has learned.

On the morning of September 20, before jurors began what would be their last day of deliberations in the racketeering trial, lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman inquired about reopening negotiations for a guilty plea that would dispose of all the charges in the case, sources said.

Before trial, Gotti had rejected a plea deal of 15 to 18 years.

With the jury still debating the charges after seven full days, sources said, Mr. Lichtman hoped for an offer of less than 10 years, a sentence that the Junior Don, during tape-recorded jailhouse talks with friends last year, indicated he might accept.

Released under strict house-arrest provisions yesterday on a $7 million bond signed by relatives and friends, Junior faces a February 13 retrial on racketeering conspiracy charges that include extortion, loan-sharking, and the 1992 kidnap-shooting of radio talk show host Curtis Sliwa.

Mr. Lichtman broached the subject of a plea bargain to Assistant U.S. Attorney Victor Hou in an effort to lessen the likelihood of a long prison stretch that would accompany a guilty verdict.

After seven days of deliberations and numerous read-backs of direct testimony by prosecution witnesses, “the mood in the defense camp was pretty gloomy,” one lawyer said.

The previous day, after the anonymous jury had first said it was deadlocked, Manhattan Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin read the jurors an instruction called an “Allen charge” and urged the panel to try harder to reach a verdict, a procedure that often causes holdouts to cave in and go along with the majority.

“Both sides were reading the same tea leaves and the prevailing wisdom at that time was that the jury was leaning toward conviction,” a second participant in the case said.

Sources said it was that “prevailing wisdom” that led Mr. Lichtman to broach the subject of a plea deal with Mr. Hou – and that caused Mr. Hou and co-prosecutors Michael McGovern and Joon Kim to reject Mr. Lichtman’s idea and ignore his last minute offer.

Mr. Lichtman, whose grueling cross-examination may have hurt Mr. Sliwa’s credibility with jurors by highlighting his decades-old phony crime-busting claims, told Gang Land that the jury’s ultimate decision was a total vindication for the defense and that what remains of the prosecution’s case is a “limping wreck.”

The conversations he had with prosecutors, he said, were routine and should not be construed as worry or fear over the outcome. He said: “There were discussions throughout the trial, but nothing concrete was ever entertained. No numbers were bandied about, either by me or to me.”

Gotti wasn’t the only defendant to think he was going down for the count, only to learn that the jury had acquitted him of some charges.

Michael “Mikey Y” Yannotti, the Gambino soldier who allegedly shot Mr. Sliwa three times, also looked to make a last-minute deal, sources said. Yannotti offered to plead guilty and accept up to 25 years in prison for two murders, the Sliwa kidnapping, and other crimes, sources said.

In the biggest surprise of the trial, the jury acquitted him of both murders and an unrelated murder conspiracy, and couldn’t reach a verdict on his alleged role in the Sliwa kidnapping. He was found guilty of racketeering conspiracy, however, and faces up to 20 years. He also faces an additional 20 years if he’s convicted at a re-trial for racketeering.

Yannotti’s lawyer, Dirmuid White, declined to comment about the case.

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Curious about how the Junior Gotti case looked from the jury box, Gang Land knocked on the door of a juror the other day. The retired actress had lots of chores to catch up with, but she agreed to chat a bit if Gang Land would give her a hand with several loads of laundry that had built up while she wasn’t paying attention.

So, as she separated clothes into two washing machines in a Laundromat a block from her Upper West Side apartment, she used one of her favorite sayings to describe why she and the other anonymous jurors gave up trying to crack a holdout who believed that Gotti had renounced his membership in the Mafia.

“Never try to teach a pig to sing. It’s a waste of your time and it annoys the pig,” she said with a twinkle.

“She was intransigent. No matter what anyone said, she said, ‘I made up my mind and I won’t change it.'”

The former actress – her credits include a featured role in “Play It Again Sam,” a 1969 Broadway play that was written by Woody Allen and starred the writer and Diane Keaton – has known a few real wiseguys in her day. She was married for 10 years to a well-known TV and movie star, but at her request Gang Land is withholding their names.

She got her start in show business in the 1950s, she said, as a Las Vegas showgirl at the Tropicana Hotel, when it was owned by Chicago mobster Johnny Rosselli and frequented by many gangsters. “They were always very protective of me back then, but I know what they were all about,” she said.

She said she didn’t like Curtis Sliwa, calling him “arrogant, a fraud,” and had absolutely no use for the turncoat gangsters that the prosecutors called as witnesses to try to prove their case.

“They’re criminals, and what’s worse, they will disappear into the Witness Protection Program and still be criminals. They will lie, cheat, and steal, not here in New York, but wherever they are,” she said.

But the transplanted “hayseed from Washington” – along with almost all the other jurors, she said – didn’t believe that the “rats” were making up stories about Junior being a high ranked mobster who was involved in loan-sharking and extortion. And except for the lone holdout, they didn’t believe that he had “quit the mob.”

“The irony is that for once in their lives they were telling the truth. They fessed up, and it was all for naught. That is the ultimate irony,” she said, as she emptied blue liquid detergent from a plastic container into the second machine and started the wash with a pre-paid laundry card.

All in all, she had good things to say about the defense lawyers and the prosecutors. “They just didn’t have enough evidence to convince everybody,” she said. But she did have one gripe about Judge Scheindlin.

“She asked me too many questions” during the jury selection process. “And you were able to figure out who I am,” she said, putting her finger to her lips: “Shhh.”

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