It was a dozen years ago that John A. “Junior” Gotti allegedly had his hit men try to silence radio talk-jock Curtis Sliwa for badmouthing his mobster father. Now Junior wants the courts to do what the gunmen couldn’t: shut him up.

Citing the same statutes the feds used against Bruce Cutler – the outspoken lawyer who represented Gotti’s late father, the Dapper Don – Junior asked a federal judge to issue a gag order against Mr. Sliwa, the motor-mouth co-host of WABC radio’s “Curtis & Kuby In the Morning.”

Mr. Sliwa has been on a nonstop, on-air tear against the Gotti clan ever since federal prosecutors filed attempted-murder charges against Junior this summer.

But if bullets couldn’t shut Mr. Sliwa’s mouth, is there even a remote possibility that a federal gag order would do the trick?

“Not a chance,” Mr. Sliwa told Gang Land. “I would openly defy it. These people tried to kill me twice. I’ve been saying that for 12 years. Now the government says Curtis was right, and I can’t talk about it? No way. This is America. Land of the First Amendment.”

In court papers, Gotti asserts that he is not seeking to suppress Mr. Sliwa’s right to free speech, but to force Mr. Sliwa to adhere to laws that prohibit him, a “prominent” prosecution witness, from using his “wildly popular radio show” to poison potential jurors in a daily “smear campaign” against him.

“Among other mischief,” stated attorney Jeffrey Lichtman this week, “he has attacked Gotti’s character, credibility and reputation; relentlessly distorted and misrepresented the case’s merits and the expected trial evidence, and shrilly proclaimed Gotti’s guilt – boasting ‘inside’ access to inadmissible information.”

If Mr. Sliwa, a “vituperative, quasilaw enforcement witness,” is not stopped, wrote Mr. Lichtman, “millions of New Yorkers – potential jurors all – will be exposed to his venom by the time trial begins in August 2005,” rendering a fair trial virtually impossible.

“In my business,” countered Mr. Sliwa, “this is the highest compliment I can be paid. It’s just not true that every potential juror has heard me say that Gotti should rot in jail and go straight to hell without an asbestos suit. I accept all these plaudits, but it’s not true.”

Mr. Sliwa said Mr. Lichtman is on a search-and-destroy mission on behalf of the mobsters who tried to kill him.

“He’s subpoenaed us for every mention of Gotti or Gambino, not only what we say on ‘Mob Talk,'” a 30-minute daily segment that Mr. Sliwa introduced after Junior and two Gambino family underlings were indicted for plotting to kill him on June 19, 1992.

“The poor engineer got a double hernia producing pounds and pounds of tapes,” he said. “I hope Lichtman had to listen to the tapes and didn’t outsource this to a guy in New Delhi to transcribe.”

Gotti’s recent efforts to stifle Mr. Sliwa were preferable to those allegedly used by soldier Michael “Mikey Y”Yannotti, who fired several bullets into Mr. Sliwa’s legs and groin from the front seat of a cab that picked up the talk show host in the East Village early that day.

“At least this time they decided to take a different route to silence me, one that benefits my health and wellbeing,” he said. “They are progressing. They have gotten their legal beagle to move ahead with a legal version of omerta, as opposed to trying to kill me.”

Gotti, 40, Yannotti, 41, and mobster Joseph “Little Joe” D’Angelo, 36 – the alleged wheelman in the assault – are charged with kidnapping and attempted murder of Mr. Sliwa, and a variety of other unrelated racketeering charges that were lodged in July.

Mr. Sliwa took a shot at his co-host, reputed civil liberties lawyer Ronald Kuby, a former New York Civil Liberties Union executive director, Norman Siegel, as well as the NYCLU’s umbrella organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, for their lack of support.

“Where are all the civil libertarians who jumped to Bruce Cutler’s defense? Kuby. Siegel. The ACLU. The NYCLU. I’ve been calling them, but so far my phone hasn’t rung.They must have had an Ex-Lax attack. Not even the paralegals are calling me.”

In the end, said Mr. Sliwa, “jail is not a foreign country,” and he would reluctantly do his time if a Manhattan federal judge, Shira Scheindlin, incarcerates him for refusing to obey any gag order – hopefully, in a cell not too close to Junior Gotti.

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As Junior awaits his day in court, Gang Land has learned that early this year he injected himself into the case of the disappearance of John Favara, his Howard Beach neighbor who killed Junior’s younger brother, Frank, in a tragic car accident in 1980 and was later murdered, allegedly on orders from their late father.

On March 11,according to a transcript of a jailhouse conversation recorded by an FBI bug, Junior told attorney Richard Rehbock to send $500 to Richard Gomes, a member of the crew that allegedly killed Favara and disposed of his body at the elder Gotti’s behest.

“He was very dear to my father,” Junior said. “He was broke. People who came through here told me he was a great guy. Real man.”

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In a surprise ruling last week, a Brooklyn federal court judge, Nicholas Garaufis, bowed to emotional pleas by relatives of a slain mob associate and rejected a plea deal that called for Bonanno soldier Robert “Little Robert” Lino to get 27 years in prison for murder.

Back on March 18, Judge Garaufis accepted the original plea – which took months to work out – at the end of an hour-long court session. On Friday, however, the judge suddenly reversed himself, telling Lino to take a 36-year sentence or go to trial.

Under the earlier deal, with time already served and normal good time off, Lino, 38, would be released at age 60. The judge’s ultimatum would keep him in until he hits 68. Judges have discretion to reject plea bargains but rarely do so, unless a pre-sentencing investigation uncovers facts that were unknown when the plea was taken. That did not occur here.

The plea deal was equally important, if not more so, to the feds. Lino was the next-to-last defendant in the blockbuster indictment against Bonanno boss Joseph Massino. His guilty plea – to more than the 25 years-to-life maximum state penalty for murder in New York – enabled them to focus their trial efforts solely on the Last Don, their main target when the FBI began investigating Massino five years ago.

By succumbing to the emotional pleas of a Lino victim’s relatives – Lino cleaned up the murder scene after the slaying – Judge Garaufis established a bad precedent for himself when time comes for him to sentence double-digit mob murderers who cooperated. Turncoat underboss Salvatore “Good Looking Sal” Vitale, for example, admits involvement in 12 murders; Massino’s lawyers argued the number approached 30. Whatever the number, aren’t the relatives of those victims entitled to as much vengeance as Lino’s?

And if Judge Garaufis does not rescind his decision, it will have a chilling effect on plea negotiations with mobsters in the future, especially those whose cases are before him.

Lino’s lawyer, Barry Levin, who told reporters last week that his client was “shocked” by the decision, told Gang Land he will ask Judge Garaufis to “reconsider” his ruling at a status conference tomorrow. Prosecutors declined to comment.