Over the years, acting Colombo boss Joel “Joe Waverly” Cacace has survived gun battles with rival gangsters and skirmishes with the law. Now, Gang Land has learned, the 63-year-old wise guy is betting he can also endure a 20-year prison stretch.

Sources say Joe Waverly and the feds are close to working out a plea bargain that will close the book on a racketeering indictment that includes four 1987 murders, extortion, and a host of other crimes.

Cacace has been jailed awaiting trial for 19 months. But that may have been a respite from the pressures of mob life. He told a task force of cops and agents who arrested him on Jan 22, 2003, that he had been “lucky” to survive two shootings, but that mob life had taken its toll on him: “I’m kind of relieved that I’m going to jail,” he said.

A health food nut who supplements his diet with fish oil pills, Cacace initiated the plea negotiations after watching two Mafia bosses – each with topnotch trial lawyers on the case – and other fellow inmates get hammered during recent racketeering trials.

Sources say federal prosecutors in Brooklyn are pushing for more than 20 years, adding that there were still several additional issues to be resolved.

Neither Cacace’s lawyers, Michael Macklowitz and Gino Josh Singer, nor assistant U.S. Attorneys Patricia Notopoulos, Katya Jestin, and Joey Lipton, would comment about the plea discussions. Sources say an agreement is likely and could be imminent. Trial is scheduled for next month.

“The deal isn’t finalized yet, but my best guess is that it will happen,” said a usually reliable Gang Land source.

The heart of the indictment – as Gang Land first disclosed four years ago – is a charge that Joe Waverly ordered three underlings to kill burly 46-year-old former federal prosecutor William Aronwald. In a bizarre mistake, on March 20, 1987, they murdered his father, George, a frail 78-year-old retired civil attorney instead.

The feds got their first big break in the case in 1997, when Frank Gioia Jr., a turncoat Luchese soldier, told the FBI that mob associate Frank Smith and two others killed the elder Aronwald on orders from Cacace.

At first, Gioia, who began cooperating in 1995, had withheld that information because he and Smith’s sister Kim had been lovers and she had borne Gioia’s son. Gioia turned on them when he learned that Kim Smith had taped conversations with him and given them to members of the Luchese family.

After several starts and stops, Frank Smith also agreed to cooperate. He de tailed his role in Aronwald’s slaying and three additional 1987 murders, all allegedly at Cacace’s direction.

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After years of debate, Congress established sentencing guidelines in the federal court system in an effort to correct disparate and unequal prison terms defendants were receiving for similar crimes around the country.

Now might be a good time for the U.S. attorneys in Manhattan and Brooklyn to arrive at a more evenhanded way of dealing with mob defectors who violate their cooperation agreements with the feds. Consider the cases of two turncoat wiseguys named Vinny.

There was a big hue and cry when Vincent “Vinny Ocean” Palermo, a real Soprano songbird, disclosed three years after he began cooperating that he had secretly given his son $1.7 million of his proceeds from a Queens topless bar he had operated.

Vinny Ocean made the revelation last year in the middle of his testimony against three DeCavalcante capos, prompting outraged federal prosecutor John Hillebrecht to tell a Manhattan jury the feds might tear up the agreement that called for leniency for Palermo despite four murders, nine murder conspiracies, and other violent crimes.

Palermo had been required to turn in any money he had squirreled away or that others were holding for him, and his explanation that the $1.7 million was no longer his money but had been a “gift” to his son struck most people, as they say on the street, as a crock of spit.

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, sources say, turncoat Luchese soldier Vincent “Vinny Baldy” Salanardi, a violence-prone drug dealer and loanshark, held back information about a $15,000 usurious loan he had given to a businessman. He also failed to say his girlfriend had collected $900 from the businessman after Vinny Baldy began cooperating in April 2003.

When confronted, sources said, Salanardi explained that in 2002,months before he was indicted, the $15,000 loan became an investment when the businessman, the co-owner of a Brooklyn car wash, said he was on the outs with his partner and asked Vinny Baldy to become his new partner in the business.

Salanardi then stopped collecting payments, sources say. But after he began cooperating, according to the sources, his girlfriend began bugging him for money to pay bills. At the time, Vinny Baldy was broke and being held without bail. So he did what any love struck prisoner might do: He told her to go ask the businessman for money.

Salanardi’s story is certainly no worse than Palermo’s – Gang Land thinks Vinny Baldy’s is more believable – and the $900 that Vinny Baldy’s girlfriend received is miniscule compared to the $1.7 million Vinny Ocean claims was a “gift” to his son.

When push came to shove, sources say Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Seigel in Brooklyn decided Salanardi had breached his agreement and he wants him tossed out of the Witness Protection Program. Meanwhile, Mr. Hillebrecht’s anger at his cooperating witness has disappeared.

Neither prosecutor would talk about his case, but the rationale behind their different responses becomes clear in court records. Mr. Seigel doesn’t need Salanardi to testify; virtually all his codefendants pleaded guilty when they learned that he was cooperating.

But at the time of Palermo’s big fib, Mr. Hillebrecht still needed him to testify against Federico “Fritzi” Giovanelli, a Genovese wiseguy who went to trial last May and was convicted of alerting Vinny Ocean and other New Jersey gangsters they were about to be indicted in late 1999.