After 30 months awaiting trial on “house arrest,” Colombo soldier Gerard “Green Eyes” Clemenza made a strategic decision: He would plead guilty to gambling and loan-sharking charges.

Since he faced just 24 months in prison for those crimes, his decision came a little late in the day. Presumably he just wanted to get the whole thing over with, a common emotion among gangsters going through the legal wringer.

Clemenza decided to throw in the towel after he lost all his pretrial motions to have his charges dismissed. The move means Green Eyes will not go to trial with two sons of the late legendary crime boss Joe Colombo. One of those co-defendants, Chris Colombo, brilliantly demonstrated that there are ways to achieve fame and money legitimately by starring in an HBO TV special, aptly titled “House Arrest.”

This week, however, life shifted to a real-life courtroom from socalled reality TV as jury selection began for Chris Colombo, his brother Anthony, an inducted family soldier, and four other defendants, who were hit three years ago with a potpourri of racketeering crimes that include a shakedown of a publicly traded Internet advertising company, DoubleClick.

But Clemenza — he prefers the more conventional nickname of “Jerry” to “Green Eyes” — now faces the prospect, according to legal experts, of serving two years in prison on top of the 31 (and counting) months of strict home confinement.

In the mid-1990s, Clemenza, along with the Colombo brothers, was ostracized and placed on the “shelf” — suspended without pay or responsibilities — by family leader Alphonse “Allie” Persico for backing the losing side in the bloody 1991–93 Colombo war.

This was a huge insult to the high-living Clemenza. But, unlike his later troubles with the feds, it didn’t alter his lifestyle much.

Until his house arrest in 2004, he could be found every August upstate, at the beautiful Saratoga Racetrack, at his regular table with a bottle of Pinot Grigio, trying to pick a winner before lighting up his first Romeo & Julietta cigar of the day. Clemenza even demonstrated this habit for the Albany Times Union, which featured him — wine, stogie, and all — in a frontpage story on August 3, 2002.

Jerry also has his own HBO connection, a “Sopranos” one, at that. In 1999, he and his brother, James “Jimmy Brown” Clemenza, were at a Little Italy Christmas party attended by several of the HBO show’s cast members, including Tony “Paulie Walnuts” Sirico and Vincent Pastore, whose Big Pussy character then was alive and kicking, not swimming with the fishes.

But parties like that are merely a memory for the mobster — and will be for some time.

Under calculations used by the federal Bureau of Prisons, defendants get full credit for every day of time served in pre-trial detention, if they are convicted. Clemenza, however, will get zero credit for his time spent under house arrest, which he began serving in June 2004, after his bail was revoked when he couldn’t find a job. To Gang Land, this seems a little unfair (and not just because we are admittedly partial to guys named Jerry).

We’re not saying that Jerry deserves full, one-day-for-one-day credit. But there should be some formula for partial credit. Perhaps one day for three, or maybe one day of prison credit for five days of “house arrest.” Something.

Court records show that Clemenza was mostly stuck at home. A few days after he pleaded guilty, for example, he had to ask permission to visit the gravesites of his father and brother, “with whom he had been very close,” attorney Nicholas Kaizer wrote in a letter to a Manhattan federal judge, Naomi Reice Buchwald.

It was one of only two times Clemenza sought permission to leave his home other than for visits to his lawyer or a doctor. Last June, Judge Buchwald allowed Clemenza to attend his son’s high school graduation.

Sentencing for the stay-at-home wiseguy is scheduled for February 15, but it is likely to be put off until after the conclusion of the Colombo brothers’ trial. Testimony is slated to begin next week. The trial is expected to last about two months.

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Judge Buchwald rebuffed prosecutors 15 months ago when they voiced their displeasure that Chris Colombo turned his limited “house arrest” restriction into a rollicking, moneymaking TV escapade, and they tried to revoke his bail conditions and have him detained until his trial.

They suffered a similar fate last month when they asked to be allowed to implicate him at his trial in the murder of a former worker in a bookmaking operation that was allegedly run by the Colombo brothers in the 1990s.

In court papers, Colombo’s lawyer, Jeremy Schneider, asserted, without dispute from the prosecution, that a former Westchester County police officer, James Di-Maria, was tried and convicted of the murder in 1998. No allegation was made at DiMaria’s trial that Colombo was an accomplice or coconspirator in the murder plot.

Colombo’s HBO adventure never led to a series, as the wannabe actor had hoped, but it did put him one up on his brother Anthony, with whom he has been feuding for several years, according to sources close to both men.

With HBO footing the bill, Chris bought several hand-tailored suits during the making of the show. On the eve of trial, Anthony was reduced to successfully petitioning the judge, through his lawyer, Aaron Goldsmith, for a modification of his house arrest conditions so he could visit a local shopping mall to buy “clothing and apparel necessary to maintain proper attire in court.”

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A mob milestone of sorts was marked on New Year’s Eve when Genovese capo John “Buster” Ardito died at home. Ardito, 87, had been released from prison a few days before Christmas after federal prosecutors became convinced by follow-up medical tests that his pancreatic cancer would take his life soon.

Ardito, who temporarily derailed an FBI electronic surveillance operation when he found a bug under a table at a restaurant he used as a meeting place, was nonetheless overheard in many incriminating conversations during a two-year probe after agents placed a “roving bug” in a cell phone he rarely used but always carried with him.

“For the little time that I knew him, I came to know him as a man who epitomized the Italian tradition of strength and honor,” attorney Joseph Corozzo, who began representing Ardito the month before he died, said.

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Aging turncoat Genovese soldier George Barone, a mob fixture for decades on the docks of New York and Miami, waxed eloquent at a recent civil deposition as he explained that he knew one of his criminal cohorts only by his nickname, Chuckie.

“We all had nicknames except me,” he said. “Meatballs and Snotnose and this guy and so on and so forth. You never knew who the hell the last name was. The Italians are great for nicknames: Big Feet, Little Feet, Fish, Sardines, so on and so forth. I never knew what a guy’s last name was. Ridiculous, but that’s it.”

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