In six days on the witness stand, turncoat capo Michael “Mikey Scars” DiLeonardo gave lessons in the etymology of mob nicknames and spoke wistfully of himself as a made guy as he blasted away at the government’s main targets – Gambino boss Peter Gotti and soldier Thomas “Huck” Carbonaro.

During the fusillade against Gotti and Carbonaro, DiLeonardo also sprayed a former acting boss, John A. “Junior” Gotti, with allegations of fraud, money laundering, and extortion, including labor racketeering shakedowns in excess of $500,000.

Mikey Scars painted Junior, his “closest friend” in the mob, as a tried-and-true gangster who made excellent use of his power as acting boss to line his own pockets when he took over following the conviction of his father – the late Dapper Don, John Gotti.

DiLeonardo still has plenty of live ammunition left for his confrontation next year at the Junior Don’s trial for the attempted murder of radio talk show host Curtis Sliwa and a slew of other charges, including two additional murder conspiracies.

In addition to placing Junior squarely behind the Sliwa rubout attempt, sources say Mikey Scars has told the feds that Junior sent three underlings to beat the outspoken Mr. Sliwa with baseball bats three months before the June 1992 shooting.

Later, while the pair was in Florida, Junior told Mikey that he had dispatched mob associates John “Johnny Boy” Ruggiero, Michael McLaughlin, and Steve Kaplan – longtime cohorts of the mob scion – to retaliate “for Sliwa’s verbal attacks on the Gotti family,” according to one law enforcement source.

Those allegations undercut the younger Gotti’s longtime claim that he has had nothing to do with mob violence. Mikey Scars has lots more to say on that score.

Sources say DiLeonardo also told the feds that as acting boss, Junior controlled high-powered weapons for the crime family, and that Junior and Johnny Boy – their late fathers were also partners in crime – were involved in a long-running machine gun caper with DiLeonardo.

It began in the mid-1990s, sources said, while Gotti and DiLeonardo were at a Queens cafe on Woodhaven Boulevard. Junior turned to Mikey Scars and the following conversation ensued:

“Would you hold something for me?”

“What might that something be?”

“Machine guns.”

“Sure,” said Mikey Scars, who, like Junior, planned to stay as far away from the machine guns as possible and use a trusted underling to store the lethal firepower once it was transported to Brooklyn from Queens for safekeeping.

DiLeonardo instructed Tommy Cherubino, a close associate who was a shop steward for Teamsters Local 282, to go with Ruggiero to pick up something at a nearby location. “Be careful,” he advised Cherubino.

When the two returned, DiLeonardo had Cherubino take the package to his aunt’s house in Bensonhurst. As DiLeonardo stood lookout for police on the one-way street where Cherubino and his aunt lived, he watched as Cherubino carried “a large package into his house, then came back outside,” according to a law enforcement source.

In early 2002, sources say, Mikey Scars got word from another mob associate, Noel Modica, that he had met Ruggiero and was told that “Junior wanted the machine guns returned.” DiLeonardo categorically denied to Modica knowing anything about the weapons. But he later dispatched the ever-willing Cherubino to return them to Ruggiero.

DiLeonardo, who would turn on the mob later that same year, told the feds he “did not feel as if Modica could be trusted with information,” said a law enforcement source.

The machine gun allegations might have a more immediate adverse effect on Junior and may well ensure his sixth consecutive Christmas behind bars if assistant U.S. attorneys Victor Hou, Joon Kim and Michael McGovern continue to have their way.

Citing Gotti’s alleged directive regarding the guns two years ago as “clear and convincing” evidence that even after six years in prison he remains a danger to the community, the prosecutors convinced a Manhattan federal court magistrate judge, Frank Maas, to detain Junior without bail as he awaits trial.

This week, however, Gotti’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, appealed to a Manhattan federal court judge, Shira Schleindlin, to reverse Judge Maas’s decision, arguing that house arrest and a $10 million bail package would assure the public’s safety and afford Gotti an opportunity to prepare to defend himself against charges that could put him away for life.

Noting that the machine gun allegations, like many others, were “based solely on DiLeonardo’s uncorroborated word,” Mr. Lichtman argued that they should be ignored because they have been denied by both Gotti and Ruggiero.

In addition, wrote Mr. Lichtman, the violent acts attributed to Gotti are “very stale” and belied by jailhouse utterances on an FBI bug for 14 months during which Junior was “heard spewing anger and resentment about his years in organized crime and his strong desire to leave the life he inherited from his father.”

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During his testimony at Peter Gotti’s trial, Mikey Scars also gave a lesson in the lexicon of mob nicknames.

The lesson began with a correction of a longtime error concerning a confusing moniker that late mob boss John Gotti had been overheard to use for his deceased predecessor, Paul Castellano. His explanation, however, had spectators scratching their heads and trying to summon up old,faded geography lessons.

Asked about the word “Nasabeak,” which was attributed to Gotti on a transcript of a famous December 12, 1989, conversation and played at Gotti’s 1992 murder trial, DiLeonardo said the word the Dapper Don used was actually “Nosambique,” a nickname that Mikey Scars had given Castellano during the 1980s.

“It was a reference to a small country in Southeast Africa, Mozambique, so I called him Nosambique because Paul has a pretty Romanesque nose,” he said. Here’s what DiLeonardo said about nicknames of a few other Gambino wiseguys:

* Thomas “Tommy Sneakers” Cacciopoli – “Likes sneakers.”

* John “Handsome Jack” Giordano – “The name doesn’t fit him.”

* John “Jackie Nose” D’Amico – “Has a Romanesque nose.”

Mikey Scars – his nickname stems from dog bites he received as a kid – had “no clue” why mob associate/murder victim Edward Garafalo was called “Eddie the Chink” or why Aniello Mancuso is known as “Wahoo.”

DiLeonardo was a series of contradictions on the witness stand.

He tearfully told how he decided to defect when he learned that Junior Gotti had tried to use DiLeonardo’s teenage son to convince him not to turn against the Gambino family he had joined at age 33.

Often, though, he used the “we” and “us” pronouns in references to the Gambino family, as though he were still a “made man,” well aware of the Mafia dictum he was told during his induction ceremony: “You come in alive, you go out dead.”

While discussing Salvatore “Sammy Bull” Gravano, however, he referred to the turncoat underboss, the object of a failed murder plot DiLeonado testified about, as a “onetime member.”

No matter how he describes himself these days, Mikey Scars is in pretty much the same situation as Sammy Bull was in a decade ago: a witness against his Mafia boss who is hoping to walk out of prison someday, instead of leaving in a body bag.