Tommy Cappa made it through the bloody Colombo family war that left 12 dead on the streets of Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island between 1991 and 1993. A soldier in that fratricidal battle, Cappa did a six-year stretch for participating in a botched murder plot.

Now, the mob associate is engaged in an even tougher family feud: He’s at war with his mother, Ellen.

In addition, Cappa is battling his brother, Richard, and sister-in-law, Laura. The clash stems from a decision he made five years ago to leave the mean streets of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and move into his mother’s Manhattan co-op apartment.

While incarcerated, according to court papers, he became a voracious reader, earning an associate’s degree in applied science from Mercy College in New Jersey and 30 credits toward a business degree, which motivated him to “get out of Brooklyn” when he left prison.

That’s when Cappa, who was part of a murder conspiracy that led to the death of a teenager in 1991 in a mistaken-identity execution, put his getaway plan into action.

He spent $350,000 to buy, renovate, move in, and maintain the apartment for four years, only to be served with an illegal eviction from his mother two months ago, six days before Christmas, Cappa charges in a complaint filed in Manhattan Supreme Court.

Cappa, 39, claims that his mother and brother Richard, 35, also stole $315,000 worth of his jewelry and other valuables, including a baseball card collection, that he had stored at the Lower East Side co-op on Grand Street. Richard, a minor player in the mob war, was Tommy’s co-defendant in a racketeering indictment and received probation in the case.

To add further injury to the insult, according to the complaint, while Tommy was cooling his heels in prison, his mother, brother, and sister-in-law stole his interest in a Florida condo he owned with his mother in a fraud scheme befitting a mob family, not a biological family.

Stung by his relatives’ actions, Cappa, who got a sweet one-day sentence earlier last year for violating conditions of his supervised release showed restraint. He hired a lawyer rather than opt for a more traditional wiseguy response.

In court papers filed by his attorney, Barry Levin, Cappa is seeking the return of all his assets, as well as $6 million in punitive damages.

On August 18, 1998, according to the complaint, his mother and Richard forged Tommy’s signature on a deed that illegally gave them his ownership rights. Later, the complaint said, they transferred his piece of the condo to Richard’s wife, Laura.

After Tommy discovered the scheme last year, he confronted his family. The response, according to the legal papers, came February 22, 2006: “Laura Cappa’s illegal interest in the condominium was transferred back to the defendant, Ellen Cappa.” The complaint described that transfer as a blatant cover-up effort designed to conceal the initial fraud and deprive him of his ownership rights.

Mr. Levin, who told Gang Land that Cappa “has endeavored to settle this unfortunate litigation amicably,” obtained a temporary restraining order from Supreme Court Justice Jane Solomon that prevents the defendants from liquidating any of the allegedly appropriated assets. A hearing on the case is scheduled for March 12.

Contacted by Gang Land, attorney Philip November, who filed a response last week denying the allegations on behalf of all three Cappa defendants, denied that he represented them.

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As he did this past Christmas, Tommy Cappa received another unwelcome gift a few days before Christmas 2004 — charges that he violated six conditions of his supervised release. Ultimately, two specifications were upheld. Last year, he pleaded guilty to them.

Neither charge was terribly onerous. One was for not notifying his probation officer that he had moved to Manhattan; the other was for disguising a $25,000 one-time commission as salary received over a 12-month period. But the charges could have meant a return to prison, if not for some good lawyering.

Some good fortune came first. Within days of Cappa’s release from prison in 2002, he was approached and given an unusual proposal in a Midtown pickup bar by a female executive who had a half-hour to kill between business meetings.

“I said, ‘Excuse me, I am not really interested in the pickup scene and don’t want to be bothered. Do you mind if I sit with you?'” recalled Penny Hart, the president of TSC Direct, a 25-year-old Jericho, Long Island, company that is the largest privately held automobile insurance firm in New York.

“He said, ‘Is that your way of telling me you think I’m ugly?’ We hit it off. He had done a lot of reading in prison; he liked Ayn Rand. We started talking about that, and ‘Atlas Shrugged’ came up. It was my favorite book and it was his, too. And the rest is history,” Ms. Hart told Gang Land.

That history, according to court papers, in which Ms. Hart describes Cappa as her “soul mate,” fiancé, best friend, and partner, includes, during the last year, court-approved, vacations to places such as London and Buenos Aires.

Finally, when push came to shove over Cappa’s supervised release violations, his lawyer in that matter, Alan Futerfas, proved that four charges were baseless and filed a 19-page sentencing memo that minimized the others as regrettable technical mistakes. He noted that the authorities learned of them when Cappa reported them, and stressed that his client declared the full $25,000 commission with the IRS and paid his taxes on the income.

As his trump card, Mr. Futerfas submitted a letter to Brooklyn Federal Judge Allyne Ross on Cappa’s behalf from Ms. Hart, a single mother who begged for leniency for Cappa, describing him as a “devoted, sensitive, and affectionate” role model for her three children.

She also wrote that she felt “somewhat responsible” for his two violations, noting that “Tom moved to the city to be closer to me.”

After serving his one-day sentence, Cappa began another three-year period of supervised release, which ends in 2009.

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A reputed Bonanno capo, Joseph Cammarano Jr., learned a tough lesson last week: Even though he spent years inside an American nuclear sub — where he had high-level security clearance — he is still too much of a bail risk.

It was a close call, U.S. Magistrate Judge Viktor Pohorelsky said as he agreed with the position of Assistant U.S. Attorney Winston Chan and ordered that Cammarano, one of 16 wiseguys and associates hit with racketeering charges, be detained to await trial.

In arguing for bail, attorney Marvyn Kornberg had stressed that Cammarano had no felony convictions and that he had earned a “top security” clearance during his six years in the Navy, higher than any of the FBI agents who had investigated and arrested him. Mr. Kornberg said he was disappointed by the ruling and intended to appeal it.

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