Venero “Benny Eggs” Mangano, a Genovese underboss whom the feds and his peers have long considered one of the sharpest wiseguys around, has spent more than 13 years in federal custody for a crime of commerce, not violence.

Even at the ripe old age of 85, Mangano, who was convicted of a single labor racketeering count of rigging bids for window installation contracts at city housing projects, is doing his time without complaint. It is the same way he served his country during World War II.

The young Benny Eggs — his nickname derived from an egg store his mother ran 100 years ago — flew tail gunner on 33 bombing missions over Europe, including two successful bombing runs over Normandy on D-Day.

His plane was twice hit by enemy fire and Mangano was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and an air medal with four Oak Leaf Clusters and three Battle Stars.

When he returned home to Greenwich Village, he gravitated to what he knew best, the garment business. He formed a company, M &J Enterprises, which bought surplus designer jeans and other clothes for resale in foreign and domestic markets. Among those with whom he did business was a young man named Calvin Klein.

None of that counted for anything, however, when it was brought up at his sentencing. Mangano’s crime normally calls for three years’ incarceration, but because of his mob rank and other reasons put forward by the feds, he was ordered to serve 15 years and eight months.

Now, thanks to standard good-time reductions, he has only 12 more days in custody. The government is making sure the ailing wiseguy is as uncomfortable during his last two weeks as he was during the prior 13-plus years.

Mangano is residing at a 160-bed federal halfway house located on Myrtle Avenue in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. It is one of three halfway houses in the New York area operated under the auspices of the federal Bureau of Prisons by a private security company, Continental Services.

The facilities are designed to encourage resident-inmates to spend their daytime hours working, looking for a job, or doing a host of other chores and permissible activities to adjust to life outside prison walls. They also can spend weekends at home with family members.

The setup leaves a lot to be desired for an ailing octogenarian. Mangano suffers from a host of ailments, including heart disease and macular degeneration that has rendered him virtually blind, according to family and friends. His daughter, Rosanna, and son, Joseph, drive him several times a week to various doctors and rehabilitation therapy at the Veterans Hospital. Mangano’s wife of 53 years, Louise, 79, is also ill and rarely leaves their home.

Mangano’s son, an insurance company executive, said that while his father was home on weekends, officials repeatedly called at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. to check up on him. “He’s 85,” the son said. “He can hardly see. Where the hell do they think he’s going?”

During the summer, he said his father contracted pneumonia because “they kept the temperature too cold for him.” He added that more than once he was called back to the facility after he had dropped his father off and told to take his father home for the night because “they needed the bed.”

Worse, Joseph Mangano said, is that the feds have singled out his old man for special harassment. Several workers have told him, he said, that BOP officials have told them to call his father “in the middle of the night.” Workers have also told him that BOP officials have ignored several suggestions to adjust his father’s status to home confinement.

In fact, according to court records, when Benny Eggs arrived at the Myrtle Avenue facility on May 3, a Continental Services supervisor told him, his lawyer, and prison officials that the facility was not well-suited for the aged and ailing Mangano, and recommended that he complete “his sentence under home confinement.”

In anticipation of the usually proforma approval by the BOP, Continental inspected Mangano’s home and determined that once the “call waiting” feature was removed from the phone, his home “met the standards for home confinement,” according to a letter Mangano lawyer Murray Richman filed with Brooklyn Federal Judge Frederic Block.

BOP rejected Continental’s recommendation, deciding that he was entitled to only one month of home confinement before his sentence officially ended on November 2, and that he would have to remain at the Brooklyn facility until October 3.

Last week, with Benny Eggs resigned and ready, in the words of his son, to “do three more weeks of this, and four weeks of house arrest,” Judge Block threw a surprise, and belated, monkey wrench into the mix by recommending that the BOP release Mangano from his halfway house obligations on September 2.

Judge Block’s handwritten recommendation — it was dated last month but faxed on September 14 — was a response to a request from Mr. Richman. It caused a flurry of activity, but in the end, Joseph Mangano said, all that happened is “they’ve been jerking him around for the last five days.”

The BOP administrator who oversees the Brooklyn facility, James Sullivan, denied that the elder Mangano had ever been sent home by the halfway house, but seemed to confirm the gist of his son’s complaints — if not his characterization of recent activity by the BOP.

“If it were up to me,” Mr. Sullivan said, “I would have sent him home already. He’s old, he’s only got a little time left. It’s up to the Region to approve it. As soon as I get that, he’s going home.”

As of yesterday, Mangano was still waiting for approval from the Northeast Regional Office in Philadelphia. A spokeswoman for that office would only say that BOP officials “were making every attempt to comply with the judge’s request.”

Despite his aches, pains, disabilities, and discomforts, Mangano’s mental acuity is as sharp as ever, according to his friends. And after surviving two heart attacks and three emergency heart operations behind bars, his attitude toward the BOP as he nears release is similar to the one he voiced in 1997, when he taunted prosecutors to “shoot me” for refusing to testify against his boss, Vincent “Chin” Gigante. Benny Eggs may not be able to do the time standing on his head, but he’s likely now to walk out on his own two feet.

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