To Curtis Sliwa, Joseph “Little Joe” D’Angelo was the taxi driver from hell, the guy behind the wheel of the stolen cab that picked up Mr. Sliwa in Alphabet City 13 years ago so that a gunman crouched in the front seat could pump three bullets into him.

To the feds, D’Angelo is the latest Gambino turncoat and the only participant in the abduction and shooting of the ABC radio talk-show host to agree to tell the inside story of the event at the upcoming racketeering trial of John A. “Junior” Gotti.

To Junior, the defection of Little Joe may not be such a bad thing.

To be sure, D’Angelo will implicate Junior in the early-morning events of June 19, 1992, when Mr. Sliwa hailed the cab in front of his apartment. The shooting – Mr. Sliwa was seriously wounded – was payback for his radio bashing of Junior, his sister, and the late Dapper Don.

However, Little Joe may not help the prosecution’s efforts to convict Junior of kidnapping and attempting to murder Mr. Sliwa, the only crimes he’s charged with in the shooting. The reason: D’Angelo’s testimony is expected to back up the assertions of key prosecution witness Michael “Mikey Scars” DiLeonardo that, according to a secret FBI report obtained by Gang Land, he heard Junior order Michael “Mikey Y.” Yannotti and D’Angelo “to put Sliwa in the hospital,” not to kill or kidnap him.

“There’s a big difference between ordering a beating, or even putting someone in the hospital, and plotting to kill him,” a source said, noting that the legal ramifications were important in a federal racketeering case. Unlike kidnapping, murder, or attempted murder, the charge of “assault” is not a crime or “predicate” act that can be cited as being committed as “part of a racketeering enterprise.”

According to the indictment, Gotti, D’Angelo, and Yannotti, who allegedly fired three shots that hit Mr. Sliwa as he scrambled in the backseat, were part of a conspiracy to kidnap and murder Mr. Sliwa that began in early 1992 and ended the day of the shooting. On his radio show, Mr. Sliwa had trashed the elder Gotti as a drug-dealing gangster throughout his trial, which ended with Gotti and his consigliere, Frank “Frankie Loc” Locascio, being convicted.

Junior Gotti gave the order in early 1992, shortly after Mikey Scars brought D’Angelo to a planning session at which Junior ordered capo Nicholas “Little Nick” Corozzo to “handle details of the attack,” according to the report by FBI agent William Hekel.

After the shooting, Mr. Hekel wrote, both Little Joe and Junior complained to DiLeonardo about the way Yannotti “handled” the order, with Gotti using street slang to note that the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing.

“The bottom line is that the plan was to put Sliwa out of commission, to shut his mouth for a while, not to kill him,” a source said.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan did not respond to Gang Land inquiries about the kidnapping/attempted murder/assault issue. But it’s noteworthy that when it came time for DiLeonardo to admit his involvement in the Sliwa caper, he pleaded guilty to conspiring to assault Mr. Sliwa in order to enhance his status in the crime family, waiving the five-year statute of limitations in the 13-year-old crime. Contacted by Gang Land, Gotti’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman would only say that he looked forward “to seeing Joe D’Angelo in the witness chair.”

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FBI agents and wiseguys have long viewed D’Angelo as a potential mob defector, but the 36-year-old mobster is a reluctant turncoat who flipped when his co-defendants rejected final plea deals that were part of a “global” offer from the government.

Sources said that when the final offer was made, D’Angelo wanted to take 30 years rather than risk a life sentence if found guilty of a murder for which DiLeonardo and another turncoat, Frank “Frankie Fapp” Fappiano, had fingered him. All three defectors were members of Salvatore “Sammy Bull” Gravano’s crew in the 1980s; Little Joe was Sammy Bull’s protege.

Yannotti, 42, who is charged with two murders, rejected a 30-year deal; Gotti, 41, turned down a 15- to 18-year plea bargain that would also cover charges that he engaged in two murder conspiracies, extortion, and loansharking; associate Louis “Louie Black” Mariani, 49, refused an 8- to 10-year deal for extortion and securities fraud.

Two years ago, FBI agents tabbed D’Angelo as a weak link and pushed him to defect, taunting him with the fact that Mikey Scars, with whom he had been close, had fingered him as the wheelman in the Sliwa shooting. When Fappiano, another close associate, turned last year, wiseguys were convinced D’Angelo would flip, sources said.

Last week, they all were proved right.

Meanwhile, as Little Joe prepares to take the path that Sammy Bull, his one-time mentor, used to his advantage back in 1992, Junior looks to fight the case the way his father and Mafia boss wanted him to in 1998, the first time he was charged with racketeering.

D’Angelo, who would have taken the 30 years and who would have been ecstatic to have gotten a 20-year deal, will likely end up doing less than 10 years in prison. It remains to be seen how the Dapper Don’s strategy plays out for Junior and Company.

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Three years ago, a former Gambino consigliere, Frank Locascio, leveled explosive charges that John Gotti threatened to kill Locascio’s lawyer during their 1992 trial. The reason? The lawyer was emphasizing his client’s interests over Gotti’s. Now the imprisoned gangster is going to get his day in court. Sort of.

Locascio, 72 and ailing, will participate in the proceedings through a televideo hookup from a prison hospital near Worcester, Mass., as attorney Anthony Cardinale takes the stand and backs up Frankie Loc’s claim that the Dapper Don threatened to kill the attorney if he didn’t make Gotti his primary focus at their joint trial.

Brooklyn Federal Judge I. Leo Glasser, who initially rejected the claim out of hand, was ordered by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to listen to Mr. Cardinale testify about the issue and to determine whether Gotti had threatened to kill him and would have killed him from prison, as he had been convicted of doing once before at his 1992 trial.

Originally scheduled for February, the hearing was adjourned when lawyers asked Judge Glasser to disqualify himself as biased and transfer the case to another judge. Judge Glasser rejected that claim, and early this week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals sided with him, prompting the parties to schedule a hearing for September 15.

By declining to recuse himself, the judge placed himself in a tough spot.

If he rules against Locascio again, as Gang Land expects he will, it will raise questions about whether the aging gangster got a fair shake and whether a different judge with a fresh look would have ruled otherwise.

If he rules for Locascio, however, prosecutors will wonder whether Judge Glasser bent over backward to avoid expected criticism and whether another judge, with no connections to the case, would have determined that the gangster’s arguments had no merit.

Let the second-guessing begin.