Two important turncoat mob witnesses who have helped the feds put away top Gambino and Colombo family gangsters may also help spring a mob wannabe who has spent nearly 20 years in prison for a murder they say he did not commit, Gang Land has learned.

Sources say Salvatore “Fat Sal” Mangiavillano and Frank Smith have independently told the FBI and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn that Carmine Carini, a low-level criminal cohort of theirs, was wrongly convicted in the 1983 murder of a shop owner.

Carini, 25 at the time, was convicted in 1985 of murdering Verdi Kaja, the owner of a record store who doubled as a fence, over a $5,000 debt. Kaja was slain November 18, 1983, three days after Carini pleaded guilty to a slew of other crimes, including grand larceny and reckless endangerment.

According to testimony at his trial, Kaja’s wife and young daughter saw Carini driving away with the victim, who was later found shot to death. Sentenced to 25 years to life, Carini won’t be eligible for parole until 2010.

Mangiavillano, who has helped the feds convict two mobsters of plotting to kill turncoat underboss Salvatore “Sammy Bull” Gravano, and Smith, whose cooperation convinced Colombo consigliere Joel “Joe Waverly” Cacace to plead guilty to murder, say a cousin of Carini’s, Vincent Carini, was the actual killer.

The circumstances surrounding the murder are set forth in an unusual letter sent earlier this year by Assistant U.S. Attorney Patricia Notopoulos to the office of Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes. Without identifying them by name, Ms. Notopoulos states that “two reliable cooperating witnesses” – referred to as “CW1” and “CW2” – have provided separate accounts of Carini’s wrongful conviction. Sources confirmed to Gang Land that the witnesses are Mangiavillano and Smith.

Fat Sal, who took the stand last week and implicated Gambino boss Peter Gotti in the Gravano murder plot, told the feds he learned of Carini’s innocence during a chance occurrence as he drove by Vincent Carini’s home and spotted him “crying on his porch,” according to Ms. Notopoulos’s letter.

After he asked Vincent “the nature of his problem, Vincent Carini responded that his cousin Carmine was just convicted of a murder that he himself had committed,” wrote Ms. Notopoulos.

Ms. Notopoulos wrote that Smith also learned from Vincent, a “close friend,” that his “cousin Carmine was wrongfully convicted of the murder of an individual who was … in the record business.”

Smith and Vincent Carini were much more than close friends. They were violent partners in crime. According to FBI documents, they took part in a bizarre mistaken-identity murder in March 1987. Ordered by Cacace to execute a former federal prosecutor, William Aronwald, they killed his father instead.

Because of their monumental blunder, the hit team – Smith, Vincent Carini, and his brother, Enrico – were marked for death. The Carinis were killed three months later. Smith escaped, then got a reprieve. Yesterday, in a plea bargain, Cacace, 63, was sentenced to 20 years.

In the record store murder, Ms. Notopoulos wrote, Vincent Carini killed the shop owner because he “owed the victim money and the victim threatened to go to the police when Vincent Carini failed to repay the money.”

The prosecutor’s June 21 letter related the new developments to Kenneth Taub, chief of the Brooklyn DA’s Homicide Bureau. Mr. Taub in turn notified Carini, who is housed at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora.

A private investigator who has worked for years to prove Carini’s innocence, Lawrence Frost, told Gang Land he is “optimistic that Carmine will be coming home soon. As soon as we speak to the two witnesses, we expect to file a motion to set aside the verdict based on the new evidence from them, as well as an in-depth reexamination of the entire record of the case.”

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“That’s the end of the ballgame,” an angry and melancholy John Gotti told brother Peter during a 1998 prison visit at the end of a long rant about the fail ings of family leaders, a few days after his son John A. “Junior” Gotti was hit with racketeering charges.

The Dapper Don could easily have been talking about the current situation facing both Peter and Junior Gotti now that Gambino defector Michael “Mikey Scars” DiLeonardo has picked up a bat and begun swinging it for the feds.

In his testimony against Peter Gotti and Thomas “Huck” Carbonaro in Manhattan Federal Court this week, the turncoat capo lived up to his advance billing, and then some.

DiLeonardo recalled growing up in the mob – in 1971 he met legendary Mafia boss Carlo Gambino at his grandfather’s funeral at age 16 – and being inducted into the Gambino crime family with Junior Gotti on Christmas Eve in 1988.

He was articulate, knowledgeable, engaging, polite, and courteous – he interrupted one answer with a “God bless you” when a juror sneezed. Most importantly, his accounts of discussions and dealings he had as a “made guy” in the Gambino family had a ring of truth.

And Peter and Junior have no one but themselves to blame.

It was Peter who triggered DiLeonardo’s decision to become a turncoat after DiLeonardo was indicted on racketeering charges and jailed in June 2002. By then the official Gambino boss, Peter, busted Mikey Scars from capo, put him “on a shelf,” and made him a “nonentity,” falsely accusing him of stealing mob money to justify the demotion.

“I was disenfranchised. It broke my heart,” DiLeonardo testified, adding that it induced him to cooperate with the feds in November 2002.”They could have taken all the money. I would have only gotten mad, but … .”

Days later, however, Mikey Scars had second thoughts. Emotionally torn by his decision to turn on Junior, “my closest friend,” and shunned by his teenage son for it, he took two vials of sleeping pills and tranquilizers in a failed suicide attempt. “I said to myself, ‘I just want to die a good soldier.'”

Months later, he was still on the fence. Then his son visited Junior in prison, and DiLeonardo got word that Junior forgave his transgressions and said he should return to the fold.

“You don’t manipulate my son,” DiLeonardo said. “That wasn’t fair game. At that point, I felt it was time, whether I was ready or not. I decided to come in and cooperate.”

In a forecast of his next trip to the witness stand, DiLeonardo admitted complicity in the 1992 shooting of radio talk show host Curtis Sliwa, the centerpiece of the racketeering indictment against Junior that is slated to play out in court next summer.

For all intents and purposes though, the ballgame is over.

This column and other news of organized crime will appear later today on Ganglandnews.com.