Here’s a switch: Gang Land has learned that Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano, the dandy former acting boss of the Bonanno crime family, has agreed to wear a wire for the feds.

Sorry if we made you spill your morning espresso. It’s not that kind of wire. Basciano hasn’t “gone bad,” as one wise guy might say about another becoming an informant. Vinny Gorgeous, desperate to avoid a possible death penalty at his upcoming federal murder and racketeering trial, has volunteered to strap on a set of electronic wires connected to a lie detector.

His lawyer, Ephraim Savitt, hopes the results will convince the Justice Department that the notion that Vinny Gorgeous ever plotted to kill three witnesses, along with the judge and the prosecutor at his last trial, is “preposterous,” as he put it.

Although the results are not usable at trial, this is not the first time a Bonanno big shot has used a polygraph exam to make his case to the government. A former boss, Joseph Massino, did the same thing in 2004 when the feds didn’t believe him when he told them that Basciano was seeking to whack a federal prosecutor.

Basciano will have his encounter with the court-authorized polygraph machine today. He will be questioned about a list of five names written by him and given to the feds by an informer. Prosecutors say it was a hit list, and they have kept him caged 23 hours a day since last year. The list is a key factor being weighed by a Justice Department panel that will decide whether prosecutors will seek his execution at trial at Brooklyn.

Mr. Savitt said the presiding judge at Basciano’s prior and upcoming trial, Nicholas Garaufis, found the list of names to be “inconsistent with the government notion that this was a real hit list.”

In court papers, Basciano has offered an explanation for the list, which carved new ground in Mafia lore. He said he wrote the list and gave it to an inmate whose mother was a Santeria priestess, in the hope that she could cleanse the five people of any animosities they had against him during the trial.

“There’s a big difference between some voodoo mumbo jumbo and a good old-fashioned gangland-style killing,” said Mr. Savitt, who hired a former FBI chief polygraph examiner, Paul Minor, to conduct the liedetector test.

The stakes are much higher for Basciano than they were for Massino, who flunked his test, but no one but the feds knew it until it was disclosed by Gang Land many months later. Despite the test results, Massino was able to convince prosecutors to let him wear a wire. In the end, he managed to snare Basciano in conversations that the feds say will prove that he plotted to kill prosecutor Greg Andres.

But if Basciano were to fail his test, the Justice Department will surely find out about it and will probably be more than a little upset.

***

A Brooklyn federal judge who cut a backsliding mob turncoat a major break two years ago has signaled that he won’t be fooled a second time.

Judge I. Leo Glasser didn’t say exactly what he has in mind for Frank Smith. But at a proceeding earlier this month, Judge Glasser uttered the two most dreaded words a defendant can hear when his sentencing is being discussed: “upward departure.”

Judge Glasser’s words left little doubt that the sentence he imposes for probation violations will be a lot tougher than the sweet one year of house arrest and five years of probation that he gave Smith in 2005 for crimes that included five murders. Smith’s probation violations include two grand larceny arrests.

Among the five murders was the bizarre 1987 contract killing of the elderly father of a former federal organized crime prosecutor. In a colossal blunder, Smith and two cohorts had stalked and killed George Aronwald, a slight, 78-year-old retired civil lawyer, instead of his broad-shouldered, 46-year-old son, William. The younger Mr. Aronwald had been marked for death by a Colombo mobster, Joel “Joe Waverly” Cacace.

Twenty months ago, Judge Glasser stated that he knew he would be “very severely criticized” for giving Smith a lenient sentence, but he said that without Smith’s cooperation, Cacace, the family’s underboss, would not have been brought to justice for ordering the slaying.

At a brief proceeding two weeks ago, Judge Glasser told Smith that he intended to “upwardly depart” from the recommended guidelines of four years if Smith were found guilty of violating the conditions of his original sentence.

At the session, Smith, 40, pleaded guilty to leaving the state where he was living under the federal Witness Protection Program without permission. He pleaded innocent to stealing a load of plasma TVs in Illinois in November, and to switching a price tag on a plasma TV at a Florida store in December.

Judge Glasser rejected a request by the defense lawyer, Robert Race, that Smith, who has been incarcerated for two months, be released on bail. The judge set a status conference for next month. The Illinois charges were dismissed last month.

Since different standards of proof are involved, dismissals of state court crimes often have little impact on federal probation violations. An assistant U.S. attorney, Joey Lipton, declined to discuss the government’s position in the federal case.

Mr. Aronwald, who initially argued that Smith should receive 20 years, said he sees no reason why Smith shouldn’t get that now. That would still be a substantial reduction from the life sentence he now faces for violating the terms of his cooperation agreement and his lenient sentence.

“He is a professed criminal,” Mr. Aronwald said, “a thug who has no respect for the law and has thumbed his nose at the judge who gave him a lenient sentence, as well as the government that made a deal with him.”

***

When Judge Glasser gave Smith house arrest, the judge took into account that the former mob associate had served 15 years in prison on drug charges for which he had been wrongly convicted by state narcotics prosecutors in Manhattan. All things considered, you might think that Smith, who survived a contract on his own life by being in prison between 1988 and 2003 — not to mention that he had killed five men by the age of 21 without a peep from the law — would have been happy to move on and let bygones be bygones.

In fact, at the time, Smith paved the way for his conviction to be vacated by stipulating that he would not file a civil suit seeking monetary damages for his years behind bars. Smith either changed his mind, or had his fingers crossed when he made the deal.

In a malicious prosecution lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court, Smith is seeking $20 million in damages from the NYPD and the city of New York.

Mr. Race, who said that while Smith was incarcerated, he acquired a “debilitating disease which is permanent and conceivably fatal,” put it this way to Gang Land: “The waiver wasn’t valid. The bottom line is that there are some rights that you cannot waive. What they did to him was illegal, and he deserves compensation.”

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