Anthony “Tony Roach” Rampino, a key pal of John Gotti’s during the Dapper Don’s heyday, made an unusual decision when he was found guilty of drug dealing in 1988. He did not appeal. Instead, without a peep, he began serving a 25 years-to-life sentence.

Because all defendants, even those without funds to pay for an appeal, are entitled to one, the choice by Rampino, a lifelong heroin user, might seem like a downright dumb move by a junkie whose brains were fried. It wasn’t.

It was a pragmatic maneuver designed to save a life – his own. Tony Roach understood that as long as he was in prison, it would be easier to avoid the death sentence that Gotti had imposed on him for suspecting that Rampino would quickly offer to talk about the bloody coup that catapulted Gotti to the top of the Gambino clan – the assassination of Paul Castellano in 1985.

The Don knew his man. On the day of his June 25, 1987, drug arrest – only three months after Gotti, Tony Roach, and five others won a stunning acquittal on racketeering charges – Rampino immediately offered to wear a wire against Gotti and others involved in the spectacular rubout. He even promised to retrieve one of the murder weapons if authorities would release him that same night.

But Tony Roach, who had cleaned up his act during the nine-month trial with Gotti, was already strung out and in obvious need of a fix, so authorities shipped him to a prison hospital instead.

Today, more than 18 years after he was first jailed and three years after Gotti died behind bars, Rampino, 65, is ready to take his chances out on the streets, and he has cited the recently softened New York State drug laws as his get-out-of-jail card.

Tony Roach, who sold a little more than four ounces of heroin to an undercover detective for $30,000, would face eight years in prison under today’s statute and should be released immediately, attorney Jean Marie Graziano claims in court papers.

No way, says District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, asserting that Rampino is not the type of low-level drug dealer that the Legislature had in mind when it reformed the so-called Rockefeller drug laws last year.

In arguing against any sentence reduction, prosecutor Eric Seidel cited Rampino’s seven arrests for the sale and use of heroin between 1962 and 1987, as well as his participation in the execution of Castellano and the murder of a Gotti neighbor who killed Gotti’s young son in a tragic car accident in 1980.

His murderous activity “dictates that the application be denied,” Mr. Seidel wrote, noting that Rampino was “not prosecuted for the murder of Castellano because he had already been sentenced on the instant case to a term of imprisonment of 25 years to life.”

“If they want to sentence him for the Castellano homicide, they have to convict him of that,” Ms. Graziano told Gang Land. “Mr. Rampino has already served twice as much time as the current law provides for the drug conviction, and he should be released.”

The case is pending before Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Edward McLaughlin, who has not yet scheduled a hearing on the issue.

***

Two years ago, grizzled waterfront racketeer George Barone testified that he turned on the mob in 2001 because Genovese boss Vincent “Chin” Gigante and his son, Andrew, had cheated him and he suspected that the crime family had marked him for death.

“I wanted to get even. I wanted to survive. I didn’t want to get killed by them,” he said.

Since that testimony at the waterfront racketeering trial of rival Gambino boss Peter Gotti, the college educated Barone – now 81 and ailing but still very lucid – has thought long and hard about why he decided to cooperate.

“I am glad you asked. This will take quite a while to explain,” he told Gerald McMahon, the lead attorney and chief architect of the acquittal of two longshoremen’s union officials and a gangster at a recent labor racketeering trial.

Barone, who says he has killed so many men he can’t recall all of them, then embarked on a long, rambling – but on occasion profound – explanation of why he defected from the Mafia. He even threw in a famous passage from “A Tale of Two Cities,” the classic by Charles Dickens.

In addition to revenge and a desire to save his own life, there were many reasons, the wizened gangster said. First and foremost was the “sickening disloyalty” shown him by younger mobsters whom he had placed in powerful positions on the docks in New Jersey and Miami.

“I decided that the Mafia is not the paternal,wonderful organization that it proposes to be. The esprit de corps does not exist. Greed, violence, betrayal: that is what exists,” he said.

Barone and Mr.McMahon sparred several times during his explanation.

“Are you done?” the lawyer asked at one point.

“No,” Barone said.

“All right. Keep going,” Mr. Mc-Mahon sighed.

At another point, Barone snarled, “I am not finished.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Mr. McMahon protested.

“But you were making faces.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I can see you.”

“But, but … go ahead, I’m listening,” the lawyer said.

One key reason he turned, Barone testified, was the mob’s efforts to “subjugate” Cuban immigrants who worked on the Miami and Ft. Lauderdale piers and were members of Florida locals of the International Longshoremen’s Association.They were “people who came from a former dictator to another one here,” Barone said.

“Somebody has to tell this story,” he said. “And something has to be done for those people. Those people are working people. And I decided that this is something that would be a far better thing than I have ever done before, like Mr. Dickens said,but at least it will have been my last hurrah.”

***

Inmates who end up in the federal prison hospital at Springfield, Mo., invariably try to impress Chin Gigante if they run into the legendary Mafia boss who has been housed there since July 2003.

Take Anthony “Tex” Elrod, a 350-pound arsonist from Dallas who arrived there from Leavenworth that November. Tex immediately tried to ingratiate himself with a tale about his grandfather being a charter member of Murder Inc. in the 1930s. “I’ll bet you a dollar to a donut that you knew my granddaddy, didn’t you Mr. Chin?” he drawled.

With a look of ridicule, and daggers in his eyes, Gigante quickly shut him up and had the rest of the ward’s patients howling with this retort: “What are you … talking about? I was a little kid then. What are you, stupid? How the hell am I supposed to know him? Besides, since when did they have Cowboy wiseguys?”

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