With help from his mother, John A. “Junior” Gotti scored heavily in the court of public opinion in recent days. On the eve of his racketeering trial, though, the Junior Don and his lawyers haven’t done nearly as well in the court that matters most.

The mob scion emulated – and surpassed – his late father’s talents, spinning self-serving tales of woe and persecution that made the front pages of the Post and the Daily News and may have swayed some potential jurors. Last week, however, his lawyers lost an important ruling that cuts into the heart of his defense – his claim that while he may have been involved in mob activities, he withdrew from “the life” more than five years ago.

The decision, in Gang Land’s view, just might lead to strategy moves that could elevate the excitement of the trial – which already has tabloids, TV stations, and radio-show host Curtis Sliwa salivating – to the lofty heights of 1992, when the swashbuckling Dapper Don had his day in court and Mr. Sliwa was abducted and shot, allegedly by gangsters working for Junior.

In an intriguing ruling, which has not been reported elsewhere, Manhattan Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin essentially barred Junior’s lawyers from introducing into evidence any jailhouse conversations secretly recorded by the FBI in 2003 and 2004, during which Junior stated categorically that his mobster days were over.

If Junior maintains that argument – and he doesn’t seem to have a better one – the ruling could force Junior to make a bold, seemingly unthinkable move: take the stand. Only as a witness on his own behalf could Junior firmly establish the key point of his defense: that sometime prior to July 21, 1999, five years before the current racketeering conspiracy indictment was handed up, he withdrew from the racketeering conspiracy by renouncing his ties to the Gambino family.

“It would be a very daring move, fraught with danger,” a noted criminal lawyer who has represented high-ranking mobsters and is familiar with the case said. “It’s a long shot, but within the realm of possibility.”

Gotti’s lead defense attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, declined to answer the question directly, but wouldn’t rule it out. “From the beginning,” he said, “we have fought this case in an unorthodox manner. We will continue to fight it by any means possible. Anything is possible here.”

In court papers, Mr. Lichtman and co-counsel Mark Fernich have stated that Junior would concede the existence of the Gambino family and his onetime affiliation with it, but that he had moved on and was no longer part of it. Gotti’s prison utterances – in which he was overheard on an FBI bug telling cohorts, friends, and his brother, that he regretted being dragged into the crime family by his late father and was out of the loop – are “vital” to his defense, the attorneys say.

In April 1999, Gotti pleaded guilty to racketeering charges and was sentenced to 77 months, minus credit for time he was detained after his arrest. He began his prison term that October. During the interim, he was at home under strict house-arrest restrictions.

The taped conversations, Messrs. Lichtman and Fernich contend, are proof of their client’s state of mind and should be admissible. In a conversation on March 14, 2003, the first day the bug was up and running at the lawyers’ visiting room at Ray Brook federal prison, Junior told his friend and then-lawyer, Richard Rehbock:

“I’m five and a half years removed from the street. I don’t want to hear about it anymore. I don’t want to hear about it. I told these guys over and over again, ‘Don’t come see me and then a week later be sitting by Ozone Park. I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want to see you again. Don’t bring any messages from anybody. I don’t want to know. I don’t care. I’m not interested.’… If I’m fortunate to walk out of here when they open the gates, Richard, I’m leaving. I’m taking my sons, my daughters, I’m going away. That’s it. I’m done. I don’t want to be bothered anymore.”

The feds used other discussions overheard on the same bug to keep Junior behind bars last September – when he completed his sentence for his 1999 racketeering conviction – as a danger to the community. Federal judges in Albany had authorized the bug, which was in place until May 14, 2004, based on affidavits by FBI agents that the conversations were criminal in nature.

Junior’s lawyers argued that the feds shouldn’t be allowed to have it both ways: to claim, on the one hand, that the discussions were criminal in order to detain his client, and then assert that they were irrelevant to his defense.

Yes they can, ruled Judge Scheindlin, who had cited the tapes as a reason for detaining Gotti last year, but sided with assistant U.S. attorneys Michael Mc-Govern, Victor Hou, and Joon Kim during a July 28 pretrial hearing. Earlier, the prosecutors had indicated that they intended to play some taped discussion in their case, but they dropped that idea in order to stymie the defense’s efforts to use them to bolster its claims.

The judge ruled that the tapes were probative of Gotti’s state of mind in 2003, not 1999. However, they could be admissible, she said, if the defense established that Junior had withdrawn from the conspiracy before July 21, 1999, and if the government then asserted that he had rejoined it later.

That scenario is highly unlikely, as several witnesses are expected to testify that Gotti was involved in specific racketeering acts of loan sharking, extortion in the construction industry, and securities fraud until 2002, and part of a racketeering conspiracy until last year.

Even if Gotti’s self-serving taped remarks were to get into evidence – with or without him taking the stand – the Junior Don will have to overcome the testimony of several key witnesses, including turncoat capo Michael “Mikey Scars” DiLeonardo and soldier Joseph “Little Joe” D’Angelo, the admitted wheelman in the kidnapping and shooting of Mr. Sliwa.

Junior’s plight is certainly much better than it was when the indictment was filed last year. Prosecutors have dropped three murder-conspiracy charges against him, including a plot to kill the ABC radio talk show host. And Judge Scheindlin ruled that Mikey Scars could not testify that Gotti said he planned to assault the late columnist Mike McAlary for “writing disparaging articles” about the Gottis, a motive quite similar to the one behind the alleged kidnapping of Mr. Sliwa.

Mr. Lichtman told Gang Land he was surprised that “on the eve of trial, the government dismissed three murder conspiracy charges, especially since the government opposed our bail application by claiming that John tried to have Sliwa and the others killed.”

As for his “vital” jailhouse tapes evidence, Mr. Lichtman remains hopeful: “The judge’s ruling on that is not absolute. We hope that we will ultimately satisfy her concerns and be able to play those tapes so the jury can hear John steadfastly and repeatedly voice his exit from the world of organized crime.”

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The Ray Brook-Rehbock prison tapes may yet help Junior, but they spelled big trouble last year for Edward Boyle, a Gambino associate who was minding his own business, helping his lawyers prepare for a racketeering indictment in which he was charged with taking part in 10 bank heists that netted $2 million between 1993 and 2003.

Mr. Rehbock, who represented a Boyle co-defendant, was heard boasting to Gotti that Boyle was using improper investigative tactics to obtain helpful Florida motor vehicle records by posing as “an insurance company” investigator, adding, “I told him. ‘You beat this case, I’ll hire you to work on [Junior’s] case.'”

Even though the feds never established that Boyle did anything wrong, the feds used Mr. Rehbock’s words to revoke Boyle’s bail and end his investigative work. That began a downward spiral that ended with Boyle getting hammered last month with a 12 1/2-year sentence that includes about seven and a half years for a $1 million bank robbery that the feds never proved he committed.

At trial, jurors sent a pretty clear message that they didn’t buy the testimony of two key turncoats that Boyle took part in the only bank robbery – there were also nine burglaries – charged in the indictment. They failed to reach a verdict on that charge and found him liable for $80,000, not $1 million as prosecutors had alleged.

Brooklyn Federal Judge Sterling Johnson turned a deaf ear to it and gave Boyle the same time he would have received if he had been convicted of the robbery. “Eddie Boyle got a raw deal, from the Rehbock fiasco to his sentence,” a lawyer who is appealing the conviction and the severity of the sentence, Martin Geduldig, said.

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