John “Junior” Gotti never attained the official Mafia boss status that his late father achieved, but the Junior Don has one-upped his swashbuckling old man in the area of drug dealing – a crime supposedly outlawed by the mob 50 years ago.

While he always vigorously denied it, there is little doubt that drug money poured into the Gambino family coffers during the elder Gotti’s reign. Many close family mobsters and associates, including brother Gene, are convicted heroin dealers – even though the late Dapper Don was never charged with drug dealing.

Even turncoat underboss Salvatore “Sammy Bull” Gravano, who fingered his Mafia boss in 11 murders, testified that the Dapper Don’s own hands were clean when it came to drugs.

But the same can’t be said for the Junior Don, according to capo Michael “Mikey Scars” DiLeonardo, a defector who was inducted into the family with Junior on Christmas Eve 1988. He will be a key witness at Junior’s racketeering trial next month.

DiLeonardo, who has testified that he was Junior’s “closest friend in the mob,” has told the feds that during the early and mid-1980s, Gotti and crew member John Alite “robbed drug dealers in and around” Gotti’s home turf of Howard Beach, Queens, according to court documents obtained by Gang Land.

Gotti didn’t rob the drug dealers to rid his neighborhood of a deadly plague, but to line his pockets, Manhattan federal prosecutors Michael Mc-Govern, Joon Kim, and Victor Hou say.

Alite “sold the drugs and shared the proceeds of those sales with defendant Gotti,” the prosecutors wrote, contending that they should be allowed to introduce testimony by Mikey Scars about the drug ripoffs at Gotti’s upcoming trial for the attempted murder of an ABC radio talk-show host, Curtis Sliwa.

Junior is alleged to have ordered the June 1992 shooting of Mr. Sliwa for his repeated badmouthing of the entire Gotti family, including a continuous rant that the Dapper Don was a drug dealer. Mr. Sliwa’s shooting came two months after the elder Gotti was convicted of murder and racketeering charges.

As Gang Land reported last week, the thin-skinned Junior Don also plotted to “hurt” columnist Mike McAlary in 1991 for writing disparaging stories about the Gotti clan, the prosecutors wrote. Gotti allegedly “scoped” out the area near the New York Post building for a good location to assault the writer, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

The prosecutors assert that drug dealing was just another racket that Junior Gotti, as well as the two underlings charged in the Sliwa rubout attempt – Michael “Mikey Y.” Yannotti and Joseph “Little Joe” D’Angelo – were involved in during the regular course of family business, first as associates and later as soldiers.

D’Angelo was behind the wheel of a stolen taxi that picked up Mr. Sliwa near his East Village apartment early on June 19, 1992; Yannotti was the gunman who rose from the front passenger seat and fired several shots at Mr. Sliwa, hitting him three times in the groin and legs, according to court records.

In the mid- to late 1980s, the prosecutors wrote, Yannotti and associate Andrew DiDonato (who is now cooperating) were involved in armed robberies of “15 to 20 drug dealers who were selling in the vicinity of the Canarsie and Mill Basin sections of Brooklyn.”

The Brooklyn duo wasn’t looking to rid those neighborhoods of drugs, either, the prosecutors say. They threatened the drug dealers at gunpoint, “collected a weekly tax of approximately $300 to $500” and “kicked up” a portion of the take to their captain, Nicholas “Little Nick” Corozzo, who is under investigation in the case.

A few miles to the south, in Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge, D’Angelo and his then-mob superior, now-turncoat soldier, Frank “Frankie Fapp” Fappiano, “supervised a number of Gambino associates in the distribution of drugs,” primarily marijuana but also cocaine, between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s.

They took their roles seriously, the prosecutors wrote, collecting regular “tribute” payments from their drug dealers, and when one was robbed of drugs and $35,000, Little Joe and Frankie Fapp retaliated, robbing the offender’s home of drugs and guns.

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When Gotti pal Bartholomew “Bobby” Borriello was killed in front of his Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, home in April 1991, Junior fingered rival mob associate Preston Geritano for the hit and demanded that the Genoveses execute Geritano, a longtime Borriello antagonist, according to the Manhattan prosecutors.

At the time, Geritano and Borriello, an acting capo for the Junior Don, had each threatened to kill the other, and their respective families had warned them to cool it under penalty of death.

It was four months after Gotti’s father, the Dapper Don, had been jailed in the case that would keep him in prison until his death in 2002, and young Gotti was eager to prove his mettle at a sit-down with rival Genovese leaders led by acting boss Liborio “Barney” Bellomo, according to the prosecutors.

At the meeting, Gotti demanded that the Genoveses live up to the “existing agreement between the two families,” warning that the Gambinos would “make good on that agreement” and kill Geritano if the Genovese clan didn’t.

But according to secret FBI documents obtained by Gang Land, Geritano – stabbed to death last year by his business partner and brother-in-law, Andrew “Andy Wilson” Gargiulo – had nothing to do with Borriello’s slaying.

Instead, Borriello, who was a bodyguard for the elder Gotti during his heyday, was shot to death by Luchese capo Frank Lastorino on orders from underboss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso with important help from “the cops” on his payroll, Detectives Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, according to a report by FBI agents Richard Rudolph and James Brennan.

Borriello’s murder was a real-life echo of the famous Luca Brasi episode in “The Godfather.” At the time, Casso and Luchese boss Vittorio Amuso, who had orchestrated the killing of Gotti’s first underboss, Frank DeCicco, were planning to kill Gotti as official retaliation by the Mafia Commission for killing his boss, Paul Castellano, without permission. The Lucheses feared that if they succeeded in whacking Gotti, Borriello would likely “look to avenge his murder,” and so they marked him for death, the agents wrote.

After a year of intrigue, Casso – a fugitive at the time – obtained Borriello’s address from associate Burton Kaplan, his go-between with “the cops.” Casso then passed the information to Amuso’s brother Bobby, another participant in the murder plot, during a meeting at a sporting-goods store in Parsippany, N.J.

“After Borriello was killed, Casso met with Lastorino, and Lastorino smiled and hugged him,” the agents wrote. The memo doesn’t say whether a package of newspaper-wrapped fish was delivered to the Gotti household.

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