By Jerry Capeci

And a young federal prosecutor and his best friend were no different than countless others before and after them who wanted to hear some good sounds. It was saxophonist Lonnie Youngblood, perhaps best known nowadays for his groundbreaking experience with Jimi Hendrix, who beckoned these two to the western reaches of Harlem.

"Man, is he something," Charles Rose would say enthusiastically, again and again, each time more sincerely than the last. "That man is playing at my funeral."

And last week, a panorama of law enforcement -- 400 cops, federal agents, prosecutors, lawyers, judges -- relatives and others squeezed into St. Joseph's Church on the Upper East side to be mesmerized as Youngblood performed the most haunting rendition of "Amazing Grace" I've heard in my life. We all left the church knowing just a little bit more about this amazing guy.

Charlie Rose grew up in the Bronx, got a bachelors degree from Cornell University. He earned his law degree from Brooklyn Law School in 1979, when he was 32. That same year he became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

He had a slew of titles during 15 years there, and prosecuted the entire catalogue of bad guys -- bank robbers, drug dealers, terrorist bombers, murderers and mobsters. He formed friendships and alliances with police and agents from New York City to Washington, D.C. to Hong Kong and Palermo, Sicily.

His long list of convicted criminals includes Luchese boss Vittorio (Vic) Amuso (left), members of the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN, Genovese underboss Venero (Benny Eggs) Mangano, Colombo consigliere Benedetto (Benny) Aloi, mad terrorist bombers from the anarchist United Freedom Front, and enough drug dealers to start a small city.

His success as a prosecutor continued after he hung up his hat in Brooklyn. "Is he crazy or is he sane" Mafia boss Vincent (Chin) Gigante was finally convicted last year, three years after Rose left the office, on racketeering charges Rose filed in 1990.

The son of a cop, Rose had a special bond with cops and federal agents with whom he worked, often accompanying them on dangerous raids, about which most prosecutors would have waited in the office to hear the details after everyone had been locked up.

When NYPD detective Anthony Venditti was gunned down in Queens in  1986, Rose raced to the scene. After several state murder cases ended in mistrials, Rose pushed for federal prosecutions of the suspects, and got them.

And when things didn't go the way he'd hoped, he had an uncanny ability to focus on the positive. After a long racketeering trial ended in acquittals for five of eight defendants, including Gambino capo Peter Gotti, a reporter caught him on a stairwell in Brooklyn Federal Court and asked him what went wrong.

"Wrong? Peter Gotti's a nobody," said Rose. "We just nailed the underboss of the Genovese family and the consigliere of the Colombo family and they'll be away a long time. Go ask Mangano and Aloi if we won or lost."

During that trial, Rose played a tape recorded conversation -- he often said it was his all-time favorite -- in which Mangano (right) was overheard berating an associate, Peter Savino, for hanging around with untrustworthy gangsters.

When Savino protested he was different than the thugs in question, Mangano said, "Show me your friends, and I'll tell you who you are."

Mangano is still locked up. If the mobster lives, he will get out of prison in 2006, at age 85.

Rose is dead of cancer at age 51. More than 400 of the prosecutor's friends showed up last Tuesday at a tiny church on Manhattan's Upper East Side to tell the world who Charlie Rose was.      

The government hid and is still hiding his assets, preventing his twin 12-year-old sons from obtaining money that is rightfully theirs, Suzanne Savino charges in a federal lawsuit.

She claims that when Savino entered the program in 1989 he began ignoring the terms of their 1986 divorce, which required him to make   weekly child support payments, to pay the boys' medical, dental and private school expenses, and to buy life insurance that would provide  $133,333 for them in case of his death. The couple was divorced seven months after the boys were born.

When Savino died of cancer on Sept. 30, 1997, Suzanne Savino tried to locate and freeze his assets, but was stymied by federal officials, according to the suit, which names Attorney General Janet Reno (left) and Frank Skroski, the Deputy U.S. Marshal who runs the supersecret witness program, as defendants. Savino wanted the feds to furnish the information she needs to sue her ex-hubby's estate.

The court records in the case have been redacted (legalese for blacked out) to eliminate Savino's alias and where he lived. Several members of his family were also relocated and still live in that area.

A pre-trial conference scheduled last week was adjourned. No new date has been set. The case is assigned to the same judge who handled the Gigante trial, Brooklyn Federal Judge Jack Weinstein.

During the trial, Savino was too ill to travel and his testimony -- the most damning and dramatic in the case -- was taken in a far away courtroom and viewed in Weinstein's courtroom by closed circuit television.

With tape-recordings that backed him up, Savino said he made millions for the Genovese family through bid-rigging, extortion and kickback schemes involving contracts to replace windows at New York city housing projects.

During his day and a half of testimony, Savino, gaunt and in obvious pain,  sweated profusely, constantly mopping his forehead with paper towels. Weinstein had to call frequent recesses.

"I got to take a break please," Savino said near the end of his testimony,  groaning and clutching the armrests of his chair.

Weinstein urged the lawyers to wrap up their questions. "I'm just hoping he survives," he said.

Gigante was found guilty of more than 30 labor racketeering counts and with conspiring to kill Savino after he began cooperating with federal authorities. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

About the only thing he didn't do at his sentencing on state racketeering charges for heading a lucrative stolen car ring was get on the floor and kick his legs up in the air or bang his well coifed head on the table.

Glaring at prosecutor Gerard Brave, he complained that he had been  framed by a cocaine addict and thief who lied in return for a get-out-of-jail-free card.

"If I have to die in prison I will, but this was not a fair trial," said Asaro, 63. "I've been in trouble (with the law) a few times in my life, but I was framed here."

Acting Supreme Court Justice Robert McGann let Asaro tire himself out, which took about five minutes, then hit him with a 4-to-12 year bit for enterprise corruption.

Asaro's lawyer, Stephen Mahler, said his client was "railroaded" and that he would appeal his conviction. 

John A. (Junior) Gotti and his codefendants are set to accept a plea bargain deal that will close out the racketeering case that has been pending since January.

It may or may not happen today, but almost certainly before Santa and his reindeer zoom out of the North Pole shouting "Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night."

  Big Al's Corner

By Allan May

(This week, Big Al offers some Coney Island factoids and spins some urban legends in his reply to  a reader who wanted to know if Al "ever heard of any mobsters from Coney Island.")

Probably the most infamous death in Coney Island was the demise of Abe "Kid Twist" Reles. One of the most prolific killers of the so-called Murder, Inc. gang, Reles turned informer while in prison when he suspected that jailed gang members had sold him out. In the end, Reles and at least seven others became police informants, including Abraham "Pretty" Levine, Anthony "Dukey" Maffetore, Seymour "Blue Jaw" Magoon, and Albert "Tick Tock" Tannenbaum.

As a result, nearly all of the gang's leaders went to prison or were executed. The most notable exception was Albert Anastasia, who had become the
cops' prime target. During the early morning hours of Nov. 12, 1941, Reles, (left) who was being guarded
by police at the Half Moon Hotel on the boardwalk, took a six-story dive out the window of his room.

"The canary could sing, but he couldn't fly," became the new refrain of wiseguys everywhere. Rumors spread that Reles was heaved out the window by police with the approval of District Attorney William O'Dwyer, a politician in the employ of the Prime Minister of Organized Crime, Frank Costello, (right) Anastasia's good buddy. But a broken wire that had been attached to bed sheets and pictures of Reles's body near the hotel supported the theory that he was either trying to escape or to get to the fifth floor, climb back in and shake up the cops who were supposed to be guarding him.

Ten years earlier, on Apr. 15, 1931, Joe "The Boss" Masseria was murdered at the Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant on West 15th while he was having a late lunch with Lucky Luciano. At  3:30, Luciano went to the bathroom. As he did, four men -- rumored to be Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese and Bugsy Siegel -- walked into the place and blew away Joe The Boss, eliminating the major obstacle to Luciano's visions for the future of La Cosa Nostra.

On the day that Pope John Paul II visited New York City in October 1979, James "Jimmy the Clam" Eppolito and his son "Jim-Jim" were executed as they sat in a car not far from Coney lsland. This killing was by committed by Gambino capo Nino Gaggi (left) and soldier Roy DeMeo, the focus of Murder Machine, the 1992 book written by bossman Capeci and Gene Mustain.

Mimi Scialo, a Colombo family capo often referred to as the "King of Coney Island," was killed in 1972, albeit in another section of Brooklyn.

Other wiseguys with links to the famed seashore resort area are:
*Johnny "Bath Bath" Oddo, a Colombo family member who operated there during the 1950s and 1960s.
*Rocco "Burri" Perino, a Genovese family member.
*Bobby Perino, a Genovese family member.
*Sam Perrone, said to be a good friend of Salvatore (Bill) Bonanno, was murdered on Mar. 11, 1968.
*Ciro Perrone, a Genovese family member.