By Jerry Capeci

Leroy (Nicky) Barnes noticed that the tires of his custom-made, souped up Citroen-Maserati were lower than they should have been. The notorious heroin kingpin smiled and reached for the phone.

"It's Nick. I need air again," said Barnes, summoning his auto mechanic to his Riverdale high rise where his French-made sedan with its Italian engine was strategically parked for a speedy getaway from the police.

That was February 1975. Today, Barnes, now 66, no longer needs a fast getaway car. He doesn't worry about heroin or Mafia suppliers. Quietly released last summer after 21 years in prison, he is a doting family man, concerned only with his daughters and grandchildren.

Barnes once strutted turning his nose up to lawful society. Now, he's  concentrating on losing the "prison shuffle" -- the short-strided gait that came from years of having no place to go.

In prison, he won a national poetry contest for federal inmates and earned a college diploma with honors.

"He's bright, articulate, and can easily pass as a retired school teacher," said a source who has spoken to the former druglord.

Mr. Untouchable, as the narcotics kingpin was known in the old day, was convicted in 1977 in the first federal trial decided by an anonymous jury,  sentenced to life without parole and sent to the maximum security prison in Marion, Ill.

In 1981, after he learned that his drug partners were cheating him, sleeping with his wife and his girlfriend, and doing drugs in front of his two young daughters, he offered to cooperate with the feds.

For the next 15 months, he worked undercover against his Harlem drug partners, his ex-wife, his girlfriend and his Mafia suppliers. He brokered drug deals for  his old loves, drug partners and his sources of heroin with wired-up federal narcs.  

His testimony helped convict 50 drug dealers and killers, including Frank  (Blackie) James (left) and Brother Jones, (center) pictured here with Barnes at a gala birthday party for James and Barnes at the Top Of The Sixes that was attended by 300 guests.

Unlike today's Mafia informers, Barnes was not promised an early release for his cooperation. For years, he hoped for a presidential pardon or commutation of his sentence, which then-U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani (left) first hinted at in 1987. But neither ever came.

Eventually, he was resentenced to 35 years and housed in  a special Witness Security Unit at the federal prison in Otisville, N.Y. Under a complicated formula, his prison term was to end last October.

By working, Barnes earned two months off and was released last August. Work was something Barnes seemed to thrive on during the more than 15 years he spent at Otisville.

"He worked all the time," said one prison source. "He worked in the kitchen, in the dining area, separating the recycle stuff from the regular garbage. You name it he did it. He seemed obsessed."

Another source described Barnes as "a loner who kept to himself" and a "work-out nut." He was a bulky, but solid 210 pounds, in 1977. He rejoined the free world as fit, trim, and weighing 165 pounds.

As he learns to navigate a world completely changed from the one he left two decades ago, Barnes spends time with his daughters - who were taken from their mother and relocated when his cooperation was made public - and his grandchildren.

The Office of Enforcement Operations, the section of the U.S. Marshals Service that runs the federal Witness Protection Program, declined to make Barnes available for an interview.

Barnes was a legend in Harlem, a cancer that police could not eradicate. He was also a deacon at a Harlem church that gave turkeys to needy families for Thanksgiving and toys to kids at Christmas.

He was acquitted three times of drug, murder, and bribery charges in three trials in Manhattan and The Bronx.

During that period, he and his main heroin supplier, Matthew Madonna,  had a system for exchanging cash for drugs that cops never cracked. Barnes told them about it when he flipped.

Once a month, Barnes would meet Madonna, a smuggler he befriended in an upstate prison in 1959, on a street corner in Manhattan to get the keys and location of a car with heroin in the trunk that was parked in a nearby municipal lot. 

One night in February, 1975, Barnes was eager to retrieve a 20-kilogram load of white powder from Bangkok that was in a car that Madonna had parked in a 24-hour lot in Manhattan.

After eluding the cops, Barnes picked up the car and drove to one of several apartments, where underlings cut and packaged the heroin for sale on the streets of New York.

Two days later, Barnes returned the car, its trunk full of cash, to another lot, met Madonna on another street corner and gave him the keys.

The feds nailed Madonna that year, but Barnes found another supplier and kept going for two more years - beating another case in the Bronx - until the feds nailed him. Sentenced to 30 years, Madonna served 20, a year less than Barnes, and was released in 1995.

On the witness stand testifying against one of his former associates in the mid-1980s, Barnes said, "I embrace traditional values now, education. I mean positive, good, constructive values, the values that should be held in all communities. I am not trying to say that I am a No. 1 American. I am just a guy that came from the street and made a sharp turn, that's all."

A much sharper turn than any Barnes ever made in his Citroen-Maserati.

Lawrence (Larry Tattoos) Fiorenza, 40, the Colombo associate she married while he was serving life for racketeering and murder -- will soon be joining her in the federal Witness Protection Program.

Brooklyn Federal Judge Charles Sifton reduced his  sentence to time served plus 30 days because of the "substantial assistance" he gave prosecutors in the Russo case.

The assistance took the form of 32-year-old wife Dorothy, who told how she aided Russo (left) tamper with a jury that had found his son Joseph and Larry Tattoos guilty in 1994 of crimes stemming from the bloody Colombo war that left 10 dead in 1991 and 1992.

She testified that Russo and codefendant Dennis Hickey, (right) who were convicted of obstruction of justice, helped a witness to the jury tampering evade a federal grand jury subpoena and hide from the FBI.

She also testified that she and Russo became lovers after meeting at a 1994 Christmas party, and that for the next seven months, she delivered messages from Russo to his jailed son. During those visits, she met Fiorenza, fell in love and eventually married him.

In December, 1997, she said, doctors said her husband, a former drug abuser and alcoholic who suffers from AIDS and cirrhosis of the liver, had a  maximum life expectancy of 10 years, but was likely to live less than five.

When he is released next month, Fiorenza will be confined to his home for four years, and then subject to five years of supervised release, said Sifton.

Meanwhile, lawyers for Russo and Hickey are listening to hundreds of hours of tape recorded telephone conversations between the Fiorenzas, hoping to find something contradicting her trial testimony.

During the 1960's and 1970's, while he was logging  arrests for loansharking and assault as a wannabe Colombo mobster, he was knocking people down and churning up yardage as a running back for the Mariners, a semi-pro football team in Brooklyn. (That's  Shacks towering over  Carmine (Junior) Persico in a photo taken after their 1962 assault arrest during a war between rival mob factions.)

"There were quite a few cops on that team," recalled one law enforcement official. "During the week they used to chase him and on the weekends they used to block for him."

So it shouldn't be surprising that after settling in Beverly Hills in 1996 after his release from federal prison, Montemarano, now 60, gravitated towards UCLA football players and regularly invited them to his apartment for Monday Night Football parties.

Montemarano flew to New York with star UCLA quarterback Cade McNown in December and served as a Big Apple tour guide for the Heisman Trophy finalist during the Heisman weekend -- that is, after he got permission from federal probation officials.

He drove McNown, his brother, and their mother around town, showing them the old neighborhood, taking them shopping and to Sparks Steak House, where Paul Castellano was blown away in 1985. FBI agents with zoom lenses followed their every move.

The Big Apple agents, in cooperation with Tinsel Town counterparts, were investigating point shaving allegations involving several Bruins games last year, including one where favored UCLA did not cover the point spread, sources said.

McNown, who didn't get the coveted award for the nation's best college player but is still a potential first-round pick in next month's NFL draft, was questioned last month about his dealings with Montemarano. He got a clean bill of health by UCLA and the FBI after the New York Daily News broke the story last week.

The Los Angeles FBI boss also said that the inquiry uncovered no evidence of any wrongdoing by any UCLA football players.

No such pronouncement was made about Montemarano, a Colombo capo who was convicted of racketeering in 1986 with old buddy Persico, (right) served 11 years, and is under federal supervision until 2003. (Persico's son Alphonse (left) and then-capo Andrew Russo were also nailed in that case.) The belief is that Montemarano, like any gangster worth his salt, was looking for an edge, and the feds won't give him a pass, if they don't have to.

But Montemarano is a fatalist and knows how the game is played. In 1962, when he was nabbed for assault during the Profaci-Gallo war and saw that frustrated cops were going to rough him up, he said honestly, but   matter-of-factly: "Be careful fellas, I only got one kidney."

Last week's column brought a spate of queries about the Gambino crime family, the Sicilian faction of the family once led by John Gambino,  the Pizza Connection case, and mob drug dealers.

Probably the best place to start, is the book, "Octopus," by the late Claire Sterling. An otherwise excellent work, the book mistakenly identified  Giovanni (John) Gambino (left) as a member of the Sicilian Mafia. Sterling's  thesis was that the Sicilian Mafia clans controlled the heroin trade in the United States. She claimed that American mobsters allowed Sicilians to conduct their drug dealing in return for a cut and stayed out of direct dealing. For her thesis to work she anointed  John Gambino as a Sicilian Mafioso because he was one of the major heroin dealers in the U.S. She even claimed that he was John Gotti's boss since the Dapper Don (right) went to visit Gambino one time. She claimed a Boss would not  visit an underling. What Sterling didn't understand was that Gotti,  fresh from an assassination of Paul Castellano, the prior boss, was making good will visits to his capos.

Informants and wiretaps have shown conclusively that John Gambino was a Gambino family capo and that Gotti was his boss.. Gambino had   heroin connections in Sicily that meant big bucks for him and a nice cut for   Castellano, (right) and later for Gotti. It also meant that Gambino went to jail, too.

Following is an attempt to sort out his extremely jumbled family tree.

Tomasso Gambino was a second cousin of Carlo, the powerful 1960's and 1970's crime bass, and had three sons; the previously mentioned Giovanni (John), Giuseppe (Joe) (left) and Rosario (Sal.) His  daughter, Giovanna (Joanne) married a cousin, Erasmo Gambino. John Gambino also married a cousin,  Victoria Gambino. Victoria's brother was Emmanuel (Manny) Gambino. He is not to be confused with another Manny Gambino who was kidnapped for ransom and killed in the early 1970's. (Gotti helped kill a man  suspected of taking part in the killing of this Manny Gambino.)

Carlo Gambino had two brothers -- Paulo and Joe. Joe had two sons, the murdered Manny and Thomas. (This is not the Thomas who was involved in New York's Garment district). Don Carlo had three sons -- Thomas, (right) Joseph and Carl Jr. and a daughter Phyllis. After Carlo died, Thomas became the capo in charge of the Garment Center. He had married the daughter of Tommy Lucchese who was the one time Boss of another New York Cosa Nostra Family that still bears his name. Lucchese died in 1967 and much of his garment center interests were inherited by Gambino.

Paul Castellano was Carlo's cousin. The men became brothers-in-law when Carlo married Paul's sister Kathryn. Paul was a long time capo in the Gambino family. Paul and Carlo attended the 1957 mob conclave in Apalachin, NY. Paul became family boss when Carlo died in 1976. He was killed by Gotti and his cohorts in 1985.

The Gambinos (Carlo, John etc.) were related to one of the many Sicilian Mafia families in Palermo, one that was once headed by the late Sal Inzerillo. John Gambino did business with many different heroin dealers from Sicily while his cousin Carlo, who outwardly heeded the mob's no-drugs rule, looked the other way while pocketing millions.

The Gambinos were not involved in the Pizza Connection scheme, although the Gambino family under Castellano made plenty of cash from another Sicilian-born mobster, Pasquale (Patsy) Conte. (right)

But most of the Pizza Connection characters were connected to the Bonanno Family. They and their associates obtained heroin from a number of different sources including Gaetano Badalamenti (left.) The Bonanno associates did not want their other Sicilian suppliers to know they were also dealing with Badalamenti, a hated rival of the others.

The heroin trade -- and for that matter, all the mob's illegal activities -- are not as neatly organized as law enforcement types (and some writers) would lead you to believe. After following the heroin trade for 30 years, I can state categorically that it is a madhouse. Competition among the dealers and the gangs is fierce. Deals constantly fall apart; contacts are lost, shipments delayed, the players get arrested or kill each other. And the  drugs are stolen by rivals or seized by the feds. It's probably the most maniacal segment of the Mafia.