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When Vincent Bickelman was gunned down in 1991, cops, wiseguys and nearly everyone in his Bath Beach, Brooklyn neighborhood were sure the mob had hit the small time burglar for breaking into the wrong house.

His neighbors said gangsters had even gone door-to-door canvassing the neighborhood. (See the reprint at right of an item from a Sept. 24, 1991 Gang Land column that appeared in the New York Daily News.)

Eight years later, the feds have come up with enough witnesses and other evidence to charge Anthony Spero, the reputed Bonanno consigliere,  with imposing the death penalty for a burglary at his daughter Jill Marie's home.

Shortly after the burglary, she reported the theft of jewelry and other valuables to the local police precinct. But she subsequently clammed up and refused to cooperate with detectives assigned to the case, sources said.

"Obviously, her old man decided on a quicker, more decisive way to handle it," said one investigator.

Spero, 70, allegedly got Bonanno soldiers Joseph Benanti and Fabritizio DeFrancisci to investigate the burglary. Bickelman, 25, was dispatched by wannabe mobster Paul (Paulie Brass) Gulino on Sept. 15, 1991.

Gulino's "favor" to Spero was repaid in-kind. Two years later, when he raised his hands to Spero (left) during an argument in the Bonanno gangster's social club, Spero allegedly got two other wannabe mobsters to blow Gulino away in the kitchen of his parents' home.

Spero, who had been confined to his home on a   $13.5 million bond while awaiting trial for Gulino's murder, pleaded not guilty to the new charge at his arraignment in Brooklyn Federal Court.

Prosecutor Jim Walden sought to revoke Spero's bail, but Judge Edward Korman allowed him to remain free on the bond, which is backed up by a car service owned by another Spero daughter,  Diana.

Following a protracted detention hearing, which included some colorful "see-no-evil, hear-no-evil" non-testimony about Spero's alleged mob activities from a longtime Spero friend and fellow pigeon enthusiast, and after six weeks behind bars, Spero was released under strict house arrest conditions in July. He is scheduled for trial in April.

For a guy who's 58, two years can be a mighty long time, so Johnson refused the offer and went to trial  with three codefendants charged with using two so-called minority coalition groups, which were supposed to be fighting to get work for black and Latino construction workers, to line their pockets. The coalitions would threaten to disrupt work at construction sites if their demands were not met. When a contractor didn't budge, dozens of noisy demonstrators would show up at the site, and then protests would often degenerate into a near riot.

Prosecutors charged that Johnson, Dennis McCall, 33, Robert Carnes, 29, and Daniel Hunter, 27, worked in concert with Gambino family mobsters to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from construction companies from 1990 until last year.

Johnson, leader of Brooklyn Fight Back, had earned $800 to $900 a week for nearly 10 years from the Tully Construction Company of Flushing, Queens;  McCall, (right) of United Construction, was paid $140,000 in recent years by HHM Construction Company of Maspeth, Queens, according to court records.

The case, which was put together by the NYPD's Major Case Squad, was a spinoff of the state Organized Crime Task Force probe that led to the recent conviction of John A. (Junior) Gotti.

Defense lawyers argued that the men earned their salaries for resolving disputes among rival workers and by using sometimes rough but legal means to obtain jobs for black and Hispanic workers in an industry plagued by racism.

But the coalitions didn't get the money out of the   companies, but rather gangsters like Craig DePalma (left) and Willie Marshall --a key prosecution witness -- who squeezed the contractors for cash, the lawyers charged.

Marshall (right) testified that he accompanied DePalma and his mobster father Gregory to several meetings with Johnson and his underlings to discuss and work out payoff arrangements from a third company, the Defoe Construction Company.

After a seven week trial, a jury convicted Johnson and the others of an extortion conspiracy.

On sentencing day, noting that they had perverted a legitimate civil rights vehicle for their own personal enrichment, Manhattan Federal Judge Richard Conway Casey came down with a hammer, giving Johnson 20 years and the others 17 years each.

And like Johnson, Watts was facing up to 20 years in prison if found guilty at his federal loansharking trial that had been scheduled for this month. But unlike Johnson, Watts knows a good deal when he sees one.

Charged with operating a lucrative loansharking business out of his federal prison cell in West Virginia with the help of longtime Staten Island cohorts, the feds gave Watts an offer he couldn't refuse.

They allowed him to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges of buying a watch he knew had been stolen and instead of two decades in the slammer, he faces six-to-12 months when sentenced next month by Manhattan Federal Judge Deborah Batts. The sentence will likely be added to the 15 months that remains on the six year term he's serving for taking part in a 1988 John Gotti-inspired murder.

Watts's codefendants, Vincent Billella and John (Gilly) Cannistraci, didn't fare quite as well as their boss but made out pretty well, relatively speaking.  Because the feds had more and better evidence against them, they had to eat felony loansharking charges that call for up to 21 months, according to sentencing guidelines.

The charges arose out of an FBI sting operation in a Staten Island jewelry store whose owner -- a Watts loan customer since 1980 -- let the FBI install video cameras at his shop to record weekly $2550 interest payments to Cannistraci and negotiations for an additional $20,000 loan.

Meanwhile, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn threw in the towel against Watts' ex-wife, her mother and their lawyer in an unusual fraud case in which the feds won a conviction, only to have the trial judge reverse the jury verdict and acquit the trio of making false statements on a bank loan.