It’s taken Vincent (Chin) Gigante nearly a year, but the legendary Mafia boss has heeded Gang Land’s suggestion and agreed to give up his tired crazy act, cop a plea, and end the lunacy he has created for himself and his family for more than 30 years.

As part of a “global” plea that involves son Andrew and six co-defendants, Gigante will admit obstructing justice by fooling doctors about his mental state for years. In return, Chin will receive three years, delaying his release from prison until the spring of 2010, about the time he hopes to celebrate his 82d birthday.

As bad as that sounds, the aging Mafia boss, who turned 75 last week, has half a chance of walking the streets of Greenwich Village again, wearing attire befitting a powerful Mafia boss instead of slippers and sleepwear as some sort of Daffy Don.

The decision by the mumbling mobster puts an effective end to the crazy act that he created for himself and his family more than 30 years ago when he began seeing shrinks and checking into psychiatric wards for occasional “tune-ups.”

But, as Gang Land noted last year, if Gigante had gone to trial on charges of racketeering and obstruction of justice for delaying his 1997 trial for seven years by pretending to be crazy, he was a dead duck. With no tapes to guide them, a 

jury had seen through his act and found him guilty of labor racketeering in 1997. This time, the feds had scores of prison tapes of him in lucid discussions with his wife, children, doctors, and his girlfriend.

In court papers, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said they had “literally hundreds of audio taped conversations” between Gigante and family members that put the lie to his claims of insanity.

In a telephone discussion with his girlfriend, Olympia Esposito, the feds say he mocked his own mumbling act in describing how his daughter was suffering from laryngitis.

“She can’t talk. She says she’s lost her voice. I says, you, you got like me,” said Gigante, who then mumbled incoherently, the way he often did on the streets and in court, both before and during his 1997 trial, according to court papers.

In a long conversation with his wife, also named Olympia, federal prosecutors asserted that Gigante discussed the medications he was taking and related the conversations he had with a prison doctor about a stress test he had recently taken.

While preparing for trial, sources said, the feds got psychiatrists who had previously diagnosed Gigante as mentally incompetent to conclude they had been fooled by Gigante and his family members to reach a false diagnosis. And the doctors were prepared to testify accordingly.

Andrew, 47, (left) will receive the lowest sentence – two years – of all eight defendants but will fork over

$2 million in fines and restitution, according to sources familiar with the complicated plea deal which has not yet been finalized.

“We have a firm agreement in principle,” said one lawyer in the case.

In addition to the Gigantes, three Genovese capos, including two who served as acting family boss, two soldiers and a longtime key associate have agreed to take plea bargains. All but the elder Gigante will plead guilty to labor racketeering charges on the New York and New Jersey docks and take sentences ranging from 30 months to seven years, sources said.

Onetime acting boss Liborio (Barney) Bellomo, 46, (left) who has been jailed since 1996, will take four more years. Ernest Muscarella, 53, (right) who succeeded Bellomo as acting boss, will get five. Capo Charles Tuzzo, 69, and soldier Michael Ragusa, 37, minor players in the case, will receive 30 months.

The elder Gigante, who has been boss of the Genovese family for two decades, is expected to lead the parade of guilty pleas before

Brooklyn Federal Judge I. Leo Glasser on Monday.

The pleas come on the heels of the labor racketeering convictions of Gambino Boss Peter Gotti and six others on the Brooklyn and Staten Island docks, and are a clean sweep of the two powerful crime families that have shared waterfront rackets for 50 years.

As part of the deal, sources said, all eight defendants will agree to sever their ties to waterfront businesses, an industry association of container repair companies and the powerful dockworkers union the family used to extort payoffs, the International Longshoremen’s Association.

Key players in the extortion schemes, soldier Pasquale Falcetti, 44, and associate Thomas Cafaro, 44, have agreed to take seven year sentences. Both were snared in tape recorded conversations discussing their roles as underlings of Vincent and Andrew Gigante by young turncoat Michael (Cookie) D’Urso. Now 33, D’Urso would have been the key prosecution witness at trial.

Other devastating testimony would have come from grizzled George Barone, (left)  the 79-year-old waterfront wiseguy who began cracking heads on the docks more than 50 years ago and knew both Gigantes – father and son – well. Barone testified against Gotti & Company, and also had dealings with Falcetti and Cafaro.

More than 15 years ago, in the confines of his East Harlem social club, Gigante’s consigliere Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno (right) had a poignant observation about his boss’s crazy act that proved to be correct in 1997, and will again on Monday.

“If he gets pinched,” said Salerno, “all them years he spent in that fucking asylum (would be) for nothing.”

Mob Star: The Story of John Gotti

Mob Star: The Story of John Gotti – the book it took yours truly and Gene Mustain 17 years to do – tells the complete saga of John Gotti, from his treacherous rise to his defiant downfall. Although we didn't know it at the time, we began working on "Mob Star" in 1985, when we began covering the Gotti story as news reporters.

The first edition came out in 1988, and we finished this new edition three days before Gotti died in June 2002. We added a postscript, and Alpha Books has distributed it to the nation's bookstores.

With a 40,000-word update, the new edition contains the entire Gotti saga right up to his time in prison and his death from throat cancer.

The 378 page, full-size book uses eight additional chapters, a prologue and an epilogue to complete the story we began telling (better than any other reporters, we might add!) when we covered the Gotti-orchestrated, midtown Manhattan assassination of former Gambino boss Paul Castellano.

For the last and best words on Gotti, this is the book to have. It is specially priced at Amazon.com at $11.87, more than five bucks off the suggested retail price.

    Not Really For Idiots

Whether you're a Gang Land regular or an occasional visitor, you'll enjoy  "The Complete Idiot's Guide to The Mafia," a book I wrote for Alpha Books. It's filled with real stuff about real wiseguys and insight about the ways that mobsters make their money. It's 343 pages of true stories of life and death, honor and betrayal. Get it at your local book store, or at Gang Land's favorite, Amazon.com, where the powers that be have knocked the price down to $13.27, so low I am concerned that the Godfather of online booksellers has forgotten about my end.