Like ancient Indian burial grounds in a horror movie, mob graveyards have popped up all over town lately. Since 2004, law enforcement agents digging in backyards, vacant lots and garages in Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn have unearthed the remains of a New York Post executive, two Bonanno capos, and the first murder victim of Mafia Cops Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa.  

Now, the FBI has added one more unlikely location to the list: Potter’s Field.

Gang Land has learned that a team of FBI agents determined last month that a Bonanno family associate who disappeared 10 years ago, Richard Guiga, 41, was laid to rest there. 

Sources say Guiga received a pauper’s funeral and was buried in the city’s Potter’s Field on Hart Island – a small rocky strip in Long Island Sound that is officially part of the Bronx – the final resting place for unclaimed bodies and New York’s indigent since the city purchased the island for $75,000 in 1868.

For many years, Guiga, whom the Luchese family had marked for death in a dispute that began over a woman before he was released from prison in 1991,

was assumed to have been whacked by mob rivals after his mother, Rosanna, reported him missing in September 1997. 

Last week, during a brief account about Guiga’s demise, turncoat Bonanno mobster Nicholas (P.J.) Pisciotti (left) testified in Brooklyn Federal Court that he and a cohort killed Guiga during a knife fight outside a Lower East Side bar and disposed of his body at an undisclosed location on Staten Island. 

Comparison DNA analyses have not yet been completed, but authorities believe the tests will confirm that Guiga was one of about 1500 persons buried each year in Potter’s Field by Riker’s Island inmates who earn 35 cents an hour for their work at the official City Cemetery.

Sources say that FBI agents were skeptical when P.J. took them to a wooded area where he said that he and a cohort who was also involved in the knife fight, Michael DeMaria, had buried Guiga – and they found no signs of his remains.

But Pisciotti held fast, and a follow-up inquiry disclosed that an unidentified body had been discovered at that location and interred on Hart Island after the Medical Examiner’s Office took DNA samples for possible later identification.

About six weeks ago, sources say, those samples, as well as DNA samples donated by Rosanna Guiga, were sent to an FBI lab to determine whether the remains found in a wooded area of Staten Island in 1997 should be exhumed for re-burial by his mother. 

Actually Guiga (right) was lucky to live as long as he did. In the early 1990s, no less that 31 Luchese mobsters and associates – including family boss Vittorio (Vic) Amuso, underboss Anthony (Gaspipe) Casso, and onetime acting boss Alphonse (Little Al) D’Arco – were involved in plots to whack him, according to FBI documents obtained by Gang Land.

Guiga’s troubles with the Lucheses began when he tried to maintain a relationship from prison with a former comare (girlfriend in mob parlance) who dumped him for Luchese capo George (Georgie Neck) Zappola, according to a report by FBI agents Stephen Byrne and Kevin Hallinan.

Guiga’s problems escalated when he refused to heed Luchese family warnings to leave her alone, and sent a pal to check on the woman while Zappola was at her home, the agents wrote.

“He was a violent, vicious coke user, the most obnoxious scum who ever walked the streets,” recalled one knowledgeable Gang Land source, insisting that he would not let his personal animus for Guiga taint his remarks. “He was universally hated. His father disowned him. He was truly a guy that only a mother could love. When he disappeared, and word got out that he was gone, everyone but her was a suspect.”

In one report, agents Byrne and Hallinan listed a dozen efforts by 18 participants to kill Guiga from 1991 through 1993 that were aborted for one reason or another. One attempt, during which Georgie Neck (left) planned to use a silencer-equipped machine gun, was prevented by the arrest of two wiseguys as they got into a stolen car that was to be used in the planned hit.

Guiga escaped a plot to whack him during a drug deal, one to poison him, and yet another one to kill him as he visited a friend at Beekman Hospital. He also ducked a scheme to murder him in the basement of Ray’s Pizza, the landmark Prince Street eatery owned by Luchese mobster Ralph (Raffie) Cuomo.

In a remarkable turnabout Monday, Manhattan Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan gave former acting Genovese family boss Liborio (Barney) Bellomo (right) a year-and-a-day in prison for a 12-year-old fraud in a racketeering case that began with Bellomo facing the death penalty for a 1998 murder.

The surprisingly sweet sentence by Kaplan, who last month was ready to reject a lenient plea deal that called for Bellomo to receive 41 months in satisfaction of all the charges in his indictment, was promptly called a “miracle” by Bellomo’s mother-in-law, who joined his four children and other family members at the proceeding.

It’s more likely that other, less heavenly factors were at the core of the compassionate sentence by the usually tough-on-wiseguys judge. 

Kaplan may well have been motivated by defense lawyer Barry Levin’s fact-filled court papers that make the case that Barney was probably innocent of the main charge in the case, and by the government’s admissions that whatever case it had against Bellomo had fallen apart.

And the judge (left) was unquestionably moved by the emotional, heart-wrenching plea for leniency by Bellomo’s 27-year-old daughter Sabrina, a lawyer whose only work since passing the state bar two years ago has been on her father’s case.

After the young lawyer detailed the incredible sense of loss that she and her brothers had endured since her father was first jailed in 1996, the judge pointedly told the gangster that his daughter had risen above the many mistakes he made during his crime-filled life.

“You certainly have someone to be proud of in the person sitting next to you,” the judge said.

One day after Kaplan squashed the government’s efforts to slam Bellomo, the feds upped the ante for the current acting Genovese boss, Daniel (The Lion) Leo, who is imprisoned as he awaits trial for racketeering and extortion. 

The FBI arrested Leo’s nephew and reputed right-hand-man-in-crime for extortion. And a prosecutor disclosed that the FBI has a year’s worth of tape recorded talks between the nephew, Joseph (Joey) Leo, 45, (right) and The Lion that will likely lead to more charges for both men.

Assistant U.S. attorney Eric Snyder said the FBI had bugged a car – a black 2006 Lincoln Zephyr – that Joey used to chauffeur his uncle to meetings with other wiseguys. Like his uncle, Joey Leo was a danger to the community and should be denied bail, Snyder argued successfully at a hearing before Manhattan U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Dolinger.

Snippets of the conversations disclosed in an affidavit by FBI agent Michael

Castner show that Danny and Joey Leo used interesting – but nonetheless easily decipherable – codes in their efforts to thwart the FBI’s electronic surveillance that they suspected was in place.

On March 19, 2006, Joey informed his uncle that a colleague “told me he’s got no kids at his house,” meaning, Castner wrote, that no FBI agents were conducting surveillance at the cohort’s house.

Earlier in the discussion, Joey told The Lion (left) that he had been unable to pick up an overdue loan shark payment from the owner of a private car service owner by stating: “I was supposed to buy some firewood today and it’s been called off.”

Snyder revealed some heated, uncoded words between Joey Leo and his girlfriend that seemed to carry weight in the final decision by Judge Dolinger: “She tells Joey Leo, ‘You have no respect for people. You are a murderer. You told me you murdered someone.’”

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 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 $11.02, more than five bucks off the suggested retail price.

The best of Gang Land is available in a book store near you. Or you can pick up a copy of "JERRY CAPECI'S Gang Land: Fifteen Years Of Covering The Mafia" at a special low price from the Godfather of online booksellers, Amazon.com.

The 330-page oversized book includes an index and eight pages of photographs. It is sure to contain a few of your favorite columns, as well as some you may have missed during Gang Land's lengthy run that began in 1989 in The New York Daily News and continues today online and in The New York Sun.

The book's 125 columns chronicle the New York Mafia landscape from John Gotti's heyday in 1989 as the swashbuckling Dapper Don to the remarkable day in 2003 when Gotti's longtime rival Vincent (Chin) Gigante gave up his Daffy Don routine and confessed to having put on a crazy act for three decades.

Amazon.com has it in stock for $12.32  – 35% off the $18.95 list price.