Mob Defector’s Sister Shot in Brooklyn : Crime: The attack is viewed as a message to potential ‘rats.’ The ‘code’ protecting women and children is broken.

The sister of a mob defector who is a potential witness against reputed Mafia boss John Gotti was shot and seriously wounded outside her Brooklyn home Tuesday. Police sources said the attack was meant to warn others against revealing crime-family secrets.

Law enforcement sources said the shooting of Patricia Capozzalo, 38, sister of Peter Chiodo, appeared to break the mob “code of honor” against harming women, children or relatives not involved in organized crime.

“This is highly unusual,” said one police investigator of organized crime who asked not to be identified. “It doesn’t appear that she or her husband were involved in the family, and (mobsters) don’t usually go after a woman.

“It could be that they went for her to teach everyone else a lesson,” the investigator added. “They’re sending a message out to anybody who decides to rat.”

Chiodo’s testimony last year helped to convict three mobsters of racketeering in a scheme that involved contracts for replacing windows in city-administered buildings. Five others in the so-called “Windows” trial were acquitted, among them Gotti’s brother, Peter.

Chiodo, 40, a former captain in the Luchese crime family, was the target of an assassination attempt last year. As he looked under the hood of his car at a Staten Island gas station, he was shot 12 times in the stomach, chest, legs and arms. He survived because the bullets could not deeply penetrate his 435-pound frame, doctors said.

Chiodo, sweating in a wheelchair, testified during the trial that he turned government witness only after his wife and his father received death threats.

Chiodo and his family are at an undisclosed location under the Federal Witness Protection Program. His sister, Capozzalo, and her family chose to stay out of the program, aware of the mob tradition of sparing innocent relatives, a police source said.

Capozzalo, a homemaker and mother of three, had dropped off her son and several neighborhood children at school and was returning to her Bensonhurst home when a black van with tinted windows pulled alongside her car, police said. Two men in ski masks fired shots that lodged in her neck and back. She stumbled into her home and her husband called for help, police said. The gunmen escaped in the van, which was stolen.

She was taken to a hospital, where she was in serious but stable condition, police said. Police and FBI agents said they were investigating the shooting as mob-related.

Chiodo and Philip Leonetti, a reputed underboss in Philadelphia, originally were expected to testify against John Gotti, reputed boss of the Gambino family on trial for murder and racketeering in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.

But the defection four months ago of Salvatore Gravano, Gotti’s underboss and former co-defendant, outweighed testimony that Chiodo and Leonetti could offer as members of mob families only affiliated with the Gambinos, authorities said.

Neither Chiodo nor Leonetti is expected to testify against Gotti, whose trial was in recess Tuesday. Chiodo is expected to be a witness soon in what is being billed as the “Windows II” trial of, among others, his former mob boss, Vittorio Amuso.