Gangster Chronicles : Crime: Reporter Jerry Capeci’s tenacious investigations have earned him the respect and wrath of the New York underworld. Mob boss John Gotti threatened to punch him.

When John Gotti gets mad, Jerry Capeci gets a wake-up call.

“Why don’t you punch him (Capeci) in the (expletive) mouth?” the New York crime boss fumed during a wiretapped conversation played at his current murder trial. “Make an appointment, I’ll punch him in the (expletive) mouth for you, that rat (expletive).”

In the long and bloody saga of the “Dapper Don,” there are many corpses. Wise guys who crossed the belligerent Gotti and paid the ultimate price. Mafia hotshots who wound up in the trunk of a Lincoln, heading for a watery grave.

But you won’t find Capeci’s name on any hit list. Instead, he shows up in the newspapers and in the press box every day at Gotti’s headline-grabbing trial. Blunt, tough and plain-spoken, he’s the city’s most respected mob reporter.

In a world of blow-dried anchormen and 30-second sound bites, Jerry Capeci is a media anachronism: Born and raised in Brooklyn, he grew up among working-class people, including street-corner mobsters, and still visits the old neighborhood. Unlike some reporters, who depend on press releases from prosecutors to write about the mob, Capeci rubs shoulders with underworld crooks. And he covers them like other journalists cover city hall or the board of zoning appeals.

Besides daily stories, Capeci also writes “Gangland,” the city’s first gossip column for gangsters. Packed with juicy exclusives and recaps of the latest rub-outs, it’s become must reading for Mafia voyeurs, goombahs on the run and the district attorneys pursuing them.

No one doubts Capeci’s integrity, or his contempt for organized crime and the economic toll it takes on New York. But he believes it’s essential for mobsters to tell their side of the story, as well as law enforcement.

“You have to track these guys down like anyone else,” he says. “John Gotti may be guilty of terrible crimes . . . but he has a right to get his point of view in the papers like anyone else, to complain about unfair treatment and to have it printed. As a reporter, you have to be fair to everybody.”

Although he comes across in print as a brash, no-nonsense guy, Capeci, 47, is a quiet man who enjoys the company of his wife, Barbara, and their three children. He seems almost pained when he receives a compliment over his work at the New York Daily News and quickly points out the contributions of his writing partner and co-author, reporter Gene Mustain.

Above all, Capeci likes to keep his personal life and his work separate. But it’s not always possible, because he periodically becomes a character in his own stories. Gotti threatened to punch him out, for example, because of Capeci’s well-known ability to dig up secret information. On the wiretap played in court last week, the hot-tempered mobster was furious that one of his own attorneys would even speak to the reporter.

Less than 24 hours after Gotti’s threat made headlines, Capeci was low-key about the incident. As a group of the Don’s silk-suited friends joked with him in a hallway outside the courtroom, he tried to brush if off.

“I think Mr. Gotti was exaggerating,” Capeci told the men, who were leaning against a wall. “That’s all it was . . . I hope.”

“So, you gonna give us a break, or what?” answered Joey (Jo-Jo) Corrozzo. Capeci laughed quietly and walked away, running next into Joey (Butter) DeCicco, another Gotti friend who regularly attends the trial.

“Hey, handsome,” Capeci called out.

“I’m watchin’ you,” said DeCicco.

It’s all part of the circus atmosphere surrounding Gotti’s fourth trial in seven years. Prosecutors are betting they will finally convict America’s most powerful organized-crime figure, who beat the rap on three previous occasions.

This time, officials say, the brawling mobster will pay for those he whacked, including Mafia kingpin Paul Castellano, whose 1985 killing paved the way for Gotti’s takeover of the Gambino crime family. The dramatic shooting in front of Sparks Steakhouse during the Christmas season made Gotti’s reputation as a tough guy, and it also established Capeci as a proven mob reporter.

In a story that appeared several days after the crime, Capeci was the first journalist to present the theory--now accepted by prosecutors as gospel--that Gotti arranged the hit to head off an embarrassing probe by Castellano of drug dealing among Gotti’s associates. It was a matter of kill or be killed.

How did he get the story? Capeci answers carefully: “I had, uh, sources. I talked to some organized-crime figures. I had tapes. That’s all I can say.”

Since then, his reputation has grown among journalists and other Mafia cognoscenti. Much of the praise stems from the fact that he takes on anyone--FBI agents as well as gangsters--when he discovers illegal behavior on his beat. It’s gotten him into hot water with some prosecutors, who expected Capeci to function as a silent partner instead of an independent voice.

“Jerry stands head and shoulders above the other reporters, and there are a lot of hard-working journalists covering this issue,” says Ed McDonald, a former U.S. attorney who headed an organized-crime strike force in New York. “The reason is that he works harder and has sources that nobody else has. He’s plugged into that world better than anyone else in this town.”

He also has a clear-eyed view of the mob that Hollywood often ignores.

“The ‘Godfather’ movies romanticized the Mafia to the extent that it made gangsters into men of honor,” Capeci says. “And it’s never been anything about honor. The Mafia is about making money through any criminal way and using any means possible, including death. These are not nice people.”

Mobsters traditionally take a vow of omerta , or silence, before their initiation into the underworld. Yet talking to Capeci seems to be routine for many of New York’s organized-crime figures. At the very least, they devour every word about themselves in his weekly “Gangland” column.

Just ask Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano, Gotti’s top deputy, who sparked headlines by turning state’s witness and agreeing to snitch on his boss. In one courtroom exchange, the man who has admitted to 19 murders told Gotti’s attorney that he gets valuable information from Capeci’s stories, reading “about 99% of them.”

It’s no surprise, given the nature of mob life these days. How can a guy get any privacy and learn what’s going on when the feds have bugged everything except the kitchen sink, and sometimes even that?

“In New York, mobsters can’t communicate with each other on the phone, and they can’t send each other faxes, so they’re reduced to reading the newspapers to find out what’s going on,” says Nicholas Pileggi, the author of “Wiseguy,” on which the movie “Goodfellas” was based.

“Every Tuesday, when Capeci’s column appears, you can see Lincoln Town Cars with smoky windows pull up to newsstands. . . . You can just bet that a 300-pound guy with a pinkie ring lumbers out and says: ‘Gimme da Nooz.’ ”

Sometimes there are real gems: Once, Capeci wrote about the exploits of John (Handsome Jack) Giordano, who was convicted of running a $300-million-a-year gambling operation for Gotti. Just before sentencing, Handsome Jack argued that he was a wrangler at an Upstate New York ranch.

Nassau County Judge Raymond Herrington was not amused, said Capeci, and fired back: “Mr. Giordano says he’s a wrangler, but for this court to believe that, it would have to be another part of a horse’s anatomy.”

There’s also room for the bizarre: Once, three Philadelphia gangsters stuffed a murder victim into the trunk of their car and began driving out of state. But as they neared a tollbooth, Capeci wrote, the men realized they had no change. As other motorists honked, they had to get out of the car and ask an operator to change a dollar. Philly mobsters are known for their violence, he observed, but brains are another thing.

“Jerry’s great gift is that he gets under everybody’s skin,” says author Jack Newfield. “He works both sides of the street, and it shows.”

Not bad for a kid who never graduated from college and who earned money as a truck driver and dock worker before signing on as a copy boy in 1966 with the New York Post. Capeci’s father was a cabdriver, his mother held a series of jobs, and neither of them ever expected their son to become a reporter.

Unbeknown to them, his training started early.

Growing up in Bensonhurst, Capeci says he did the things most youngsters did--playing cards, shooting craps, hanging out in bowling alleys and killing time in pool halls. In his neighborhood, a spicy mixture of Jewish and Italian-American residents, wise guys were part of the landscape:

“For me, the Mafia was the loan shark who hung out at the bowling alley, the guy who loaned you $96 for $120 and you paid him in eight weeks. The guy who ran card games. You knew they were connected. You knew who they were.”

It was that sensitivity to neighborhood ways that helped Capeci get his first exclusive story. After becoming a police reporter for the Post, he was assigned to cover the funeral of Carlo Gambino, the powerful mobster who died in 1976. Although the event was off limits to the press, Capeci knew the layout of the church where the service was being held and walked in a side door.

After introducing himself as a reporter to the priest and conducting a brief interview, he strode into the main room and took a seat among the other mourners. When Capeci later filed out of the building with them, the other reporters outside were dumbstruck.

Capeci soon began covering all aspects of the mob in New York. He broke stories that poultry magnate Frank Perdue had made overtures to Castellano for help in busting up a union, and wrote profiles of mob figures for New York magazine. He was hired by the Daily News soon after the Castellano assassination and began writing the “Gangland” column several years later.

In 1988, Capeci and co-author Mustain--also a Daily News reporter--wrote “Mob Star,” a biography of Gotti. The writing duo will soon publish “Murder Machine,” about a gang of organized-crime killers in New York City.

Asked if he feels threatened covering the mob, Capeci says the press is seen as a necessary evil by the Mafia, and is traditionally free from reprisals. But the recent shooting of the sister of a mob figure in New York, something unheard of years ago, suggests that old standards are collapsing.

It tends to make him more cautious, says Capeci, particularly when an anonymous voice over the telephone promises him information--but only if he’ll go to a remote spot late at night with nobody else around.

“I don’t do those kind of things,” he says. “I’m not stupid. When you cover organized crime, the most important thing is common sense. You can never operate out of fear. You just go on, do your job, and hope for the best.”

Never mind that Big John gets mad from time to time. The important thing, Capeci says, is that people are paying attention.

Once, Bruce Cutler, Gotti’s attorney, called the reporter late at night and told him that Gotti was angered by something Capeci had written the day before. “He’d like to kick you in the ass,” the lawyer said.

When Capeci protested that other papers had reported the same news that day, Cutler was oddly reassuring: “Yeah, but you’re like E.F. Hutton. When you talk, people listen.”