Metro

Nightmare bar drama

The memory of kerosene, plastic handcuffs and a deranged gunman shouting, “White people are gonna burn tonight!” is still enough to make her cry.

Ten years after Ann-Margret Gidley heroically ended a hostage standoff at an East Village wine bar — by tackling an armed psychopath — she was back on the witness stand in Manhattan yesterday, sobbing with still-raw emotion as prosecutors played a 911 recording of the 40-minute siege.

“I got 16 motherf–kers in here, and all the motherf–kers are white, too,” Steven Johnson is heard on the tape, taunting cops from the back room of Bar Veloce on Second Avenue, on June 16, 2002.

“I will start burning mother-f–kers, do you hear?” shouts Johnson, an AIDS-infected, unemployed Brooklyn barber who’d strapped a catheter to his leg, and arrived packing three guns, a 30-inch sword, a squirt bottle of kerosene and a six-inch barbecue lighter.

Johnson’s kidnapping and attempted-murder case is being retried a third time, again with an insanity defense. The first trial deadlocked in 2004; the second resulted in a 240-year prison sentence, but the conviction was overturned on a technicality on appeal.

“Oh, my God,” Gidley’s own voice is also heard pleading on the recording played for jurors yesterday. “Can we have a negotiator here, please?”

Doused in kerosene, front-cuffed with plastic ties, and cowering in a sink alongside nine men and five other women in an 8-by-12 back room, Gidley, who was then just 23, still had the mental fortitude to leave the phone open as the drama unfolded.

“Wanna take a shot?” Johnson taunts the arriving cops. “Why not? Take a shot! Why not? That’s what you get paid for! F–king cops!”

Then Johnson — who had already pursued a passerby into the bar, shooting that man twice — changed the subject to body bags.

“That’s when I got really scared,” Gidley told jurors, tearing up, “because he said [to cops], ‘You have a couple of body bags in there? Bring us 20 body bags ’cause that’s the only way we’re coming out.”

Still folded into the back room sink, Gidley realized Johnson had briefly put his gun in his pocket, then taken it out again as he continued to hold his cellphone and lighter with one hand, and a female hostage by the neck with his other.

“Then, when he put the gun in his pocket a second time, I launched myself off the sink as hard as I could,” she said. “And I hit him a couple of times . . . He started squirming, and I knew he could still get to his gun.”

“I guess another person or two jumped on him, then I heard his gun go off.” Her friend and fellow hero hostage, Annie Hubbard, took a bullet in the shin.

“I started yelling, ‘Shoot him!’ I kept yelling it for what seemed like forever. Then one of the officers shot him, and he stopped moving . . . And I yelled, ‘Shoot him again!’ ”