A crafty Genovese capo who spent 11 years on the lam was slapped with murder charges yesterday for killing a gangland foe who goaded him in a New Jersey parking lot, authorities said.
“What’re you gonna do now, tough guy?” John “Johnny Coca-Cola” Lardiere said to Michael “Mikey Cigars” Coppola when the capo tried to shoot him outside a motel and his gun jammed.
What Coppola did was reach down and whip out a second gun he had strapped to his ankle, authorities said in court papers that also charge him with extortion and identification-document fraud.
He pleaded not guilty in Brooklyn federal court.
Prosecutors claim Coppola, 62, described the Easter Sunday slaying to more than one mob turncoat over the past 30 years.
He was ordered to carry out the whacking in a Bridgewater motel parking lot, but it was unclear why the mob family wanted Lardiere dead.
Coppola is also charged with shaking down the International Longshoreman’s Association along with reputed Genovese leader Tino Fiumara and the late capo Lawrence Ricci, who was whacked and found in the trunk of an abandoned car in New Jersey while he was on trial in 2005.
Both Coppola and Fiumara are considered suspects in the Ricci murder, although neither has been charged.
Coppola came under scrutiny for the Lardiere murder in 1996 and became a fugitive when New Jersey authorities demanded that he submit to DNA testing.
Coppola previously pleaded guilty to federal fugitive charges and has been held in custody in New Jersey since his arrest last year.
He and his wife, Linda, traveled back and forth between New York and San Francisco repeatedly while he was on the lam.
When they were in the city, the couple hid in plain sight in an Upper West Side apartment that was owned by a Genovese associate. The feds finally caught up to him in the neighborhood in March 2007.
While the DNA test proved inconclusive, a search of the couple’s apartment turned up a stash of fake identification and a book called “The Methods of Attacking Scientific Evidence.”
Coppola has been serving a 31/2-year sentence after pleading guilty to fugitive charges and faces the rest of his life behind bars if convicted of the new charges.