It was a dusty old photograph capturing the moment when three strange bedfellows came together — and yesterday, it surfaced as evidence at a Brooklyn Mafia murder trial.
The photo shows then-US Sen. Alfonse D’Amato flanked by two smiling mobsters, and Brooklyn federal prosecutors unveiled it as they built a racketeering case against a ranking Gambino crime-family capo.
Bartolomeo Vernace — one of three senior mobsters sitting on the crime family’s ruling panel — is accused of gunning down two bar owners in 1981 after a spilled drink splashed a wiseguy’s girlfriend.
While D’Amato’s photo has no connection to the murder, prosecutors hope it will help prove that Vernace’s actions were part of a pattern of Mafia racketeering and document his connections to other wiseguys.
In the photo, D’Amato stands between Gambino associate Ralph Sciulla and Bonanno associate Giuseppe Gambina.
Sciulla was a member of Vernace’s mob crew, the feds say, but just months after the photo was taken he was dead, his body stuffed into car trunk and discovered on Long Island on Aug. 7, 1992.
But the prized photo lived on, hanging for years in a mob social club in Queens run by Vernace.
“It was on the opposite side of the counter, against the wall in the middle,” Gambina told a jury yesterday.
Gambina, now an FBI informant, took the stand at Vernace’s trial and looked at a poster-sized reproduction of the photo displayed for the jury.
He explained that the picture was snapped at Giannini’s, a restaurant in Queens where people gathered to support the Republican senator.
“It was a fund-raiser for Senator D’Amato,” Gambina recalled.
The political mixer in the early ’90s was not the first time that D’Amato had crossed paths publicly with New York gangsters.
In the 1980s, he took the stand as a character witness for a Luchese family associate.
On another occasion, D’Amato rallied unsuccessfully to persuade then-federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani to reduce charges against Genovese mobster Mario Gigante.
D’Amato also intervened on behalf of Paul Castellano, who at the time was the boss of the Gambino crime family.
In the past, D’Amato characterized these controversies as nothing more than efforts to support constituents.