He’s lucky he wasn’t dealing with Big Tony.
In a scene straight out of “The Sopranos,’’ a reputed mobster whose family owns the New Jersey jiggle joint featured in the hit HBO series was beaten and robbed for squealing on fellow wiseguys, court papers allege.
Suspected Genovese associate Anthony “Tony Lodi” Cardinalle, 63, was attacked Christmas Eve at his family’s club Satin Dolls, which doubled as TV don Tony Soprano’s Bada Bing hangout, according to Manhattan Federal Court papers.
The robbery and beat-down was likely “payback’’ for Cardinalle ratting out his criminal cahorts in a “Sopranos”-style trash-hauling shakedown scheme, his lawyer wrote in the documents.
Cardinalle “not only risked injury’’ by singing to the feds “but also was actually beaten and robbed in what was, in all likelihood, revenge or punishment for his cooperation,’’ his lawyer, Alan Silber, said in arguing for leniency for his client in the shakedown case.
A thug also came to another of the four New Jersey strip clubs that his family owns and told a dancer “she shouldn’t work there because Mr. Cardinalle was a snitch,” the lawyer said.
“It is obvious that the danger — including the possibility of future attacks — is ongoing for one whose cooperation was made public” by the media, Silber added in a Jan. 23 letter to the judge that only surfaced last week.
Cardinalle had been “assaulted by two men in a truck’’ after driving to his family’s strip joint — “the one that everybody knows because it was Bada Bing on ‘The Sopranos,’ ” said Silber.
The alleged Jersey Mafioso reveled in the notoriety surrounding his club’s fictional counterpart and mob boss Tony Soprano, who used a waste-carting business as a front for his illegal enterprise.
Cardinalle decorated Satin Dolls with posters of Tony Soprano actor James Gandolfini and hung a sign outside that said “Thank You Jimmy, Farewell Boss” after the star died in 2013.
But reel life turned seriously real when Cardinalle was pinched along with 31 others in January 2013 in connection with a multifamily organized-crime effort to control New York and New Jersey’s waste-hauling industry, authorities have said.
Cardinalle could have landed up to 40 years behind bars before copping a plea in December to racketeering and extortion conspiracy charges.
He then faced a recommended sentence of 21 to 27 months, but Silber argued for probation in the documents.
“The government has acknowledged Cardinalle’s cooperation as ‘noteworthy and significant’” in scoring convictions against at least two members of the mobster’s Lodi, NJ-based crew, he said.
Cardinalle ended up getting a slap on the wrist Jan. 29 when he was quietly sentenced behind closed doors to 30 days in jail.
He began serving his time Wednesday.
Manhattan federal Judge Kevin Castel also ordered him to pay a $10,000 fine and $3,400 in restitution.