‘The Mafia Cookbook,’ or How to Kill ‘EmWithout a Gun: Use Cholesterol : Food: Start with two sticks of butter; add cream and meat--lots of meat. No ‘rabbit food.’ A former chef to crime families spills his secrets.

NEW YORK — “The Mafia Cookbook” makes it clear why the stand-up guys are a dying breed. If the feds don’t get them, cholesterol will.

As presented by author Joseph (Joe Dogs) Iannuzzi--an underworld Paul Prudhomme who started out cooking for the Gambino crime family and wound up serving the FBI--the Mafia’s menu is as lethal as its hit men.

Joe Dogs claims to have learned his craft as saucier at a swanky restaurant in Cleveland. One day he stole a car and drove to New York, where he worked in various restaurants, cooking food and making book.

He became friendly with some mobsters and says he cooked his way into the Gambino family one night in 1974 with a meal of savory stuffed artichokes, Sicilian style; breaded and sauteed steak and greens, and zabaglione, a dessert prepared with egg yolks, sugar, Marsala wine and fresh fruit.

Mobsters, he found, “know what they like, and when they like it they eat all of it. And then more.” They eat all the time, before crimes and after them. “When there are no crimes,” Joe Dogs says, “they eat while waiting for them to happen.”

Especially voracious was Little Dom Cataldo, a Colombo family soldier, who killed two Colombian drug dealers one night in Florida and immediately thereafter did the same to Joe Dogs’ orecchietti with peas and prosciutto.

Joe Dogs honed his craft while cooking for mobsters hiding from the law or each other. “Any meal may be their last,” he notes, “so it better be a good one.”

But Joe Dogs was as deadly with a stove as any mobster with a .38; his larder had more butter, cream and beef than a dairy farm.

Occasionally he’d serve something relatively healthy, such as cicoria insalata (dandelion greens salad); more typical is his recipe for shrimp scampi, which calls for half a pound of butter and two cups of sour cream.

“When serving guests with more normal appetites, just keep the sauce on the side,” he advises readers.

Similarly, Joe Dogs’ baked pork chops Philadelphia (“A man’s man’s kind of dinner I’d picked up from a Philly mobster vacationing in Miami”) calls for four inch-thick chops, as well as half a stick of butter, 1 1/4 cups heavy cream and several shots of cognac and white wine.

His recipe for mussels in light sauce requires 10 pounds of fresh mussels. His osso buco is made with veal flanks 1 1/2 inches thick. His veal Marsala, prepared en flambe, starts with two sticks of butter and gets progressively richer.

The Mafia chef had one problem: Although Mafiosi are big eaters, most are unimaginative ones; not meat-and-potatoes men, perhaps, but certainly veal-and-pasta ones.

“But that didn’t stop me from experimenting,” Joe Dogs writes. “I’d never tell the crew what I was cooking if it wasn’t a recipe from the old country. They wouldn’t have eaten it, and they might have shot me.”

A volatile killer named Tommy Agro, the author’s link to the Gambino family, was a particularly touchy diner. “When T.A. was nervous, I liked to stay traditional,” Joe Dogs says. “It only upset him more when I experimented in the kitchen.”

When Agro, predictably, developed a heart condition, Joe Dogs served him meatless lasagna with eggplant and spinach and sun-dried tomato sauce. But Tommy, a pot-bellied slob who needed six bibs to finish a lobster, still wasn’t happy. “I’m eating like a . . . rabbit,” he groused. “Joey, you got any bacon and eggs and toast out there? I need some meat.”

Fittingly, the turning point in Joe Dogs’ criminal life came in a kitchen--Don Ritz’s Pizzeria on Florida’s Singer Island.

Possibly because Joe Dogs was three months late with some loan-shark payments, Agro and his thugs beat him to a pulp. Tommy was about to personally cut off Joe’s right hand with a meat cleaver when the restaurant owner’s wife walked in and screamed, scaring off the attackers.

The beating drove Joe Dogs to the FBI. Soon he was spying on his old friends and cooking his new ones steak au poivre-- with 10-ounce cuts of filet mignon, because they also liked to eat.

At the end of the book Joe Dogs explains that he is in the federal Witness Protection Program, somewhere in “wahoo land,” eating in restaurants that advertise “Italian night” and serve macaroni and ketchup instead of pasta.

But that apparently changed in October, when he flew to New York in hopes of appearing on David Letterman’s “Late Show” and was expelled from the witness program for breaching security--even though Letterman canceled his appearance.

“What am I gonna do now?” he asked in a telephone interview. “Well, I can always cook.”