TALKING DEAD

Skelos team lists late GOPer as witness

THINGS HAVE gotten so bad for Dean Skelos, he was apparently hoping for some help from beyond the grave.

One of the witnesses the former state Senate majority leader was planning on calling in his defense case is a dead man, prosecutors complained Wednesday.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Rahul Mukhi complained to Judge Kimba Wood that Skelos’ lawyers had submitted a list of over two dozen possible witnesses to testify on Skelos's behalf in his corruption trial next week.

“We don’t believe this is a real list,” Mukhi told the judge, noting it included former state Sen. Owen Johnson (photo near right), “who passed away.”

That news should not have been a surprise to the 67-yearold Skelos (far right).

Johnson’s obit in the Daily News — from last December — read: “Former state Sen. Owen Johnson, who served 40 years in the Senate before stepping down two years ago, has died, Senate GOP leader Dean Skelos announced.”

Johnson, who represented Babylon, L.I., died at 85 of natural causes.

Skelos’ lawyer, Robert Gage, eventually acknowledged he’d made a mistake by including Johnson on the list. He chalked the gaffe up to uncertainty about who the feds plan to call in the coming days, saying that as a result, his list is “fluid.”

“We don’t know who to call yet,” Gage added.

Testimony continued a short time later, with one of the prosecution’s live witnesses, Bjornulf White.

White was Adam Skelos’ supervisor at AbTech — a $10,000-a-month job Adam (center) landed with what the feds say was strongarming from his powerful pop.

White wound up cooperating with the feds and wearing a wire to his meetings with the son, who prosecutors say was working in tandem with his father to pocket extra money.

On cross-examination, Gage got White to acknowledge that the information he got from Dean Skelos in a three-way conference call with Adam in the days after Hurricane Sandy wasn’t all that insider-y.

Dean Skelos had told White, whose company was involved in storm water purification, that there would be a lot of spending on infrastructure in the months to come. “That was not exactly a surprise, right?” Gage asked. “No,” said White. Watching some of the action was Judge Valerie Caproni, the judge who presided over the trial of Sheldon Silver.

The former state Assembly speaker, once one of the powerful “three men in a room” atop state government with Skelos and the governor, was convicted of corruption charges earlier this week. Caproni was joined at one point by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who sat next to her in the courtroom until she left a short time

later.