They’re bad, but not mob, sez lawyer

Prosecutors say this duo burnt and pillaged their way through Brooklyn, but lawyers for two alleged Russian mobsters told a jury Tuesday their clients may be bad dudes — but they’re not gangsters.

Leonid (Lenny) Gershman and Aleksey Tsvetkov, linked to an Eastern European organized crime syndicate known as Thieves in Law, are on trial in Brooklyn Federal Court for racketeering, extortion, arson, illegal gambling and a host of related charges.

Federal prosecutors say the brutal duo operated extensively in south Brooklyn neighborhoods and overseas, reporting to higher-ups in former states of the Soviet Union.

Tsvetkov (bottom) and Gershman (top) are alleged — among other things — to have set fire to a Coney Island Ave. building with children inside on May 2, 2016.

Prosecutors say they raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in that building, running illegal highstakes poker games on the second floor — until a rival poker game started up on the ground floor.

The government’s star witness, Renat Yusufov, took the stand on Tuesday and fessed up to a life of crime — much of it, he said, in cahoots with Gersham and Tsvetkov.

The Russian mobster said he pocketed millions of dollars over a 10-year period dealing cocaine in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach, Coney Island and Bensonhurst before his 2017 arrest.

“(Lenny) was my go-to guy — my muscle,” he said, citing Gershman’s “intimidation and violence” among his attributes. “If I had problems that needed taking care of, I’d go to him.”

The witness testified that Gersham once took care of a cocaine runner after learning he’d set up a fake robbery, leading the culprit to his Sheepshead Bay garage and beating him to a pulp.