Defense attorneys representing former Bonanno crime family boss Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano rested their case yesterday in a strategy that seems designed to portray former mobsters who testified as government witnesses as a bunch of liars.

The defense called only a few witnesses in the month-long trial of Basciano, who is accused of ordering a hit on mob associate Randy Pizzolo.

Basciano considered Pizzolo to be disrespectful and insubordinate, and referred to him as a “rat,” although sources say he was not a government informant.

Perhaps their strongest witness was a government cooperator who took the stand again yesterday.

Carlos Medina, an admitted Colombian drug dealer and professional hit man also known as “Dino Diablo,” told a story that could be used to raise questions about the earlier testimony against Basciano by former Bonanno captain Dominick Cicale.

Medina, who admitted to killing a man with an icepick and murdering another by shooting him in the head with an M-16 assault rifle, was housed inside the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn at the same time as Cicale in 2007.

Yesterday, the hit man accused Cicale of lying and concocting a phony assassination plot behind bars to suggest that Basciano wanted him dead.

“He asked me . . . if I could get together and put on a story . . . that I was being hired . . . on behalf of Vinny Gorgeous to kill him,” Medina said on the stand.

“He says, ‘Vinny Gorgeous had put a contract to kill him,’ ” Medina said.

Cicale, a protege of Basciano who was one of the government’s chief witnesses at this death-penalty murder trial, created the fictitious plot hoping to get out of prison on bail, Medina told the jury.