PROVIDENCE — For more than a year in the summer of 2001, then-Lincoln Planning Board member Robert R. Picerno had been using his position on the panel to squeeze discounts on cars from a local car dealer, sponge free landscaping from a contactor working for the town and extorting bribes. The worst that had happened was when he had to refund one of the payoffs to a disenchanted briber.

Then he ran into Robert Gelfuso. Gelfuso was co-owner of a company that was renovating the Fairlawn playground in the summer of 2001. Picerno was on the job site that July, while Gelfuso was on vacation, and Picerno got a $4,750 cash payoff from Gelfuso’s partner, telling the man he could stop intrusive town officials’ inspections of his company’s work.

But unlike other targets of Picerno’s efforts, Gelfuso said he didn’t just let it go. He got the money back. And then he went to the state police.

Gelfuso was on the stand yesterday at ex- Lincoln Town Administrator Jonathan F. Oster’s Superior Court bribery and conspiracy trial, describing his role in the state police investigation. He told how Picerno tried to extort a $25,000 cash bribe and a $15,000 payment disguised as legal fees from Gelfuso and his company in exchange for help in buying a piece of town-controlled land on Route 116.

Oster is facing two bribery counts and two conspiracy counts in the case. The state charges that Gelfuso was one of the targets of that conspiracy. For his part, Picerno pleaded no contest in 2004 to four counts of taking, or trying to solicit, bribes, and three counts of conspiracy to solicit bribes.

Gelfuso spent most of his time on the stand listening, along with the jury, to recordings of meetings and phone calls he had with Picerno in October 2001 through January 2002. Two of the meetings were at Shanna’s Country Kitchen, a small Lincoln eatery down Route 246 from what’s now called Twin River. Another was at Stuffie’s on Mineral Spring Avenue in North Providence, where Gelfuso, cooperating with the state police, handed Picerno an evelope with $5,000 in cash, an installment on his $25,000 bribe. The meeting was taped and state police photographed Picerno brandishing the bulging envelope in the parking lot as he left.

Gelfuso told how the fact that he once bought two building lots from former New England mob boss Raymond “Junior” Patriarca enticed Picerno to deal with him.

In the 1990s, Patriarca and Picerno had clashed over a lot near one of Patriarca’s luxury home subdivisions in southwest Lincoln. Throughout the taped conversations, the then-Planning Board member asked Gelfuso for insight into Patriarca’s attitude toward him — “Raymond’s over there bad-mouthing” — while Gelfuso steered the conversations toward Oster.

“He assumed because you bought some land you were ‘involved,’ ” O’Brien said, asking point-blank if Gelfuso was. The barrel-chested Gelfuso said no.

“You were playing the wiseguy,” O’Brien said, emphasizing that he did not mean any offense. “And you played it well.”

“Thank you,” Gelfuso said.

At one point in the Picerno-Gelfuso conversations, Gelfuso complained about law enforcement, recalling a time in 1993 when he said federal agents had rousted him from his home and didn’t even let him put on his shoes. Thing was, it never happened.

“But you were on a roll,” O”Brien said. “Yes,” Gelfuso answered.

In the exchanges with Gelfuso, Picerno spun an assortment of plans for the six-acre site, known as the H&H Screw property. He suggested condos, talked about the money to be made in nursing homes.

Under O’Brien’s questioning, Gelfuso told how he had been specifically instructed by state police to get Picerno to discuss Oster’s role in the bribery operation. O’Brien focused on parts of conversations where Picerno said the town administrator lacked total control over the planning and building departments and how, when specifically pressed if Oster knew about the bribes, Picerno would become evasive and give answers like, “Let me say this to you: He will never …. me” or “I can’t say that, you know how it is.”

While testifying that he found Picerno to be a blowhard — he said he joked Picerno should host the game show Let’s Make a Deal — he also said the Planning Board member was able to help him navigate the town land use bureaucracy, getting uncooperative officials to issue needed permits using legal methods.

But he also testified that he was furious at Picerno’s shaking down his partner for the $4,750 and for convincing the partner, David Wayne Daniel, to send a subcontractor from the Fairlawn project to Picerno’s house to do free landscaping. That irritation came through in one of the tapes. After an Oct. 30, 2001, meeting at Shanna’s, Gelfuso bid Picerno goodbye in the parking lot and muttered to the state police listening on the transmitter they’d given him.

“Guys, not for nothing,” he said, “but I’d still like to punch him in the face.”

jhill@projo.com