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The next time you're stuck in traffic caused by highway construction that appears to involve no actual work, you can thank the Gambino crime family. While you're sitting there, burning up $3 per gallon gasoline, chew on the fact that mob-connected contractors are creating highway traffic jams all over New York — on the BQE, the Bruckner, the Van Wyck, the Cross Bronx, the Long Island Expressway, as well as up and down the New York Thruway.

The mob isn't ripping off taxpayers just on highway construction jobs, either.

A four-month Daily News investigation has found that New York's organized crime families — supposedly banned from all such construction projects — are back in public works big time — at city schools, playgrounds, bridges and parks.

Since 1995, dozens of contractors barred from doing government work because of mob ties, corruption or serious safety violations have been able to win more than 100 public contracts worth more than $1.2 billion.

Take the massive $138 million Brooklyn-Queens Expressway repair that is currently mucking up traffic near Flushing Ave. It's the work of Defoe Construction, a firm the FBI says has been controlled by organized crime for years.

Earlier this month, The News found traffic backed up for a mile at the Defoe site, but no workers were seen working. Four men chatted inside an air-conditioned van while a backhoe and several dump trucks sat idle nearby.

Defoe was hired in May by the State of New York for the BQE job, just weeks after its president was indicted on charges of bribing a mob-infected union.

The FBI has gathered evidence over the last few years that Defoe president John Amicucci has regularly paid off mob-connected unions to use cheaper nonunion help.

On government jobs, prosecutors say, that means Defoe billed the taxpayer for union scale, hired nonunion help and pocketed the difference as profit.

Last year, Amicucci was repeatedly caught on tape delivering payoff cash and discussing corrupt practices with Gambino gangster Greg DePalma, according to FBI documents obtained by The News.