Underworld

For almost 20 years, authorities said last week, a former Cherry Hill plumbing contractor had gotten away with murder. Then one day this month, he met an old friend at a flea market near his new home in Boca Raton, Fla. And amid the trinkets and trifles of other people's lives, the past caught up with Irving Norton Singer. "He set up the perfect crime," one New Jersey law enforcement official said last week. "And then his own mouth beat him. " Singer, 68, was arrested Thursday at Newark International Airport and charged with the 1974 murder of his ex-wife Carol, a striking blond former cocktail waitress who was found brutally stabbed to death in the second-floor bedroom of their posh South Jersey home.

There were, her lawyer said, "a couple of million other places she would rather be," but Deborah Merlino, the wife of jailed mob boss Joseph "Skinny Joey" Merlino, spent yesterday morning testifying for the prosecution in the murder trial of Billy Rinick. "She answered all the questions, and she told the truth," attorney Brian McMonagle said after escorting Merlino through a gauntlet of reporters and television cameramen as she left the Criminal Justice Complex at 13th and Filbert Streets.

Chanell Cunningham, whose testimony helped convict her kingpin boyfriend of murder, was sentenced Tuesday to 12 years in prison by a federal judge who said she spent years "styling and profiling" as a high-living underworld drug moll. U.S. District Judge Curtis Joyner, in pointed comments to a courtroom packed with family members and friends, told Cunningham that were it not for her cooperation, he would have sentenced her to more than 30 years in prison. He described the 37-year-old mother of two as a "major officer" and "vice president of personnel" for the multimillion-dollar cocaine-distribution network set up by her lover, Maurice Phillips.

It is a story more suited for The Sopranos than federal court; a saga of petty corruption and personal betrayal that may be as accurate a depiction of the beleaguered New Jersey mob - plagued by informants, hounded by the FBI, and decimated by a series of successful federal prosecutions - as anything the popular HBO series can offer. Call it the tale of the cop and the wiseguy. It opens Monday in U.S. District Court in Camden. The cop is James "Jimmy" DeLaurentis, 38, who is facing extortion charges that could end his career.

"Trouble in Mind. " A drama starring Kris Kristofferson, Keith Carradine, Lori Singer and Genevieve Bujold. Written and directed by Alan Rudolph. Photographed by Toyomichi Kurita. Edited by Tom Walls. Music by Mark Isham. Running time: 111 Minutes. An Alive release. At the Budco Olde City and Bryn Mawr. Alan Rudolph operates on his own wavelength, commanding the look, feel and, most important, the movement of his movies (which include "Choose Me," "Roadie," "Welcome to L.A. " and "Remember My Name")

Guy Ritchie makes movies that zoom. The gangland Britspeak is pumped up, profane. The action flashes forward, then roars into reverse. All parties concerned appear to be having a gas - even as bullets fly, bad guys (and good) are beaten to a pulp, and suckers get taken for every cent. The problem with Ritchie - recently exed from a certain one-named pop diva - is that he keeps making the same movie. Like Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels , Ritchie's RocknRolla is set in the London underworld.

With Subway, the young French director Luc Besson has given a new and literal meaning to the idea of a criminal underworld by rewriting the definition of an underground filmmaker. Most of his characters and nearly all of his movie are confined to the vast subway system beneath Paris. Down there - after the last Metro has departed in the small hours - petty criminals, lost souls, pimps, vagrants and hookers form a subculture in the remote corners and dark tunnels that commuters never see. For them the sunlight is a rumor.

The man at the heart of Neil Jordan's extraordinary Mona Lisa is a tarnished knight who discovers that he has no armor to protect himself when he sets out to protect a lady of the evening. Set in the dingiest brothels and porn shops that line the narrow streets and alleys in London's Soho, Mona Lisa is an essay on the boundless cruelty of men toward women and on a singular relationship invested with an equally boundless amount of self-delusion. Jordan has been remarkably successful in placing a heightened romanticism against a grittily seamy reality.

"The Testament of Dr. Mabuse" at Film Forum/Philadelphia at the Philadelphia Center, 509 S. Broad St, at 7:30 tonight and 7 and 9:15 p.m. tomorrow. Tickets: $3.50; $2.50 members and full-time students. Phone: 732-7704. KESWICK THEATER 291 Keswick Ave, Glenside, 572-7650. Sun 1:30 p.m.: Show Boat, musical starring Irene Dunne, Allan Jones and Paul Robeson, and The Harvey Girls, musical starring Judy Garland. $5. REFLECTIONS ON THE WORLD University Museum of Anthropology & Archaeology, Harrison Auditorium, 33d & Spruce Sts, 898-4015.

On Wednesday, Joshua "Trent" Jackson, 33, also known as "Apple," was in Southwoods State Prison in Bridgeton, N.J., when he received a visitor. Special Agent Greg Sheridan, from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, dropped by to talk about illegal gun dealing. On Thursday, Jackson was charged in federal court in Camden with dealing firearms without a license - illegally buying an estimated 280 weapons and then, acting as a wholesaler, selling them on the streets of Camden and elsewhere from March 2009 through July 2010.