A BAR ROOM murder pact: you kill my wife, and I’ll kill yours.

It’s 1979, and on the eve of Thanksgiving, Stephen Azzolini is arrested for murder following the death of his seven-month-pregnant wife, Mary, who was found shot dead from behind in their apartment.

But he isn’t fingered as her killer. Instead, he’s accused of murdering his friend Dennis Raso’s wife several weeks earlier. Raso wanted his wife gone, and in return for a stake in Dennis’s florist business in Hoboken, Azzolini offered to carry out the hit.

The killing, by all accounts, was as cold as they come. Azzolini went out drinking with the Rasos in a bunch of midtown Manhattan bars before luring Rosa Raso to a van afterwards, cutting her throat, and dumping her body in a parking lot.

Azzolini’s wife was suspicious when he arrived home wearing bloody clothes. Fearful she’d go to the cops, he contacted Raso who shot her to death.

Both men, from Hoboken, New Jersey, would be sentenced to life in prison the following year.

CRIME IS so rife in the city at this point that 12 murders over a period of just 40 hours are relegated to a five-paragraph story. There are fewer than one a day, nowadays.

The list is grim: a porter’s body found chained to a sink in Anita’s topless bar on Broadway; human remains found in a green canvas bag in a ‘deserted area of lower Manhattan’; a Brooklyn man gunned down in an argument over a dog.

It’s wild out there, and the murder rate will only keep on rising for another decade.

OUT ON Long Island, Karl Linnas is battling a US government attempt to revoke his citizenship. The alleged crime? That he commanded a Nazi concentration camp, committing “cruel and inhuman acts” against men, women and children.

A neighbor told the Daily News: “He’s not one for socialising…”

He was eventually sent to the Soviet Union, and died in a Leningrad prison hospital while awaiting a hearing.

THE JOYS of Chinese food are rediscovered by the tabloids thanks to the rise of ‘Cantonese delicacies’ on the menu.

The two recommended restaurants - Pearl’s on West 48th street and David K’s on the Upper West Side - are long gone.

David K’s proprietor - David Keh - seems like a bit of a character, though. Reports published years later said he “often left a team of seconds to run his restaurant while he - gloriously seductive in British tweeds, dark mink, and Rolls-Royce - played mah-jongg till dawn”.

Danny Kaye, Henry Kissinger, Isaac Stern all hung out at the flagship eatery, and Keh expanded. But by the late 80s, he’d lost it all. He was mysterious about money, but rumours of a dud gold mine investment circulated…

A LETTER asking about gender re-assignment surgery receives a surprisingly supportive response from an advice columnist, given what we’d perhaps assume of the attitudes of 40 years ago.

Ann Landers marvelled at the cost - up to $10,000 - and said “Anyone who would go through the pain of surgery, and spend that sum of money, must want the gender change desperately. I feel that those who want the surgery should have it.”

NEED A CHANGE from Thanksgiving turkey? Jimmy Dell’Orto’s has a 22lb sandwich…