Clifford Cummiskey had been accused of pummeling an off-duty State Department agent in a drunken brawl outside a Ninth Ave. bar. He said it was self-defense, and that his dad's notoriety still follows him. The son of infamous Hell's Kitchen gangster Eddie (The Butcher) Cummiskey was acquitted Tuesday of beating up a federal agent.

"My last name is Cummiskey, my father was a known gangster," Cummiskey, 36, said after a Manhattan judge cleared him of a single misdemeanor assault charge. "He died 33 years ago and to this day, anytime anything happens it's the first thing [the cops] bring up."

Cummiskey, whose father was shot dead on the streets near their home, did acknowledge many past run-ins with the law, including a 1992 felony assault conviction for breaking a man's jaw and a more recent drunken driving conviction. Eddie Cummiskey was a leader of the murderous Westies gang which ruled the upper West Side in the 1960s and '70s, and which at one time was headed by Mickey Spillane - the mobster, not the novelist. Cummiskey's son was busted by cops Sept. 21 after a violent 3:30 a.m. brawl involving as many as six off-duty federal agents erupted outside Coppersmith's pub on W. 53rd St. While prosecutors charged it was Cummiskey who threw the first punch and then pounded Agent Patrick Scoggins while he bled on the sidewalk, Cummiskey's defense attorney argued his client was jumped. It may have been testimony