CHIN
The Life and Crimes of Mafia Boss Vincent Gigante
Larry McShane
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
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Copyright © 2016 by Larry McShane
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3704-9
ISBN-10: 0-7860-3704-0
First Kensington Hardcover Edition: June 2016
First Kensington Mass Market Edition: December 2016
eISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3705-6
eISBN-10: 0-7860-3705-9
First Kensington Electronic Edition: June 2016
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue - Bringing It All Back Home
CHAPTER 1 - ANOTHER SIDE OF VINCENT GIGANTE
CHAPTER 2 - POSITIVELY SULLIVAN STREET
CHAPTER 3 - CHANGING OF THE GUARDS
CHAPTER 4 - COLD IRONS BOUND
CHAPTER 5 - RAINY DAY WOMEN #12 & 35
CHAPTER 6 - WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE
CHAPTER 7 - A PAWN IN THEIR GAME
CHAPTER 8 - LICENSE TO KILL
CHAPTER 9 - GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY
CHAPTER 10 - ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER
CHAPTER 11 - EAST SEVENTY-SEVENTH STREET REVISITED
CHAPTER 12 - HARD TIMES IN NEW YORK TOWN
CHAPTER 13 - MASTERS OF WAR
CHAPTER 14 - IT AIN’T ME, BABE
CHAPTER 15 - WANTED MAN
CHAPTER 16 - CAN YOU PLEASE CRAWL OUT YOUR WINDOW?
CHAPTER 17 - IDIOT WIND
CHAPTER 18 - NEIGHBORHOOD BULLY
CHAPTER 19 - TANGLED UP IN BROOKLYN
CHAPTER 20 - DESOLATION ROW
CHAPTER 21 - EVERYTHING IS BROKEN
CHAPTER 22 - I SHALL NOT BE RELEASED
EPILOGUE - IF NOT FOR YOU
For Margie, Stacey, Megan and Joe
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A big thank you to my agent, Frank Weimann, and Gary Goldstein of Kensington Books for their belief in the book and their resolve in getting things done. Much appreciated.
Thanks to all who generously gave their time and recollections to the author, especially Father Louis Gigante, Howard Abadinsky, Joe Barone Jr., Charlie Beaudoin, Douglas Bissett, Benjamin Brafman, Mike Campi, Jerry Capeci, Michael Chertoff, Lenny DePaul, Dan Dorsky, Michael Franzese, Henry Hill, Tommy James, Phil Leonetti, Bruce Mouw, Joe Pistone, John Pritchard III, Barry Slotnick, George Stamboulidis, and Robert Stutman. Rita Gigante spoke with me earlier for a story that ran in the New York Daily News.
A special thanks to Greg O’Connell, who welcomed me into his office, provided me with free coffee and shared his wealth of knowledge about organized crime in New York City.
Thanks to James J. Leonard, Esq., for his assistance and encouragement.
Thanks to the Daily News Library, especially Vinny Panzarino and Scott Widener, and the Daily News Photo Archive, especially Reggie Lewis and Claus Gulberger. Special thanks to Robert F. Moore, Daily News Managing Editor/News, for his help.
Rick Hampson, Jerry Schwartz and Richard Pyle: Great friends, better writers and three guys who will read your first draft at no charge. Thanks for everything. To the boys in Lot K-2, see you in the fall as always. Much of this book was written to a soundtrack of Bruce Springsteen and Nils Lofgren— a long-distance thank you to both. Ditto JR Cigars. Thanks for your support, Joe Balistrieri.
Miss you every day, Greg Fonte.
No man has a wholly undiseased mind; in one way or another, all men are mad.
—Mark Twain
Isn’t he a fucking nut?
—Genovese family member Joseph “Joe Glitz” Glitzia, speaking to John Gotti about Vincent “Chin” Gigante
Prologue
Bringing It All Back Home
THE THE OLD MAN, A BIT OF A BOUNCE STILL EVIDENT IN HIS STEP, moves easily along the sun-dappled sidewalks of his youth.
His neatly pressed white shirt matches the hair trimmed short atop his well-worn face. The spry senior citizen, semiretired and sharp as a stiletto at eighty-two, is clean-shaven. A pair of glasses marks his lone concession to age.
It’s a warm spring morning, and Father Louis Gigante is headed to breakfast at Pasticceria Bruno in Greenwich Village, where he was born in the first half of the last century.
He’s moved around across the decades, finally landing as a parish priest in the South Bronx. But the Roman Catholic priest—like an East Coast Tony Bennett—left his heart down here on Sullivan Street.
Father Gigante’s résumé is impressive: congressional candidate, city council member, social activist, urban developer in the South Bronx. He’s met presidential candidates and cardinals, mayors and multimillionaires. It’s been an interesting run—at one point, he recalls, director Martin Scorsese expressed interest in making a movie about this life of his.
But today Gigante is here to discuss someone else: his older brother Vincent, dead since 2005. For years the Federal Bureau of Investigation had loudly insisted that Vincent, aka “The Chin,” had ascended through the ranks of the Genovese crime family, from street soldier to hit man to capo to the most powerful and feared Mob boss in the United States of America.
For just as long—and just as loudly—Louis Gigante insisted that his brother was a sick man incapable of holding down even a menial job, much less running the nation’s most lucrative and lethal Mafia family. The priest didn’t stop there: he denied the very existence of Italian organized crime in the United States, even as he lived in its epicenter.
Through it all, the priest remained charismatic, quotable, indomitable. And he always looked good in a Roman collar.
When federal prosecutors accused Vincent of crimes ranging from racketeering to murder, Louis paid his brother’s legal fees and served as his sibling’s unwavering public defender. When Vincent wandered these same streets in his bathrobe, Louis was often seen on his arm. The priest insisted that his brother, rather than a dangerous Mafia don, was merely deranged.
“He’s a mental case,” the priest once said dismissively. “Why don’t they leave him alone? Vincent is ill. Vincent is in need of psychiatric treatment.”
Gigante orders a cup of espresso, an egg on toast and sfogliatelle (a sweet Italian pastry). He’s a regular at Bruno’s; the cannoli, he confides, is the best in the five boroughs, and people come from far and wide to carry a boxful back home. It’s right around the corner from the tenement where he grew up with Vincent, their brothers and their immigrant parents.
“Father G.,” as he is known to friends, is the last of the Gigantes left in the old neighborhood. He lives across La Guardia Place in an apartment that once belonged to his brother Pasquale, and where Vincent eventually moved in with their mother. Father G. still stops in during the week at the offices of the South Bronx development company that he founded bac
k when the borough was famously burning. Weekends are spent upstate on bucolic property purchased from a close friend, the infamous music business executive Morris Levy, one of Vincent’s business associates.
Sometimes during his rural getaways, he’ll light a cigar and relax, the fragrant smoke wafting silently toward the ceiling.
The priest’s eyes narrow when he’s making a point, and they dance when he’s making a joke. He reaches across the table to touch an arm gently for emphasis during a ninety-minute stroll down his personal memory lane.
“I was always at Vincent’s side, and he had the greatest regard for me,” he says in a raspy voice. “He was the proudest guy in the family about me becoming a priest. My whole family loved it, but he cherished it because he was a religious man.”
He tells a few old tales of life in the neighborhood, about his hardworking parents and his childhood on Sullivan Street, about growing up with Vincent. He talks about the bonds of loyalty and devotion shared with his departed brother: “I certainly knew, and he knew, that he could always depend on me and trust me. And he was very proud of me.”
And then, out of the blue, Father Gigante has a confession to make.
“Was my brother the boss of the Genovese family?” he asks aloud. “Yes. He rose to that, picked purposely by Vito Genovese.”
CHAPTER 1
ANOTHER SIDE OF VINCENT GIGANTE
ONE “CHIN.” TWO FACES.
Over two decades atop the Genovese crime family, Vincent “the Chin” Gigante was a man perpetually divided.
He was a ruthless Mob boss. He was a helpless mental patient.
He controlled a far-reaching business that earned tens of millions of dollars. He rarely ventured more than a one-hour car ride from his Greenwich Village roots.
He was a made man in the Genovese crime family. He was a baptized member of the Holy Name Society at Our Lady of Pompeii Church.
He callously ordered the deaths of other mobsters—including Gambino family boss John Gotti. He was raised a devout Roman Catholic, attending Sunday Mass until his death.
He was widely considered among the brightest in the Mafia underworld, with a vision beyond that of his contemporaries. He was a high-school dropout, with a recorded IQ just north of 100–a slightly above average score.
He had a wife and five kids in a house in suburban New Jersey. He kept a mistress and three more children in a town house on the Upper East Side.
He recognized the threat of electronic surveillance from investigators, and forbade his underlings—under penalty of death—from uttering his name. He eventually wound up on prison tapes speaking openly with family members, including a panicked call on 9/11.
Most incredibly and indelibly, the ultimate stand-up mobster played a broken-down man in a stunningly successful ruse to dodge and vex prosecutors. It was a piece of improvisational street theater that ran longer than anything on or off Broadway during his eight decades on earth.
There were hints, whispers from informants, and finally a long-awaited admission that the whole thing was a brilliant scam. But for three decades authorities were powerless to prove Gigante’s sanity and convict him, as they would any other criminal.
“Mr. Gigante’s case is truly fascinating,” marveled one prison psychiatrist. “His ability to sustain his ‘crazy act’ over many years and to have deceived at least three prominent forensic evaluators into believing that he was mentally ill and incompetent places Mr. Gigante into the ranks of the most cunning of criminals.”
A full decade before launching his long-running psychiatric charade, a prison evaluation cited Gigante’s natural skills in leading such a “Jekyll and Hyde” existence. First tipped by a Mob insider in June 1970 that Gigante’s mental-patient act was a scam, the FBI needed another twenty-seven years to prove the truth of his claim.
It took another six years before the Chin finally confessed to the ruse in 2003, after federal prosecutors seemed poised to charge Gigante family members with abetting his psychiatric subterfuge.
His bizarre behavior continued even behind bars: Gigante toyed with prison psychiatrists while desperately holding out hope for a successful appeal, which ultimately was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Despite his national reputation, Gigante devoted his entire life to keeping his efforts carefully hidden from the eyes of the public or the hidden recorders of federal investigators.
During the 1980s his operation was as successful as any Fortune 500 business: The Genovese family raked in more than $100 million a year in profit, law enforcement said. The same authorities who chased the Chin grudgingly hailed his family as “the Ivy League of organized crime” and the “Rolls-Royce” of criminal enterprise.
The Chin controlled all numbers operations in Lower Manhattan, as well as the annual St. Anthony’s Feast in his neighborhood, where he turned piety into profit. By 1985, when Gigante was surreptitiously running the Genovese family, and Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno took the law enforcement heat as its straw boss, the family’s assorted illegal enterprises included gambling, extortion, loan-sharking and bid rigging. The Genovese influence extended to the garbage, concrete, construction and music industries; they held an iron grip on the labor that allowed them to dominate the New Jersey waterfront, the Javits Convention Center and the Fulton Fish Market. The family was stealing money on every window installed at the city’s vast housing projects and skimming cash from New York’s enormous concrete industry.
Gigante boasted a workforce of more than four hundred dedicated men at his twenty-four-hour beck and call. In the Mafia galaxy, no Mob star burned brighter than the famously nocturnal Gigante.
“The alleged status of Vincent Gigante as boss of the Genovese organized crime family makes him the sun around which all the planetary criminal activities revolve,” observed U.S. District Court judge I. Leo Glasser.
Yet, this titan of illegal industry was most notorious for his “Oddfather” routine, where he played a serial psychiatric-hospital patient who wandered the city streets clad only in his ratty bathrobe, well-worn pajamas and decrepit pair of slippers. Gigante occasionally added a floppy cap to complete the carefully mismatched ensemble.
Gigante, on close to thirty occasions, admitted himself to a suburban mental hospital for treatment of his self-diagnosed mental illness. Among his Mafia pals, the visits were genially known as “tune-ups.” Each one added to his wacky aura of invincibility, sparing him prosecution while insuring his continued reign atop the world of organized crime.
The brutal gangster and his doddering alter ego lived side by side within the Chin, and helped him become the most successful Mob boss of the last half-century. He surpassed headline-making next-generation Mafiosi like Gotti, old-time leaders like Frank Costello and even the namesake of his crime family (and his Mob mentor), Vito Genovese.
“You know, every time a Mob boss gets indicted, he becomes ‘the most powerful boss,’ ” said former federal prosecutor Greg O’Connell. “John Gotti captured a lot of attention. But we knew Gigante was the guy. The Chin was the capo di tutti capi—‘the boss of bosses.’ ”
His long and successful reign was inexorably linked to his strange persona, captured in scores of FBI surveillance photos and witnessed by countless passersby on the streets of Greenwich Village. Gigante couldn’t do it alone; it took a village of cooperating relatives, neighbors and mobsters to support the performance and spare him from the clutches of law enforcement.
But the Chin was the unquestioned star of this production, which improbably mingled Mob hits with method acting: Marlon Brando in a dingy bathrobe.
His was an extraordinary run atop one of New York’s five Mafia families, from the early 1980s into the new millennium, when the constantly pursuing feds and trigger-happy fellow mobsters insured a steady turnover of leadership in New York’s other four families. The Chin and the Genoveses always rose above the fray.
To provide proper perspective, Gigante spent more time in “office” than four-term P
resident Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in the White House—and FDR didn’t spent his time dodging death threats, ordering executions and avoiding federal bugs.
But the Chin was more than a gangster whose life paralleled the explosive growth of the Mafia in the twentieth-century United States, along with its decline in the twenty-first. He became a part of pop culture; his ceaseless head games with prosecutors and the FBI eventually inspired a memorable episode of Law & Order, the tale of dodgy Uncle Junior on The Sopranos and a satiric novel, I Don’t Want to Go to Jail, by New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin.
Gigante became a headline writer’s dream at the New York tabloids, where his exploits were chronicled in big, bold, black type (THE ODDFATHER!) with tales that only seemed to confirm his legendary lunacy.
Breslin’s novel referenced the Chin’s real-life devotion to two women, both named Olympia, on either side of the Hudson River. It was a maneuver consistent with the mores of 1960s Greenwich Village, the Chin’s longtime home and base of operations, but hardly acceptable among the hard-line, old-school men of the Mob.
Yet no one dared challenge the Chin about his dual domestic lives—or anything else.
From inside his headquarters, the dank Triangle Civic Improvement Association, and from behind bars, Gigante oversaw an era of relative peace and prosperity for his family in a business where homicide marks a management change and treachery remains a marketable skill.
In contrast, Gotti’s run atop the Gambino family lasted barely seven years before he went away to die in the same Missouri prison where Gigante eventually followed.
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