Chin

by Larry McShane

  The Chin proved far more adaptable. As the Mob’s founding “Mustache Petes” made way for the next generation, he rose through the ranks in the 1950s and 1960s as a protégé of Genovese. His ascension continued through the turbulent 1970s, and Gigante assumed his seat as boss in 1981. When other bosses, including Gotti, went to jail in the ’80s and ’90s, the Chin dodged prosecution and stayed on top of the Genovese family into the new millennium—even after the feds finally put him in prison.

  Even his installation as Genovese boss, the culmination of his Mafia career, was swathed in secrecy. Gigante demoted predecessor Salerno, but arranged for Fat Tony to serve as a figurehead. The cigar-chomping, fedora-wearing old-timer took a one-hundred-year prison term after his conviction as a member of the Mob’s “ruling commission,” leaving the Chin free and in charge.

  Salerno died behind bars rather than rat out the real boss. Gigante stayed on the streets and at the top of the family.

  Gigante invested more than three decades of his life in pretending he was certifiably insane, a performance that included small touches (not shaving or combing his hair) and grand ones (greeting FBI agents as he stood naked in the shower, holding an umbrella). By one count he duped a half-dozen psychiatrists into thirty-four separate diagnoses of schizophrenia as he operated with impunity atop the Genovese family.

  His efforts rivaled the Oscar-winning work of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with one difference: If Randle P. McMurphy wanted out of the mental hospital, Gigante returned there again and again. The dedication to his craft earned Gigante his memorable tabloid sobriquet, the Oddfather, along with the respect of his underlings.

  “His family revered him,” said George Stamboulidis, the federal prosecutor who led the team that finally convicted Gigante.

  Forces on both sides of the law were equally impressed by a show that at times resembled something conjured up by director Scorsese and “the LSD king,” Owsley Stanley. Imagine GoodFellas on a bad acid trip. John Pritchard Jr. ran the FBI’s Genovese Squad in the mid-1980s as the agency tried desperately to convict the elusive Chin. He came away with a reluctant respect for the Mob boss.

  “Chin was probably the most feared gangster in New York,” said Pritchard. “He was so clever. . . . He was a quiet, calculating, behind-the-scenes guy. Chin didn’t want people to know he was the boss. It was enough that the people in the neighborhood knew. He was known among the people as a guy who could get things done, a la The Godfather.”

  Pritchard was among the first to use the phrase most often used to describe the Chin’s dependence on the insanity defense: “Crazy like a fox.”

  Philip Leonetti, an Atlantic City mobster with a vast knowledge of Mafia lore, put Gigante in a class by himself.

  “Within our family, we viewed the Chin as a very, very smart man, a very secretive man, very cunning and very ruthless,” Leonetti recalled. “He was old-school Cosa Nostra—stay low-key, follow the rules and make money. He wasn’t flashy. I mean, Christ, he spent his whole day in a bathrobe.

  “He wasn’t trying to be a celebrity. He was a gangster and he knew this thing, La Cosa Nostra, this thing, better than anyone in the country.”

  Leonetti’s was a dead-on assessment: Gigante did not keep a standing reservation at the Copacabana, or pose for photos with an arm wrapped around Frank Sinatra, or chase showgirls around the Las Vegas Strip. His primary interests were the Genovese family, the prestige, the power. He was comfortable in the confines of Sullivan Street.

  There was money, too, but it mattered less to Gigante than his peers atop the other families. Part of his crew’s loyalty was based on the Chin’s generosity when it came to kicking up cash (a standard Mob practice where the family head receives a percentage of every illegal dollar pocketed). Gigante routinely allowed his capos to keep money that would routinely go to his contemporaries astride New York’s four other crime families.

  He became the last acolyte of a fading tradition, a true believer in a disappearing world, a man of old values surrounded by thugs and turncoats. He never abandoned his roots—geographic or otherwise.

  Gigante seized control of the Genovese family during the Ronald Reagan presidency; by the time he pleaded guilty in April 2003 on federal charges of lying to doctors about his mental health, it was Reagan who was suffering from Alzheimer’s.

  The Chin’s reign became a constant in an ever-changing world. Three post-Reagan presidents filled the Oval Office during his time as boss, and the Soviet Union collapsed as his crime family thrived. The World Trade Center was twice targeted by terrorists. There was a bombing in Atlanta at the Olympics; and the New York Rangers won their first Stanley Cup since 1940, when Gigante, living a couple miles south of Madison Square Garden, had celebrated his twelfth birthday.

  Gigante endured, firmly entrenched as the Howard Hughes of organized crime. Long after he didn’t need the money or the aggravation, the Chin remained the biggest boss in the nation’s biggest city—and the “craziest” gangster since the hotheaded Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who was the real thing.

  At the end, after spending the last eight years of his life behind bars, Gigante returned to the Village for his funeral Mass, a small and exclusive gathering of family and friends. There was none of the pomp associated with many Mob farewells, the endless floral arrangements or lengthy funeral cortege.

  His life had come full circle: a final farewell in the old neighborhood, just the way the Chin would have wanted it.

  “He didn’t move far,” said Henry Hill, the former Lucchese family operator who turned federal informant in the early 1980s. “All that money, that so-called power—the power to assassinate and kill—and he hasn’t left a four-block area in forty years.”

  CHAPTER 2

  POSITIVELY SULLIVAN STREET

  VINCENT LOUIS GIGANTE, THE FOURTH OF SALVATORE AND YOLANDA Gigante’s six boys, arrived in a home still shrouded in loss and grief.

  The parents were Italian immigrants, married in their native Naples on October 20, 1920, before setting off for New York City in the era’s tidal wave of new arrivals from their homeland. Records from Ellis Island show Salvatore and Yolanda (her name misspelled as “Iolanda”) arrived three days after New Year’s in 1921, crossing the Atlantic Ocean aboard an Italian ship, the Pesaro.

  He was twenty-five, and his pretty bride just eighteen.

  At five-four, with black hair and brown eyes, Salvatore listed his occupation as “workman,” while Yolanda described herself as “housewife.” Handwritten beneath a question about their intended length of stay was the notation “perm”—permanently. The newlyweds would find a home in Manhattan, joining relatives already living in Greenwich Village.

  As they did for all new arrivals, the ship’s captain and surgeon signed off on documents attesting to the Gigantes’ mental and physical well-being. Both Gigantes checked the “yes” box when asked if they could read.

  The couple settled into a tenement at 181 Thompson Street, sharing the space with Salvatore’s brother Louie and his wife. Salvatore and Yolanda would spend their whole lives in the neighborhood, never moving beyond a radius of a few blocks, relocating only to find space for their expanding family or to stay ahead of the wrecking ball in the constantly evolving area.

  The Gigantes soon welcomed three boys: Pasquale, Mario and Vincent. Salvatore, a jeweler by trade, hustled to support the family; and like many of the local women, Yolanda picked up work as a seamstress, specializing in piecework for ladies’ coats. It was during a rare vacation that the hardworking young couple endured a heartbreaking blow.

  During a 1925 trip home to see family in Naples, eighteen-month-old Vincent suffered horrific burns from an accidental spill of a large pot of water boiling for pasta. The child spent two agonizing weeks in the hospital before dying. The devastated Gigantes returned to the Village, where they welcomed their fourth child on March 29, 1928. There was little debate; the new arrival, another boy, would be named for his late brother. An
unbreakable bond between mother and son was forged, one that would last two lifetimes.

  Vincent’s doting mom provided her boy with the nickname that followed him through life. Although the name would one day echo with menace, it sprang from her love.

  “My mother, as a Neapolitan woman, would call him ‘Chenzino. ’ It’s the diminutive of Vincenzino, ‘little Vincent,’” explained Louis Gigante. “That’s how he got the name, ’cause Mama would call him ‘Chenzino.’ She never spoke English to him. Vincenzino. So the kids called him ‘Chin.’”

  The Village was already heavily Italian by the time the Gigantes arrived. More than fifty thousand Italians settled in the neighborhood between the 1880s and 1920s; the vast majority were young, single men. By 1920 the area was about 30 percent Italian and supported a pair of churches catering to the new arrivals: Our Lady of Pompeii, on Carmine Street, and the nation’s oldest Italian-American parish, St. Anthony of Padua, incorporated in 1859 and located on Sullivan Street.

  The city’s first Italian-American mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, was born in 1882 on the same street as both Vincents.

  The Village had also earned a reputation as a haven for artists and eccentrics. Mark Twain once walked the local streets, as did bohemian/social activist/journalist John Reed. The insular neighborhood was also home to a long tradition of taking care of its own and minding its own business, particularly among its Italian immigrant community. The Village’s padrone was a local fixer, able to provide an assortment of services for his constituents. It could be anything from a job opportunity to notarizing documents to arranging steamship tickets for a trip back to Italy.

  Among the first padrones was Louis Fugazy, who immigrated to the Village in 1869 from his hometown of Liguria. Fugazy was still living on Bleecker Street when Louis Gigante arrived; the old man died in 1930. A Neapolitan immigrant named Vito Genovese would fill his shoes.

  With the arrival of Ralph and their last son, Louis, the Gigante family was complete. The five sons were raised as devout Roman Catholics, with Sunday Mass a regular part of their routine. Yolanda always favored Our Lady of Pompeii on Carmine Street.

  The Bureau of Prisons, in a 1960 evaluation, characterized Chin’s childhood as “normal . . . and healthy.” Louis Gigante said the brothers, though born years apart, remained a tight-knit group despite the difference in ages. The connection to one another and to the Village streets remained, and it endured unbroken as they grew into adulthood.

  During a sit-down years later with prison officials, the Chin recalled the number one household rule: “Respect your parents.” Each boy was assigned regular household chores, and Gigante’s only bad memories of childhood were dealing with a speech impediment and a minor heart condition. Gigante, who described Salvatore and Yolanda as a loving couple, could not recall a single instance where he watched his parents fight.

  Salvatore was only occasionally moved to spank one of the misbehaving boys. Mom Yolanda’s method of discipline involved a paralyzing stare, which young Vincent inherited, using it to great effect in later life. “A happy childhood” was Gigante’s recollection decades later. By all accounts, the future Mob boss with a penchant for bathrobes dressed quite normally, too.

  The Chin specifically mentioned that he was always quite close with his mother. There were, he added, no family secrets, although there was one sad chapter in their history. Gigante’s maternal grandfather committed suicide at age thirty-seven. The circumstances were strange. He swallowed poison to avoid testifying against “the Black Hand,” a Mafia-esque group operating in Naples. Fearful his family would be targeted if he took the stand, Pasquale Scotto took his own life.

  Though living in the nation’s largest city, the boys were raised as if they remained in their late grandfather’s homeland.

  “My mother and father were not American,” said Louis Gigante. “They were Neapolitans. Their culture and everything [was] completely imposed on us, the way they knew life.”

  The Gigante kids learned English on the streets and at school as their parents spoke strictly Neapolitan at home.

  “Never spoke English until I was in school,” recalled Louis Gigante. “Being the youngest, the other four [brothers] spoke English to me. I just never heard it from my mother.”

  Salvatore landed a job on Canal Street with a jewelry business started by another immigrant: William Kelly.

  “He hung out with the Irish jewelers. . . . You know how he made his money?” asked Louis Gigante. “He worked there with them, and then he would be their representative in the Italian neighborhood. Every woman who was getting married would go to him, and he would display the rings in the house.”

  With the onset of the Great Depression and hard times in the jewelry business, Salvatore took other work, including one stint with the New Deal-sponsored Works Progress Administration (WPA).

  “I was very proud of him,” recalled Louis. “My father worked all his life. He made a living, and supported us very well.”

  Yolanda chipped in, too, bringing sewing work home to the cramped apartment—much to Salvatore’s dismay. A good Neapolitan wife was supposed to raise the children and cook the meals. Salvatore, his pride stung, took his wife’s sewing machine and sold it.

  “I was angry a little,” she recalled decades later. “But don’t you worry. I bought a secondhand machine for ten dollars. I worked day and night.”

  The Gigante family’s economic fortunes improved once Salvatore landed a better job in the jewelry trade, but it required a long commute.

  “Newark. Poor guy had to go to Newark all his life,” said Louis Gigante. “And he was an engraver in a big jewelry company. That was what he did. He didn’t just engrave initials. He’s cutting the stones.”

  Each night the entire family would gather at the dinner table to discuss the day’s events in two languages. It was an essential part of their life, with each of the boys expected to contribute to the ongoing conversation. The sons addressed each other in English, while the parents spoke only in their native tongue.

  * * *

  As young Vincent was finding his footing in the world, the nascent American version of La Cosa Nostra was starting its bloody evolution into the powerful institution that became an integral part of New York City for the next eight decades.

  Gigante’s Mob mentor, Vito Genovese, was smack in the middle of the Mob wars that gave birth to the five Mafia families of New York. The crime family that would carry the Genovese name emerged from a period of unprecedented bloodshed and betrayal.

  Genovese arrived in the New World in 1913, a teenage boy whose family left their own village in Naples to settle south of the Gigantes on the Lower East Side. The young man quickly gravitated toward a life of crime and easy money, falling in with a group of like-minded and ambitious Italian immigrants.

  A Sicilian youth named Giuseppe Bonanno—rechristened “Joe” in his new country—followed the same path. Bonanno eventually became the right-hand man of Salvatore Maranzano, known respectfully as “Don Turrido.” Maranzano was a barrel-chested bull capable of breaking a man’s neck by using only his thumbs, a very useful skill in their new enterprise.

  The boss carried himself with an air of class and legitimacy despite his illegitimate business. Maranzano boasted of speaking Latin and Greek, and proclaimed himself well-versed in classical literature. He attended the seminary, studying to become a priest, before opting for a more secular career. A handsome and understated man, the only jewelry he wore was a watch and his wedding ring.

  “He looked just like a banker,” said Joe Valachi, a street hustler later inducted into the Maranzano ranks. “You’d never guess in a million years that he was a racketeer.”

  Maranzano established an import/export company in Little Italy as a cover for his booze business during Prohibition. Decades later, in his novel, author Mario Puzo’s fictional Corleone family did much the same with their “olive oil” operation.

  But the dominant family belonged to Giuseppe “Joe th
e Boss” Masseria, who rose to prominence during the bootlegging days of the Roaring Twenties. His group was rife with young, hungry talent, which included a quartet of future bosses: Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Gaetano Lucchese, Vito Genovese and Francesco Castiglia, who later was reinvented with an Irish-sounding first name and surname, “Frank Costello.”

  Barely five feet tall, Masseria would casually demolish a five-course meal—complete with wine—with the gusto of a dog tearing through a bucket of steaks. He did so with about the same amount of grace.

  The two factions were soon at odds, with a demand by the imperious Masseria setting off a bloodletting later dubbed “the Castellammarese War”—a nod to a small Sicilian coastal town once called home by many of Maranzano’s troops. The boss demanded $10,000 in tribute from his underlings, asserting it was his right as the capo di tutti capi. Conflict inevitably followed.

  Maranzano presented himself as the populist choice, the antithesis of the greedy Masseria in the bloody battle that ran roughly across eighteen savage months in 1930 through 1931. The fighting became so fierce that Bonanno delayed his wedding to work full-time for the Maranzano forces. Dozens of men on both sides were killed in the struggle.

  The need for soldiers led to Maranzano’s induction of Valachi in a secret Mafia ceremony. The East Harlem resident’s life of crime began as an eighteen-year-old getaway driver for a burglary ring, and ended decades down the road with his decision to become the first Mafiosi to turn informant.

  An act of pure treachery would end the war, with Luciano—an up-and-comer growing increasingly frustrated by Masseria’s intransigence in the ways of making money—finally selling out his boss. It was anything but lucky when Luciano invited Masseria to lunch in Coney Island on April 15, 1931.

  Before meeting with Joe the Boss, Luciano—reportedly accompanied by Genovese—arranged a quiet meeting with Maranzano and concocted the plot that would end the hostilities. They met at a private home in Brooklyn, where the conversation, fraught with importance, was nonetheless clipped and quick.