Chin

by Larry McShane

  Markowitz battled successfully for a reduction to $100,000, still an exceptionally high figure. Meanwhile—in a move foreshadowing the future—Gigante checked into a hospital, albeit with a legitimate gallbladder issue. Five days later, the Chin walked out of jail.

  His parents, his brother Pasquale and five friends pooled their “bankbooks and stocks” totaling $117,000 to cover the bail. Mom Yolanda personally provided the bondsman’s fee of $3,030 as the Chin’s new lawyer attacked those who regarded his client—a married man, father of four, neighborhood mainstay—as a nefarious Mob hit man.

  The bail money was “an answer to the accusation that sinister forces are behind the defendant,” snapped attorney Maurice Edelbaum, who was now representing Gigante.

  A somewhat stunned spokesman for DA Hogan put a positive spin on the development. Making such a high bail was indeed “rare,” he acknowledged, but it had occurred “a few times before.”

  * * *

  Maurice Edelbaum was a city kid himself, born in Brooklyn and a graduate of Fordham Law School. By the time of the Gigante case, he had almost twenty-five years in private practice. The Gigante case boosted the lawyer’s profile. Edelbaum would become one of the most prominent lawyers in the city over the next decade, handling the cases of notorious Colombo crime family member John “Sonny” Franzese and New Jersey Teamster boss Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano—a reputed Genovese captain later implicated by the FBI in the never-solved murder of Jimmy Hoffa.

  Edelbaum went on to achieve notoriety in a pair of high-profile cases: Edelbaum managed to clear Isidore Zimmerman, who did twenty-four years in prison for a 1937 murder committed by somebody else, and the attorney won an insanity acquittal for a former medical student accused of stabbing his mother-in-law while tripping on LSD.

  Zimmerman had worked as a city doorman, a job that would loom large as the case against the Chin moved forward.

  * * *

  The trial was set for April 1958, with the first juror—a city public-relations executive named John F. Byrne—quickly seated. Edelbaum received a two-week delay to finish a federal case before jury selection resumed. The all-male panel was chosen in short order, with Gigante ordered back behind bars for the trial’s duration.

  When opening day arrived in May, the pro-Gigante contingent was out in force, filling several rows in the Manhattan courtroom. Wife Olympia became a constant presence, along with her in-laws. The Chin’s mom, Yolanda, sat mutely in the back of the courtroom, silently praying the rosary throughout. Assorted other relatives and neighbors filled out a group that swelled at times to forty people.

  Testimony started slowly, with NYPD detective Nathan Udry recounting the repeated police visits to the tight-lipped Olympia Gigante. Dinner companion Philip Kennedy took the stand to recount the pleasant evening that preceded the failed assassination.

  Kennedy once again said he saw nothing—and only heard the gunshot from a distance. “It sounded like a large firecracker,” he recounted yet again, under questioning by prosecutors. “In the lobby I saw ‘Mr. C,’ and he was bent and holding his head.”

  The two paralyzed building workers “stood in utter panic to one side,” he recalled.

  “Was there blood?” asked Judge John A. Mullen.

  “Yes, there was,” he replied.

  Edelbaum rose from the defense table for his cross-examination. But the lawyer was hardly confrontational as he faced down the witness. Instead, he turned to the defense table and asked Vincent Gigante to rise from his seat and stand.

  Had Kennedy, inquired Edelbaum, seen this man on the night in question?

  “No, sir.”

  * * *

  The trial tedium disappeared with the explosive appearance of the government’s star witness: the doorman Norval Keith, who had worked at the Majestic for twenty-two years. The fifty-five-year-old employee took the subway in from Queens each night to his job at the posh building.

  Keith seemingly appeared in the courtroom from nowhere. In fact, he came directly from a hotel across town, where the prosecution had kept him hidden for the past nine months. He had one major problem for an eyewitness: One of his eyes didn’t work so well. His damaged left orb allowed Keith to discern nothing more than light and shadow.

  The prosecution addressed the problem head-on. Keith was asked to read the clock on the courtroom wall about sixty feet away. He nailed his reply: 12:05 P.M., and time seemed to be running out on Gigante.

  The prosecution had Keith step down from the witness stand, walk toward the defense table and take a long look at the defendant. Keith didn’t flinch in the presence of the accused shooter.

  “I heard this man say, ‘This is for you, Frank,’” he announced before the rapt courtroom. “The next thing I witnessed, he raised his right hand and fired a shot. I saw Mr. Costello pacing up and down in the lobby, holding a handkerchief to the right side of his head.”

  Gigante then ran right past Keith to the waiting getaway car. The doorman wasn’t done; he testified that Gigante had walked right past him on the way inside, too.

  “I saw a big, dark car double-parked near Seventy-Second Street,” he recounted. “A big man got out of it, brushed past me and went into the lobby. I looked inside after him.”

  The bombshell testimony, laid out in short order by the prosecution, seemed devastating for the defense.

  * * *

  Edelbaum stepped up for his shot at Keith, looking to score a few points against the very confident witness. The lawyer suggested the doorman maybe had a few drinks before Costello’s arrival: “Did anyone bring you black coffee that night in question?”

  “No, sir,” the genial Keith replied.

  The attorney then focused on the physically transformed defendant. Keith said it was still the man with the gun, only forty pounds lighter.

  “What about his hips?” Edelbaum inquired.

  “They were much larger on May second, much broader,” the doorman said.

  Edelbaum brought Keith down from the witness stand for another look at the Chin. From close range, the witness estimated Gigante had lost a full nine inches from his waistline in the last year. The Daily News turned the exchange into a classic headline: WITNESS STILL HIP TO CHIN THOUGH THERE’S LESS OF HIM.

  Norval Keith stepped down from the stand, his testimony finished.

  The doorman was followed by NYPD detective Edward Lehane to bolster Keith’s claim regarding the Chin’s post–attempted hit weight-loss regime. Lehane, who had the mobster on his radar for about five years, duly noted Gigante’s decision to go with a new haircut before returning to the city.

  * * *

  One more riveting piece of courtroom theater awaited. On May 20, 1958, just a few weeks past the first anniversary of his near-death experience, the prosecution summoned Frank Costello. The reluctant witness, by turns, was pleasant, polite and perturbed. He was not at all helpful to prosecutors, who were intent on convicting the man who fired a bullet at his head.

  The mob boss began by describing himself as a retired real estate executive and New Orleans casino operator. The lone mention of his criminal past had nothing to do with his lofty position as head of the Genovese family for twenty years. Instead, he acknowledged working as a bookie shortly after becoming a naturalized citizen in 1924.

  And then, for the first time in public, the godfather gave his version of the night when he literally dodged a bullet.

  “I walked through the front door,” Costello recounted. “I heard a shot—it sounded like a large firecracker to me at the time. I paid little attention to it at the moment. Then I felt something wet on the side of my face. It was blood, and I realized I was shot.”

  Costello acknowledged that he spun toward the sound, but he swore that “nobody was in sight.” His three-hundred-pound assailant had dashed from the lobby with the speed of Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens. Costello never caught even a glimpse of the would-be killer. In fact, he couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to see him dead.
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  “I know no human being who would have a motive,” he told the jury. Costello made an excellent point, for no witness or prosecutor had provided a motive for the daring murder attempt. The prosecutor sat down, and it was now Edelbaum’s turn.

  * * *

  The first rule for defense attorneys is simple: Never ask even the simplest question unless you know the answer. Maurice Edelbaum launched his contentious cross-examination 100 percent certain that Costello wouldn’t implicate his client under any circumstances. He started slowly by reviewing all of Costello’s testimony before the Kefauver Committee.

  The Mob boss at one point snarled at Edelbaum over his line of questioning: “Please don’t raise your voice.”

  “I’ll give the orders in this courtroom,” interrupted Judge Mullen.

  Edelbaum asked Gigante to rise yet again at the defense table. Costello carefully donned his glasses, a showy gesture that meant nothing. He peered at the Chin without a glimmer of recognition.

  “Do you know any reason why this man should seek to take your life?” Edelbaum asked.

  “No reason whatsoever,” Costello replied evenly.

  “Is the reason you won’t say you saw the man because you’ll be indicted for perjury?” the lawyer pressed.

  “Absolutely not,” said Costello.

  Edelbaum wrapped up his interrogation with one final question, delivered for the jury in a booming voice: “You know who shot you that night. You know who pulled the trigger that night. Why don’t you tell the jury who it was?”

  Costello, cool as ice, turned the query around: “Well, I’ll ask you, ‘Who shot me?’ I don’t know.”

  After the trial, Edelbaum told a friend, “I would have dropped dead if he answered.” The lawyer, still breathing, turned and sat down alongside Gigante. The gangster stepped down from the stand and strolled back into the courtroom. “Thanks a lot, Frank,” Gigante declared in a voice loud enough for the press to hear.

  There was one scary moment for Costello before his silent exit. A self-proclaimed “well-wisher,” sporting a black eye and a leather jacket, approached the Mob boss with a brown paper bag. Inside, as it turned out, was a gift of cigarettes and candy for Costello’s wife, Bobbie.

  * * *

  Both sides rested their cases, with the prosecution calling sixteen witnesses across the eleven-day trial. Despite the pretrial claims of an alibi, neither Gigante nor anybody else ever took the stand to explain where he was on May 2 or for the next three months. Edelbaum called just a single witness: a probationary cop named John DePalo who bore a slight resemblance to the Chin and was called to stand in a lineup.

  The defense lawyer, in his final address to the jury, harped on the doorman’s bad eyesight and alleged boozing. Norval Keith “had D.T.’s right here in this courtroom on the stand,” he declared.

  Assistant District Attorney Alexander Herman urged the panel to ignore Costello’s testimony, dismissing his much-hyped appearance as a sideshow.

  “I put him on in the nature of an exhibit—a corpus delicti, as it were, the man who was shot, the guy who got it in the head,” the ADA said. “No one in the police department or the district attorney’s office or the defense table gives a hoot in hell about Costello. But he’s a threat to the community. And when he’s shot, it’s important.”

  After getting instructions from Judge Mullen, the jury began its deliberations at 3:30 P.M. on May 27. They took a two-hour dinner break before resuming at 8:30 P.M. The courtroom remained packed, with the tension rising as the clock ticked toward midnight.

  Then word came through the otherwise-empty courthouse: There was a verdict. At 11:45 P.M., after just over six hours of deliberations, jury foreman Hayward T. Carter rose to deliver the verdict: Vincent Gigante was not guilty of the attempted murder of Frank Costello.

  It was a unanimous decision for the ex-boxer.

  The courtroom was bedlam, a combination of Times Square on New Year’s Eve and a winning Super Bowl locker room as three dozen Gigante supporters burst into wild applause. Mom Yolanda, still clutching her rosary, credited divine intervention for the jury’s decision.

  “It was the beads! It was the beads!” she told anyone within listening distance. Her husband, Salvatore, stoic throughout the trial, burst into tears at the foreman’s declaration. He was joined by the Chin’s weepy wife.

  Sitting at the defense table, Gigante watched impassively as the wild scene unfolded. When the foreman was done, he slumped slowly into his chair with relief. The acquitted shooter then signaled for his supporters to bring the celebration down a notch.

  “I knew it had to be this way because I was innocent,” the subdued Gigante said outside the courtroom.

  The Chin wore a dark suit, dress shirt and perfectly knotted tie when he posed for a postverdict picture. An exulted Olympia planted a kiss on her husband’s cheek, and he wrapped his right hand around her shoulder. His left arm pulled Edelbaum close. Gigante stared straight into the camera, his face betraying no sign of excitement or surprise.

  Prosecutor Herman was less than graceful in defeat. Gigante remained “a young punk on the way up in the underworld who was chosen to kill Costello to earn his spurs,” he sneered.

  Jury foreman Carter said the panel was unimpressed by the evidence against Gigante, dismissing the state’s overall case as weak. And, he added, the jurors were unconvinced by Keith’s confident courtroom identification of the defendant.

  THE CHIN’S NOT GUILTY OF CREASING COSTELLO, trumpeted the Daily News.

  * * *

  The trial was over, but speculation about Gigante’s role in the shooting and his whereabouts immediately afterward would endure for decades. The News reported at one point that Gigante was shipped to Florida for an immediate weight reduction program, while other reports claimed the Chin fled upstate to a Mob-run “fat farm” to slenderize.

  Joe Valachi confirmed the latter was the case: “The Chin was taken somewhere up in the country to lose some weight. I’d say he was around three hundred pounds, and you couldn’t miss him. They found out the doorman at Frank’s place was half blind and they wanted to slim the Chin down, so he, the doorman, wouldn’t recognize him.”

  The turncoat soldier also took a shot at Gigante’s poor aim: “The Chin wasted a whole month practicing.”

  * * *

  In one of the trial’s more bizarre postscripts, the only person to do time for the shooting of Frank Costello was . . . Frank Costello. On the night he was wounded, cops searched his pockets and found a piece of paper with a mix of words and numbers that added up to a short stretch in jail: Gross casino win as of 4-27-57—$651,284. Police discovered the figures matched the exact figures from the new Tropicana casino in Las Vegas, where the Mob boss was a very silent partner—much as he had been a silent witness.

  When Costello refused to address the note or identify Gigante before the grand jury, Hogan hit the Mob boss with a thirty-day contempt sentence. He served half the time. Costello was also carrying $3,200 in cash that night. When police returned the money, he was $2,400 short. The mobster considered his loss the cost of doing business.

  Facing a choice of retirement or bloody internal family warfare, Costello made up his mind for good after another gangland hit where the shooters did not miss—six times.

  Fellow boss Albert Anastasia was known as the Mob’s “Lord High Executioner” for his work with Murder Inc., the Mafia’s preferred contract killers. He was reportedly one of the shooters in the Masseria hit, and was regarded with considerable trepidation as a ruthless and remorseless killer.

  There was no questioning his belief in murder as the solution to life’s many problems: Annoyed when a random Brooklyn citizen turned fugitive bank robber Willie Sutton in to the NYPD in 1952, Anastasia reportedly ordered the man’s execution. Arnold Schuster was gunned down outside his Borough Park home seventeen days later as payback, and the case was never solved. Anastasia’s rise to running his own family came after the 1951 murders of boss Vincent
Mangano and his brother, Philip.

  Anastasia arrived, as was his custom, for a shave at 10:20 A.M. in the lobby barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel, Chair No. 4. His face was swathed in hot towels when two men marched through the hotel’s front door and into the barbershop on October 25, 1957.

  The duo wore suits and sunglasses, and they meant business. They opened fire on Anastasia from close range, and a half-dozen bullets found their mark, including one that tore through the back of his head and stopped in the left side of his brain.

  The hunter was now the game, and Albert Anastasia was dispatched in the same brutal fashion as his many victims. The postmortem photo of his bloody body ranks among the most infamous in Mafia history, with Anastasia flat on his back, his arms splayed to either side, the towels still obscuring his face. Two city workers later lugged him out inside a body bag.

  The image lingered with Costello.

  Five barbers, a manicurist and several customers in the hotel were all in agreement once the shooting stopped: they didn’t see a thing. Vito Genovese and Carlo Gambino, the slain mobster’s treacherous underboss, were assumed responsible for the daring hit.

  Life went on for Costello, who retired from the business and kept his thoughts about Gigante to himself. Business was business, and boys will be boys. Gigante moved up in the family that was soon identified by the surname of its new boss, Don Vito.

  Years later, George Wolf, Costello’s lawyer, recalled arriving for a dinner party at his client’s tony apartment. Breaking bread with Costello was none other than Vincent Gigante, the man who once tried to kill him.

  * * *

  After the trial the newly acquitted Chin left the courthouse for the familiar streets of the Village and his Bleecker Street home. But freedom was fleeting for Gigante as the wheels set in motion by the botched Costello hit made him a target for a subtle bit of revenge.

  The Chin, back on the streets of the Village, enjoyed a mere forty-one days of freedom before Costello and his friends in the Mob exacted their payback on Gigante and his boss—delivered in the form of a stunning and unexpected new federal indictment.