Vincent Gigante became aware of Hill when the young mobster was picked up in Nassau County with several Genovese members. Hill said it was immediately clear upon arrival on Sullivan Street that the Chin was absolutely the real deal when it came to La Cosa Nostra.
“He was a legend even then,” recalled Hill. “He knew what the fuck he was doing. He didn’t want the spotlight. And it was inevitable that you had to bring the Genoveses in on certain things because of who they were. You’d save a lot of grief by bringing them in from the beginning.”
Hill was also aware of Gigante’s already well-established prosecution dodge and the Chin’s strange, bathrobed alter ego. But he had no doubts about which one was the real Gigante.
“He was a clown sometimes, but don’t fuck with him,” Hill recounted. “And don’t fuck with anybody around him. He didn’t care who you were. He knew what he was doing. He talked real sensible. Strangers would walk by him, looking, but he was already trying to fool the cops back then.
“He was a smart man, sure. That’s why he lasted.”
Hill didn’t last as long in the ranks of organized crime, running afoul of his bosses by dealing cocaine. He famously turned federal informant in 1980, fearful that the greedy Burke intended to kill him in a bid to keep the entire Lufthansa haul for himself. His story eventually became grist for a best-selling book by Nick Pileggi and the classic Martin Scorsese movie GoodFellas.
Years later, Hill recalled his admiration for the way Gigante and the rest of the Genovese family took care of their business: “They were a powerful family, always were. They were quiet, not like the Gambinos, the Colombos, killing and fighting each other. There were guys running those operations, evolved into bosses—I can’t believe it. Half-assed wiseguys, get a button, work their way up. It freaked me out.”
The hard-living Hill, who died at age sixty-nine in 2012, recalled that Gigante’s Achilles’ heel was gambling. The Chin was a guy who loved the action, and Vario was just one of the mobbed-up bookies taking Vincent’s action.
“He was betting with anybody who would take his bets, a real degenerate gambler,” said Hill. “He’d have his good-luck spurts, but nobody is good at betting—it’s a losing proposition. You get ahead a little bit, and then you go back.”
As he rose through the ranks of the Genovese family, the Chin’s luck turned. By the time he became head of the family, the card games among his colleagues inevitably ended with Vincent holding the winning hand. Every time.
“Biggest cheater I know,” Genovese capo Federico “Fritzy” Giovanelli declared once during a bugged conversation. “Ya know, if he lived in the Wild West, he’d have to wear a bulletproof vest. That man never loses. What are you gonna do?”
In one oft-repeated tale from the Triangle, the cards were once distributed to the Genovese associates at the table. The Chin looked down at his hand, lifted his head and declared, “Gin.” The other players silently tossed in their cards as he took the pot.
While the crazy Chin enjoyed his social club gambling success, brother Mario was dealt a bad hand. Mario was making his gambling money the old-fashioned way: taking illegal bets as part of a $50 million a-year betting ring. It was a staggering amount of money in 1975. After a two-year probe Mario and twenty-four others were busted for running the ring that took bets in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx.
Mario, forty-one, was now living in Yonkers, and was identified as the operation’s kingpin. Newspapers reported that he was the brother of Louis Gigante, the South Bronx priest and city councilman.
Vincent emerged as one of the prime movers in the Mob’s ban on drug money, a fast and lucrative business that was growing. Making good on his oft-stated opposition to slinging dope, the Chin became known throughout the underworld as the enforcer behind the Mob’s antidrug effort. The penalty, as promised, was a death sentence from Judge Chin and his thug jurors. Their preferred method of dispatching the guilty was tossing them off a roof.
The ever-vigilant Chin was similarly merciless to those he deemed rats or violators of the Mob oath. He instituted a rule that no one in his family was permitted to utter his name—or even his nickname. The ban was later extended to the other four New York crime families, with the same penalty for breaking the law: execution.
* * *
Gigante’s home base was now firmly established inside the Triangle, a “social club” with a decidedly antisocial look. The storefront at 208 Sullivan Street had its front windows blacked out. The front door, with an air conditioner just above the entrance, was similarly impenetrable to outsiders.
It was a Spartan twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot space, about ten feet high with a metal ceiling and a tile floor. A mural on one wall showed a French village, complete with local cafés and a park.
Two pinball tables stood inside to the right of the front door, while a small bar with a coffeemaker was installed to the left. A sign, hung on one wall, declared: MEMBERS ONLY. Another, placed carefully above its pay phone, was a vintage World War II sign with an eternal message: LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS. It was accompanied by a drawing of a boat going nose down into the water.
The walls held other cautionary bromides: THE ENEMY IS LISTENING and TOUGH GUYS DON’T SQUEAL. A fourth sign carried a simple and direct warning: DON’T TALK. THIS PLACE IS BUGGED.
On the off chance that his colleagues didn’t read the signs, Vincent had the club swept for bugs on a monthly basis. And with good reason: The club’s telephone was first bugged in October 1966 as part of a probe into gambling and extortion. The feds sought information on Gigante and his brothers—or at least the three who were not saying Sunday Mass.
The sixty-day tap of the former Italian restaurant produced zilch, an early indicator of the Chin’s savvy when it came to electronic surveillance. The NYPD and FBI somewhat routinely repeated the process with the same results: Bug, wash, repeat. Nothing of much use was ever recorded or played for a jury.
One of the Chin’s shrinks, in a 1982 evaluation, generously described the dingy outpost as a “small café,” where Gigante would “play pinball, which was his life.” A side door allowed access to an adjoining apartment building, where particularly sensitive Mob business was discussed.
There was a toilet in the rear and three tables. One held a police scanner near the rear of the club, behind a long, rectangular table about ten feet inside. In the far rear, near the bathroom, sat the circular table where Gigante engaged in his endless card games as a cadre of trusted underlings floated in and out.
Gigante’s associates occasionally complained about the lack of heat inside, particularly when forced to hang out with the Chin into the wee hours of the morning.
The club’s daily routine began around seven in the morning, when a gray-haired gent arrived alone and opened the doors. Genovese regulars would begin arriving within five minutes. One was typically designated to take the club’s guard dog for a stroll. Traffic would continue throughout the day.
Vincent thrived in the dour environment, even as his crazy act continued to bear legal fruit. When Queens prosecutors subpoenaed him in the threatened murder of a businessman fighting off Mob infiltration, his attorney responded that the strain of testifying “might affect him mentally and physically.” He was subsequently never called to appear.
There was another trip to St. Vincent’s in May 1975, which was the first year Chin crossed paths with young Sammy “the Bull” Gravano. The Gambino underling accompanied his capo, Salvatore “Toddo” Aurello, to a business meeting at the Triangle.
The Chin agreed to reach out to a fellow Genovese capo to straighten out a construction business issue. He took time during the meeting to share a bit of family gossip: One of his colleagues was recently promoted from capo to consigliere. The impressed Gravano, after laying eyes on Gigante for the first time, departed with the conviction that the Chin was the complete opposite of crazy.
Those who encountered the Chin on the streets outside the club saw a different man, as detailed in a February 197
7 federal document—the FBI’s first written account of Gigante’s deranged alter ego: Source stated that Gigante is rarely seen on the streets, but when he is seen, it is often in such a capacity as playing a “crazy man routine.” Source stated that one time, Gigante was seen walking down Sullivan Street unshaven and waving a chair like a madman. Source believes this is an act by Gigante to enhance his reputation as being mean so people will jump when he tells them to do something.
The shortsighted report failed to mention how the act was by now a reliable stay-out-of-jail card—another guaranteed victory for Vincent Gigante.
At the same time the Chin was handling the Genovese side of the “Concrete Club,” an extraordinary operation involving four of the five families. The group cooperated on a bid-rigging scam, where only certain companies received jobs worth more than $2 million in the five boroughs. In return, the “winning” bidders provided a 2 percent kickback to the Mob.
The Genovese family was flush throughout the decade; Salerno had an estimated $80 million on the streets in the 1970s, according to a 1983 U.S. Senate report.
Further indication of the Genovese penchant for secrecy at its highest levels was illustrated in an NYPD report that same year listing the retired Lombardo as the family boss. By then, Salerno had taken over and departed, ceding his spot to the Chin.
In one of the most stunning efforts in the history of law enforcement, Agent Joe Pistone infiltrated the Bonanno family in the late 1970s, risking his life for six years as an undercover. Even observing from a distance, the FBI agent knew the Chin was held in high esteem throughout the underworld. He laughed out loud when asked about the Chin’s Sullivan Street theatrics.
“The wiseguys knew he wasn’t crazy,” said Pistone. “I heard guys comment what a great act it was. Everybody knew it was an act. Unless you’re doing business with another family, there’s usually not much conversation about the other families. But when I say everybody, I mean all the wiseguys knew it was an act.”
Mobster Phil Leonetti said the Chin’s strange double life was simply accepted as part of the day-to-day business. Nobody said a word.
“Everyone knew it was fake, but nobody said nothin’ about it,” he explained. “What’s somebody going to do, go up and bust the Chin’s balls about it?”
CHAPTER 8
LICENSE TO KILL
THE 1980S ARRIVED IN THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE WITH A savage and unexpected spasm of violence. For more than two decades Angelo Bruno oversaw the Mafia family based in Philadelphia with a firm hand and a low-key persona, which earned him an atypical organized nom de crime: “The Docile Don.” He took over in 1959, eventually becoming the longest-serving boss in the city’s history.
Bruno was widely considered a good businessman who expanded the family’s financial interests. This was particularly true when casino gambling came to New Jersey in 1976, when he grabbed a piece of the lucrative construction work.
His preference for settling disputes was mediation over murder, and Bruno was an absolute stand-up guy: He did two years after refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating corruption in Atlantic City in 1970. His ties to the Genovese family went back decades, including a March 1963 summons for a meeting with then-acting boss Eboli.
By the time the ’80s arrived, Bruno’s laid-back style—and his reticence to approve drug dealing—created friction among the new generation of gangsters, led by Bruno’s treacherous consigliere, Antonio “Tony Bananas” Caponigro.
The sixty-nine-year-old Bruno, with his driver John Stanfa, was sitting in a car outside his home in a predominantly Italian-American neighborhood of South Philly on the night of March 21, 1980, when the bloody coup began. Two shotgun-wielding killers, one of them Caponigro, blasted away at the vehicle before disappearing into the darkness.
“The Docile Don” was dispatched in brutal style—his twenty-one-year reign ended. Stanfa survived the hit. The people deemed responsible would not. Bruno was buried after a Funeral Mass at a local church.
“Angelo had money, fame and power, and he had hundreds of loyal family and friends,” said priest John Dieckman in his eulogy. “Yet none of those were protection against the fate that awaits every man and woman.”
As it turned out, the Philly unrest actually began at the other end of the Turnpike, with the Genovese family in New York City. Chin Gigante, his power and prestige growing, would emerge as the kingmaker of the Philadelphia Mob. The Bruno assassination was eventually exposed as a carefully arranged double cross by Gigante and the rest of his family.
“For the record, the Genovese family had manipulated a Philadelphia family member, Tony Bananas, to murder Bruno,” said Gravano. “Right away, there was a commission meeting, and to cover themselves the Genovese people volunteered to track down Angelo Bruno’s killer.”
The move assured the Genovese power grab, but also gave Vincent Gigante a chance to flex his muscles against the cabal of killers. Murder of a boss without approval from the Mob’s ruling commission was the highest of the secret society’s inviolable rules—and a pet peeve of the Chin.
“When Ang was killed, Chin made it clear to everyone in La Cosa Nostra, the whole country, you can’t kill a boss without permission,” said Leonetti, whose Atlantic City crew reported to the Philly family.
The setup started in the summer of 1979, when Caponigro approached Funzi Tieri to propose Bruno’s brutal murder. The two had a history; they were on opposing sides of a previous beef over a bookie operation that each claimed as his own. The dispute went before the commission, and Caponigro was declared the winner.
Nursing a grudge, Tieri decided this was the time to show that bygones were not bygones. Funzi indicated the Bruno hit was okay with New York, but never brought the plot before the heads of the other four families. The result: the Bruno murder, unknown to Caponigro, was an unsanctioned killing.
Gigante informed the other families that the Genoveses would handle the bloody payback—done with their full knowledge. The Philadelphia regime change was a huge boost to the Genovese coffers: their pal in the Philly Mob, Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo of Atlantic City, would grab control of the unions once belonging to Bruno.
The Genovese family would also now carry the Philadelphia vote when their family was brought in for commission business. Plus Tony Banana’s lucrative North Jersey gambling and loan-sharking operations, worth millions of dollars, would fall into Genovese control. It was a clean sweep—unless your last name was Caponigro.
The Philly mobster reached out to Salerno in the aftermath of the murder, but Fat Tony made it clear that Caponigro’s future as the new boss was not his call.
“I do not want to get involved,” Salerno declared. “I do not want to hear about it. Go see Chin.”
He would. It was the last trip he made while still breathing.
Tony Bananas and his brother-in-law, Alfred “Freddie” Salerno, were summoned for an April 18 sit-down in the Triangle with the Chin. They came expecting a coronation, only to arrive for their own executions.
Vincent Gigante was seated at a table in the cramped social club, where he was joined by Fat Tony Salerno—no relation—top capo Bobby Manna and the duplicitous Tieri. Caponigro immediately recounted his conversation with Tieri, where he was told the hit was approved by the New York bosses.
Tieri looked the Philly gangster in the eye: “I told you to straighten it out, not to kill him.”
Hearing those words, the two out-of-town mobsters knew they were beyond their depth. Gigante made sure the two plotters were subjected to a brutal, slow and sadistic death.
Caponigro, sixty-seven, was shot fourteen times with five different guns. The first shots went into his elbows and arms, to keep him alive and suffering as the relentless assault continued. He was stabbed repeatedly, and savagely beaten. Salerno, sixty-four, suffered a similarly grisly fate.
Both of the tortured men were stripped naked, with $20 bills stuffed in their mouths and up their asses as a graphic reminder
of their greed. The bodies were eventually discovered in the trunks of two abandoned cars left in the South Bronx.
But the Chin wasn’t done avenging the Docile Don in venomous style.
* * *
The body of plotter John “Johnny Keys” Simone, sixty-nine, was found near a Staten Island landfill on September 18, 1980. The hit was proposed by Gigante, approved by the commission and assigned to Gravano. Before a single bullet from a .357 Magnum was pumped into his skull, the doomed man unleashed his fury against Vincent.
“[Simone told] how he now knows it was the greed of the Genovese family,” Gravano recalled. “How the Chin—Vincent Gigante—had conned this Tony Bananas that the commission sanctioned the hit on Bruno. How the Chin conned the commission by volunteering to do an investigation and take out Tony.”
Simone had two final requests: He wanted to be shot by a made man. And he wanted to take off his shoes. Gravano complied with both.
There was one more body: Frank Sindone, fifty-two, was discovered behind a Philadelphia variety store, stuffed inside two green plastic garbage bags. Sindone, shot three times in the head and found on October 30, was the last of the Caponigro crew to die. Leonetti was both impressed and appalled by what happened.
“They had set it all up, and now they want everyone who had a hand in it to be killed,” said Scarfo’s nephew. “That’s how treacherous they were.”
The Chin would also pick Bruno’s successor. He was leaning toward the murderous Scarfo, who had done time with Manna in the early 1970s after both refused to testify in a New Jersey Mob probe. Scarfo demurred, preferring to take the consigliere spot. Aging mobster Philip Testa was installed, instead, by Gigante as the new head of the Philadelphia family.
“My uncle was very close to Phil Testa, who was the underboss, and my uncle told Chin, ‘I think it should be Phil Testa,’” Leonetti recounted. “I think the Chin respected that, because my uncle respected the rules of La Cosa Nostra like he did.”
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