Chin
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“Don’t mention that guy,” Mangano snapped.
“Okay, I won’t mention him,” Savino apologized. “All right, he said to go out and bid the work.”
“Yeah,” grunted Mangano.
A few months later, back in Ruggero’s restaurant again, Savino delivered the news to Mangano that Gaspipe Casso of the Luccheses and John Gotti’s brother Peter were looking to make more cash off the window scam.
“It’s all ours,” said Mangano, reminding the man who started the scam exactly who was in charge. “Nobody’s supposed to touch it.”
The investigation soon settled into a routine: Savino would hit the streets and make his multiple Mob meets. He would make a secret tape drop every few days. The prosecutors would review the tapes, which were stored inside a safe in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Then every two to three weeks, Savino and the prosecutors would get together for a full review of what the latest round of death-defying cloak-and-dagger work had turned up.
“He couldn’t come see us at the U.S. Attorney’s office or at FBI offices for fear that someone would notice him,” said O’Connell. “So we’d find these mountain retreats and go away for the weekend. We’d be living together, debriefing him and strategizing, asking him what was important.
“We were one hundred miles away in these secure mountain retreats. We always took circuitous routes to get up there. Every turn was part of keeping the secrecy of the investigation.”
* * *
One thing became immediately clear: The Chin had emerged as their number one target. The feds even fitted Savino with a special miniature device, a recorder designed specifically to capture Gigante’s customary whisper.
Not everyone agreed that Gigante, doddering through the Village in his nightclothes, was worth the effort. Many in law enforcement believed that the Chin was now the “capo di tutti-frutti,” with his crazy act the real thing based on his age and legitimate health woes. The Brooklyn prosecutors pressed on despite the naysayers.
“When we were running Peter Savino on the street with a wire, Charlie and I met with a lot of skepticism about Chin’s competency,” said O’Connell. “There were a lot of people who thought he was already living in his own jail. They didn’t want to proceed, but our office did.”
While Savino worked the streets, FBI agent Tom Rash began assembling a two-decade history of Gigante’s twisted tarantella with law enforcement. Poring through FBI surveillance reports and Gigante’s medical history, he pieced together a chronology demonstrating that Chin’s well-timed “tune-ups” were inevitably followed by a hasty return to the Triangle.
There was never a single public episode of Gigante breaking down during his daily walks or his late-night wanderings. He was never taken to nearby Bellevue Hospital, but, rather, always to the leafy, suburban facility to walk the grounds, see the same doctors and expand his résumé of mental-health woes.
Chin’s old prison records were fodder for the mill, and turned up no history of psychiatric issues. The resulting chronology, so obvious it seemed impossible that nobody assembled one earlier, was incredibly damning for Gigante. O’Connell remembered how blatantly obvious everything was once laid out by Rash.
“Family members would bring him to the hospital and say he was hallucinating,” the prosecutor recalled. “After a week he was cured. We looked at this and it was like, ‘St. Vincent’s has done its magic again!’”
Savino captured other incriminating conversations, including one featuring representatives from all four families and Local 580 head John “Sonny” Morrissey. The outraged labor leader griped that a non-Mob company had actually managed to land a NYCHA contract, and recounted how he handled the situation: threatening to smash every installed window, and banging them for $14 kickback per window in the future, instead of the typical $2.
In another taped conversation Colombo family associate Vincent Ricciardo proposed a similarly violent solution to handling a contractor who flinched at the $2 payoff.
“I’m throwing him out that window,” the enforcer declared. “I’m telling you, he’s getting it. He don’t want to pay nobody.”
* * *
The tapes were astounding, but Savino’s high-wire act of walking among the Mafiosi was reaching its end. Incredibly, despite the suspicions of Mangano and others, the first word of his defection came from inside the NYPD.
The leak came through Burton Kaplan, the old Casso friend and associate. A crooked officer from Brooklyn’s Sixty-Second Precinct—Eppolito of the “Mafia Cops”—delivered Kaplan a police report that seemed to insure Black Pete’s lifespan was growing short. Kaplan delivered the damning paperwork directly to Gaspipe, who had archly taken to describing Eppolito and Caracappa as his “crystal ball.”
“It said Pete Savino was cooperating with the government.... [The] whole Sixty-Second Precinct was involved with Savino,” Kaplan later recounted. Casso quickly went to the trusted Mangano, who returned to Gaspipe with assurances of Savino’s trustworthiness.
“Benny Eggs came back a week later and said that they took Black Pete down in a basement and they put a gun in his mouth,” Kaplan recounted. Savino apparently convinced Mangano that he was on the level.
“He believed, and other people in the Genovese family believed, that Pete wasn’t an informant,” Kaplan said.
Casso claimed that he also asked for a sit-down with the Chin. It was agreed they would meet at 3 A.M. in Yolanda Gigante’s Sullivan Street apartment.
Casso, accompanied by Amuso, recalled meeting Mangano. The underboss climbed into their car and took the pair on a circuitous tour of the Village to insure they weren’t the targets of a tail. Once satisfied, Mangano had the two park the car and follow him into the basement of a tenement on the same block as Mrs. Gigante’s home.
They trekked through the underground passageways between buildings, a subterranean world of vermin and raw sewage. “It’s like Wild Kingdom down here,” Casso said.
When they finally arrived, the Chin was sitting at the kitchen table in a bathrobe. A bottle of good cognac sat in front of the Genovese boss. Amuso was the only one drinking. Gigante sat impassively as Casso insisted that Savino was wearing a wire for the feds. There was a moment of silence before the Chin spoke.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said.
End of discussion.
Gravano and Casso later approached Mangano a second time to reiterate their concerns and arrange for Savino’s murder.
“I don’t like him,” Mangano told his two business partners, “but Chin loves him. We’re not going to be able to do nothing.”
Lucchese boss-in-waiting D’Arco recalled that Gigante had an unexplained blind spot when it came to Savino.
“Vic (Amuso) told me he was trying to tell the Robe that Petey Savino was a rat,” D’Arco recounted. “But he said Gigante wouldn’t hear of it. He defended the guy to them.”
When the rumors and concerns about Savino were finally confirmed in 1989, Amuso vented his disgust with the Chin: “That asshole should shoot himself now.”
Gigante, late as it was for the realization, decided shooting Savino was the more prudent move. The Chin inquired with the Lucchese family about killing the informant—a hit that never happened.
Savino learned that his cover was blown in a chilling June 1989 phone message.
“We know you’re a rat,” said the voice, recorded by authorities. “We saw you with federal agents.”
It was Negrelli, who had since dropped out of the federal Witness Protection Program and had returned to his old friends and evil ways.
It was time to shut Savino down. The investigation was officially over, with Rose and O’Connell left to put together their sprawling prosecution. The authorities prepared search warrants for more than a dozen window manufacturers. They convinced a half-dozen businessmen to cooperate with the probe about extorted payments.
For the first time in three decades, federal prosecutors were preparing an indictment for Vincent Gigante.
As the peripatetic Savino kept busy bouncing between families with his ever-present wire, prosecutors were already taking down other members of Chin’s inner sanctum as the federal Mafia crackdown of the 1980s finally reached the Genovese family—and beyond.
The Chin’s handpicked man atop the Philadelphia family, Scarfo, was busted in January 1987 for a $1 million extortion plot on the City of Brotherly Love’s waterfront. The next year he was charged in a massive RICO indictment, and was sent off to serve a fifty-five-year term in 1989. It was an almost guaranteed life sentence, with Little Nicky’s earliest release date set for January 2033.
Even worse, the Atlantic City mobster’s once-loyal crew was flipping against him; his disgusted nephew Phil Leonetti, Scarfo’s born-and-bred right-hand man, went to work for the FBI and became one of their star witnesses.
* * *
The news was just as bad for longtime Genovese associate Morris Levy, the music industry maven who was at one point under investigation by federal grand juries in Los Angeles, New York and New Jersey. The focus was a deal to peddle bootleg albums between Levy and a company called Consultants for World Records.
Among the “consultants” were Fritzy Giovanelli and fellow Genovese member Rocco Musacchia. Baldy Dom Canterino was eventually implicated as well. “An interesting combination,” Levy deadpanned in a 1986 interview about the company’s top echelon.
That same year, FBI agents visited with Levy and his lawyer in the record executive’s Manhattan office. Their mission became clear: They wanted to convince Levy that cooperating with federal investigators against his Mob cohorts was now in his best interests. Prosecutors had served Olympia 2 with a subpoena regarding the town house sale, a move guaranteed to irk the Chin.
It was pointed out to Levy the possibility that his life may be in danger, read an August 1986 FBI document recounting their sit-down with the music mogul. Levy stated he was not in fear of his life and was not concerned about this investigation because he has been federally investigated numerous times in the past without success.
When the agents urged Levy to turn informant, the veteran businessman turned a deaf ear: He replied that the witness security program was a joke and could not adequately protect witnesses. The agents left their business cards and headed back to Lower Manhattan.
The music executive’s decades-long dodge of prosecution ended on a very sour note: Levy and Canterino were convicted in May 1988 for conspiracy in a $200,000 extortion, which was relatively small change for the colorful record company mogul.
Five months later, Levy was sentenced to ten years in prison by federal judge Stanley Brotman at a hearing in Camden, New Jersey, far from the Broadway lights where the kid from the Bronx had found his calling. Canterino received a dozen years.
Levy appealed his conviction, and was freed on $3 million bail. He died of liver cancer in May 1990, his lips still sealed, without spending a day behind bars.
* * *
The law enforcement noose had tightened much closer to home, a harbinger of the uncertain future for the Chin and his crime family. Federal prosecutors in New Jersey unveiled a damning 1988 indictment, the result of a staggering 2,500 hours of wiretaps, charging trusted consigliere Manna with a plot to kill Gotti and brother Gene, along with another pair of Mob murders: hits on the obese con man Irwin Schiff one year earlier, and Frank Bok Chung Chin, who was killed in January 1977, after agreeing to testify against family waterfront power John DiGilio.
The trial was a long time coming for Manna, who had operated in North Jersey for decades with little concern for law enforcement. Manna was so feared and respected that his July indictment and incarceration did not stop his underlings from continuing to pay him tribute: the cash was delivered to his wife, Ida.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Manna ran the family’s loan-sharking and gambling operations in Hudson County. He was implicated, but never charged, in the 1962 Tony Bender Strollo hit, and was reportedly a witness to the 1960 murder of Salvatore Malfetti, who was shot eight times at close range after authorities identified him as a witness to a 1959 Mob hit. Nearly thirty years later, the authorities finally had Manna in a courtroom.
Schiff’s association with the Genovese family dated to 1964, when he met family associate Joseph Pagano behind bars. Once released, Schiff was soon providing family-run clothing stores with bogus designer-label pants.
Schiff was executed on August 8, 1987, just after putting down a $30 tip on dinner at the Bravo Sergio restaurant on the Upper East Side. He never saw the gunman, who was wearing a dark suit, enter through an emergency exit. Neither did his comely, young and blond dinner companion.
Schiff took two bullets to the back of the head. Authorities suggested his fatal mistake was skimming cash owed to the Genovese family in a $25 million money-laundering scheme. It was later revealed that the big man, who stood six-four and weighed in at 350 pounds, had also worked as an FBI informant.
The prosecutor, three years off his commission triumph, was Chertoff, who was now working the other side of the Hudson River. The case boasted star power beyond its notorious lead defendant: Chertoff’s boss in Newark was future U.S. Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, and the federal trial judge was Maryanne Trump Barry, the older sister of billionaire developer Donald Trump.
Chertoff, in the new millennium, would go on to become a federal appeals court judge and the head of the nation’s Homeland Security office.
Once again, Gigante—although the power behind the Gotti plot—avoided prosecution as an unindicted co-conspirator. New Jersey authorities flatly said the Chin needed to okay any and all murders committed under the Genovese banner, but Gigante remained a moving target.
“I don’t think we had him,” Chertoff explained years later. “He wasn’t on tape, and the evidence in the case was driven by tapes. But the way it worked, murders had to be approved by the top three guys in the family. And Gigante was the boss.”
The Oddfather still loomed large over the case, even if his name (as the Chin preferred) was never mentioned. Chertoff invoked the infamous Triangle at one point while addressing the jury, presenting the dingy outpost as the epicenter of the unforgiving Genovese universe.
“It’s not pretty to think of a world where disputes are adjudicated in front of the Sullivan Street social club, where life and death were decided,” Chertoff told the jurors.
Jury selection began on February 27, 1989, to assemble an anonymous panel—an effort to keep the jury free of Mob tentacles.
The prosecution announced its witnesses would include the recently rehabbed Fish Cafaro in his courtroom debut. But the case swung mostly on the tapes, which captured a pair of Mob associates heaping praise on the gunman who blasted Schiff in the middle of a crowded restaurant.
“It takes guts to do it like that,” said Frank Daniello, a former Hoboken cop. “This kid is a . . .”
“Stone killer,” interrupted co-conspirator Casella, the restaurant owner.
“He was sitting there with a blond bitch, and they hit him,” said Daniello.
One of the key defense claims was that Manna was attending his son’s twenty-first birthday party on the day he was caught on tape discussing the Gotti hit. Photos from the event were produced. Chertoff pointed out to jurors that the clock in the background showed the defendant arrived ninety minutes after the incriminating conversation occurred.
“What was so important to Bobby Manna that he would be late for his own son’s twenty-first birthday party?” Chertoff asked now. “The only thing that important would be plotting John Gotti’s death.”
The trial stretched across four months, with the jury returning after five days of deliberations: Manna and the rest were guilty. The Thin Man showed not a flash of emotion as the devastating cascade of “guilty” verdicts echoed through the Newark courtroom.
The jury foreman, completely shaken by his four-month crash course in Genovese business practices, held the hands of two fellow jurors f
or support as he announced their decision.
“This is a tremendous verdict, and a tremendous blow to organized crime in New Jersey,” said Alito. “Any organization that can plot to kill John Gotti is a powerful force.”
Manna, sixty at the time, returned to court three months later for sentencing. Dressed sharply in a dark suit, he sat at the defense table with his head held high and his mouth shut tight. The implacable gangster flatly rejected a chance to address the court, and took his eighty-year prison term the same way he took his visit to the prison dentist—without flinching.
There was one final twist to the trial: Years later, Manna, who was now working as his own attorney, claimed that Barry was prejudiced before meting out his sentence after learning of Mafia death threats against her, Chertoff and the future Supreme Court justice. Manna’s court papers indicated that he was the source of those threats.
“That’s news to me,” Chertoff said with a laugh. “I completely missed it. I’m still alive. I spent the last ten years dealing with terrorists. In a way you’re almost nostalgic for the days of that kind of criminal.”
* * *
The only other legal action involving the Chin was brought by his brother Louis just prior to the Manna trial. The Gigante family petitioned a New York State judge to declare Vincent as mentally incompetent to handle his own affairs. It was a bold move as prosecutors moved in on the Mob boss; the petition could not be challenged by the federal or state investigators pursuing Gigante.
A finding of incompetence would give the Mob boss a permanent stay-out-of-jail card to play.
A psychiatrist retained by the Gigantes provided an affidavit declaring that the Chin “suffers from auditory and visual hallucinations,” as well as from “delusions of persecution.” Father Gigante asked Manhattan State Supreme Court acting justice Phyllis Gangel-Jacob for the appointment to manage his brother’s affairs.
According to an affidavit from the priest, he and his mother now served as primary caregivers for the troubled Vincent. The Chin was living full-time with his eighty-eight-year-old mother in her Village apartment. Father G. further stated that his older brother owned “no real or personal property.” A court-appointed guardian was appointed to submit yet another report on Gigante’s mental health.