Chin

by Larry McShane

  Law enforcement sneered at the family’s petition—which was filed one day before federal prosecutors in New Jersey named him in a civil RICO suit intended to cut off Gigante’s control of the Garden State waterfront. The feds flatly identified the alleged “daffy don” as the current boss of the Genovese crime family, and drily noted that a finding of mental incompetence would spare the Chin from any government seizure of his assets. They assessed these as far more valuable than the priest did.

  “As far as we’re concerned, he’s still the boss of the family and this could be a legal move to avoid an indictment,” snapped Jules Bonavolonta, head of the FBI’s organized crime operation in New York.

  In an old familiar move by this point, Gigante’s attorney had already moved to have his client declared mentally incompetent to answer the Jersey suit. But one year after he filed, Father Gigante dropped the legal effort on his brother’s behalf.

  “I wish to spare my brother and members of his family from the probability of a circus-like atmosphere that would attend a hearing on my petition,” the priest said in an affidavit.

  Court-appointed guardian Peter Wilson said he believed the original effort was not a scam, but “was brought in good faith.” Attorney Barry Slotnick, speaking for the Gigantes, said the decision to drop the mental-incompetency case had nothing to do with Vincent’s faltering competency.

  “His mental state is such that he couldn’t be the boss of a candy store,” Slotnick declared in a remark quoted endlessly over the next several years.

  * * *

  Father G. made headlines in another unrelated case. The city was shaken to its core in 1989 by the alleged gang rape of a white jogger by a pack of black teens in Central Park, a crime with repercussions that lingered for decades. The woman was sexually assaulted and beaten so savagely that she was comatose and almost unrecognizable.

  The outrage was immediate and palpable, and only escalated when five local teens were arrested for the attack. Billionaire Donald Trump took out full-page ads in four city newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty.

  Gigante posted $25,000 bail for one of the defendants, Kevin Richardson, creating a media firestorm.

  “An angel came to us,” said the young suspect’s attorney. “Rich people and gangsters shouldn’t be the only ones who are freed on high cash bail.” The irony of his comment was apparently lost on the lawyer.

  The priest broached the decision with his South Bronx congregation during Mass. Kevin Richardson deserved a chance at rehabilitation, he contended. The fourteen-year-old and his codefendants were eventually cleared of the charges, after years in jail, when another man confessed to the crime.

  Years later, Louis Gigante shrugged off the personal attacks that followed his financial backing of the jailed teen.

  “That’s the newspapers,” he says. “I don’t think of the newspapers. You think I thought about the newspapers, publicity? I’ll tell you what I was thinking—I’m a priest.”

  CHAPTER 16

  CAN YOU PLEASE CRAWL OUT YOUR WINDOW?

  IT WAS SEVEN O’CLOCK ON A WEDNESDAY MORNING WHEN THE FBI came banging on the door of the Sullivan Street apartment shared by Vincent Gigante and his mother. The agents brought along a battering ram on May 30, 1990, and were in the process of using it when the man they wanted finally appeared.

  He was, unsurprisingly, wearing a blue hooded bathrobe and pajamas. Somewhat surprisingly—and yet somehow perfectly—he turned down an offer from FBI agents to change into more appropriate attire.

  “He took so long answering, agents thought he was trying to escape,” said FBI New York office head Jim Fox. “He finally answered the door, and refused to put clothes on.”

  “Where are we going?” the Chin asked one of the arresting agents.

  “We’re going to see the judge,” he replied.

  “Oh,” Gigante deadpanned.

  He then handed over a card containing a phone number to reach his brother Louis. The Windows Case, simmering for three years, had finally come to boil. Agents across the city made arrests, and a Brooklyn federal judge awaited. For once, the Chin was entitled to a flashback–his last arrest—as he was led to a waiting FBI vehicle.

  Gigante was fingerprinted and photographed at the FBI offices, where he was a bit more forthcoming. Asked about his late brother Pat, the mob boss pulled out a Mass card. “He’s with God,” Gigante said somberly.

  He also reminisced briefly about his days in the ring: “I was a heavyweight, then I lost weight and became a light-heavy. It was a long time ago. I don’t remember.”

  Once across the East River in Brooklyn, the Chin put on a show in his holding pen. The Genovese boss, behind bars for the first time in twenty-six years, stomped madly across the cell “as though stamping out cockroaches,” according to a federal marshal.

  A codefendant recalled Gigante looking around the crowded courtroom in apparent confusion. “What a nice wedding,” the Mob boss finally announced.

  Named in the sprawling sixty-nine-count indictment, along with Gigante and his underboss Mangano, were thirteen top officials of the other three participating “Window Case” families: Peter Gotti of the Gambinos, Colombo underboss Benedetto “Benny” Aloi and Lucchese boss Amuso, along with his sidekick Casso.

  The latter two were on the lam, tipped off in advance to the coming arrests by dirty cops Eppolito and Caracappa. There was one more missing defendant: union boss John Morrissey.

  The takedown was a big-enough deal that Attorney General Dick Thornburgh made the trip from D.C. to downtown Brooklyn to trumpet the assault on organized crime.

  “Today’s indictment closes the cash window on this lucrative enterprise,” the punning prosecutor declared, calling the case the most significant attack on organized crime since the successful commission prosecution four years earlier.

  “We intend to keep the heat on,” he concluded.

  The Chin, dressed in his robe, striped PJs and ratty hat, was steered into the courtroom, where prosecutor Charles Rose first laid eyes on their slippery adversary. Rose took in the full spectacle of the deranged don, from his unruly mop of hair to the well-worn brown shoes poking out from beneath his pajama bottoms.

  This was their target? The all-powerful head of the Genovese crime family?

  “Have you looked at him?” a suddenly concerned Rose asked O’Connell. “Are you sure he’s not fucking nuts?”

  “Sit tight,” Greg O’Connell assured him.

  When all the defendants finally arrived in the jam-packed courtroom, the defense table lacked enough space to accommodate the mobsters and their attorneys. About one hundred people, many of them supporting Gigante, filled the courtroom seats around Father Louis.

  The Chin wound up in the jury box, alongside Benny Eggs, his old friend and underboss. As O’Connell watched, the two men cupped their hands over their mouths and began conversing amid the hubbub. The prosecutor realized that something he’d heard once before was true: the ever-careful Gigante, convinced the FBI was employing lip-readers in its efforts to take him down, wouldn’t open his mouth if there was a chance someone else might see him speak.

  “He’s deranged, and he’s nuts, but he’s definitely against lipreading, right?” O’Connell recalled years later. “And he’s convinced Benny Eggs to do the same thing.”

  O’Connell quickly addressed the Chin’s mental health in a preemptive strike: “If he’s competent to run the family, he’s competent to stand trial.”

  At the arraignment the federal prosecutor Rose echoed his associate, succinctly summing up the Chin’s long-running ruse: “He acts crazy in order to avoid arrest.”

  Father G. was accompanied by lawyer Slotnick, who preened like a peacock, but stung like a scorpion. The priest, as usual, picked up the tab for his brother’s counsel.

  * * *

  Barry Slotnick was the city’s hottest defense attorney, with a client roster that had included Mob boss Joe Colombo, Meir Kahane of the Jewish Defense Le
ague, crooked congressman Mario Biaggi and Panamanian president Manuel Noriega.

  The son of Russian immigrants won an acquittal for subway gunman Bernie Goetz by demonizing the four youths shot on a downtown train, turning the geeky shooter into an urban folk hero. And he was part of the defense team that helped John Gotti and six codefendants beat a Brooklyn federal rap.

  Like Gotti, he was a clotheshorse: Slotnick favored $2,500 Fioravanti suits. A mugger once relieved Slotnick of a $15,000 Piaget watch. There were rumors the attack was actually payback ordered by the Dapper Don over a financial disagreement.

  The paths of the defendant and the defense attorney had crossed previously, and Slotnick found the Chin’s current incarnation at complete odds with their previous encounters.

  “I actually had met him before I was hired to represent Vincent,” Slotnick recalled years later. “I’d known Vincent for a very long period of time. Absolutely, I saw that Vincent was not doing well. It was clear to me that he was not a candidate for trial.”

  Slotnick remembered Gigante as the padrone, a man treated with deference and respect in the Village.

  “Vincent was a very popular person in his neighborhood,” Slotnick said. “He was an extremely popular person. He’d been a boxer, and he was well known and well liked.”

  * * *

  Although this was the era of mobsters flipping like so many pancakes on a grill, O’Connell said the feds never considered cutting a deal with the Chin. His notoriety made him an unlikely candidate. Gigante would make a huge pelt on any prosecutor’s wall.

  But his life as a make-believe mental patient had also destroyed all of Chin’s leverage. A witness with a history of purported psychiatric treatment and psychotropic drug prescriptions would prove a disaster on cross-examination.

  There was one other thing: nobody on either side of the law ever believed that Vincent Gigante would become a rat.

  Slotnick entered a plea of not guilty before mentioning his client’s mental and physical ills. “Any stress could cause sudden death,” he informed the U.S. magistrate John L. Caden.

  Gigante found quick refuge in one of his favorite old haunts: St. Vincent’s Hospital in leafy Harrison. Slotnick requested the accused Mob boss head to the Westchester County facility for a psychiatric exam, foreshadowing Gigante’s enduring defense strategy.

  * * *

  Fugitive codefendants Amuso and Casso went with a different defense tactic: Mob hit and run. They had already ordered the execution of union boss Morrissey, who was taken for his last ride to a housing development under construction in rural Jefferson Township, New Jersey.

  Sonny Morrissey, the loyal Lucchese associate, was expecting to meet with Amuso, only to meet with his demise inside a cramped construction office.

  “It was a heavily wooded area,” recounted Big Pete Chiodo, who escorted Morrissey to his death at the hands of two waiting gunmen. “The next thing that happened was I heard four shots.”

  Morrissey departed in a state of disbelief. After the first bullet grazed the union boss, he uttered his final words: “I’m not a rat.” Though absolutely true, his entreaty fell on deaf ears. In the end he asked the gunmen to finish him off quickly. They complied.

  The four-hundred-pound Chiodo and the killers wrapped Morrissey’s remains in a carpet and buried him deep in the Jersey soil. “The Morrissey thing is done,” he reported to Casso.

  The union boss’s remains went undiscovered until August 1991, when Chiodo—now a government witness, too—led authorities to the burial site. Chiodo flipped only after landing in the crosshairs of the bloodthirsty Lucchese leaders. The increasingly paranoid Amuso and Casso became convinced the big man was going to flip, so they ordered his execution.

  Fate—and many folds of skin—would intervene.

  Big Pete was at a Staten Island gas station when a black sedan appeared, with two shooters emerging in May 1991. Chiodo, though shot in the neck, chest, stomach, arms and legs, managed to pull a pistol and return fire. He survived only because his enormous girth served as a beefy bulletproof vest, stopping the flying bullets from hitting any vital organs.

  The murder try came as no surprise to the Mob-wise Chiodo. “I had become a liability,” he later explained blithely.

  The failed assassination convinced the tight-lipped Chiodo it was time to start talking, and with little hesitation he joined the parade of Mafia turncoats now working with the FBI.

  His former Lucchese associates weren’t done with Big Pete. In blatant violation of the once-immutable laws of the old-school Mafia, Gaspipe and Amuso went after his family. Chiodo’s mother and father received death threats—and that was the least of it.

  His sister Patricia Capozzalo, thirty-eight, was shot in the back and neck and seriously wounded in a 1992 Brooklyn hit by two masked men who fired into her car. The married mother of three had just returned home after driving her son to school. And his uncle Frank Signorino turned up dead inside a car trunk on Staten Island—shot to death.

  It was a move more in line with Colombian drug lords than any Italian-American men of honor. The Luccheses were light-years away from the days when Lufthansa plotter Jimmy “the Gent” Burke delivered a Mother’s Day bouquet to the mom of every incarcerated family member.

  * * *

  With Petey Savino safely in the arms of the federal government, the Mob turned its attention to his wife and her six-year-old son. Savino’s third bride had turned down a shot at the Witness Protection Program so that her boy could still see his biological father—a strict no-no under federal regulations.

  In August 1990 the woman received an anonymous phone call describing Savino as a “rat” and urging her to “drive carefully.” When she went out to check her car, the woman found a crude gasoline bomb in the front seat. Only a balky fuse prevented an explosion outside the family’s home.

  Fearful for her life and that of her son, she ran to her car to drive to collect her son, who had been staying with another family member at the time, O’Connell wrote in a memorandum. As she reached to open the car door, she saw the device in the front seat. She immediately contacted law-enforcement authorities.

  * * *

  Vincent Gigante returned to St. Vincent’s yet again on August 6, 1991, complaining that he was agitated and hearing voices. Family members reported they had difficulty managing Gigante around the house. The admission papers noted this was his twenty-third visit, dating back to 1969.

  For the first few days, the patient remained in his room, did not leave, nor did he go to the dining room, read a report from Dr. Eugene D’Adamo, Chin’s exclusive psychiatrist at the suburban facility. Gradually, he began going on the grounds with his family during visiting hours.

  After a two-week stay, the Chin was escorted home on August 23 by family members. He returned the next June for another two weeks with the same symptoms and results. But the Chin, like the Lucchese bosses, was thinking he might need more to beat the rap this time around.

  The 1990s.

  With the defections of Cafaro and Savino, paranoia was high among the Genovese clan about informers in the family business. Longtime soldier Joe Barone Sr., working with a crew headed by precocious young capo Barney Bellomo, was stunned to discover his fellow gangsters believed that he was running his mouth to the FBI.

  It was the start of an unlikely saga that began with a lethal decision by the ruthless Chin—and finished, when the dominoes stopped falling, with the lives of a federal judge and a Mafia prosecutor spared from a Mob hit.

  The FBI, as required by law, reached out to Barone Sr. in 1989 with word that he was marked for death. An intercepted phone call contained a chilling threat: “We gotta get JB.”

  “The FBI came to his house and said there was a hit on his life,” recalled Barone’s son, Joe Jr. “They gave him a card, and said, ‘If you want to come in and talk, call us.’”

  The elder Barone, who did a 1970s jail term for dealing drugs in violation of Genovese policy, was a Mob lifer with
four murders under his belt. He knew any federal knock on the door would echo loudly across the already-suspicious family, his years of loyalty disappearing like the morning mist.

  “My father knew a lot of things,” said Joe Jr. “He was a pretty tough guy. He was no joke.”

  On the face of it, there was no reason to suspect the elder Barone, a Genovese veteran made in the mid-1980s. Barone was summoned by Bellomo to meet at 2:30 A.M. in a remote, designated spot. The pair then drove together up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway before pulling over for a quick walk and talk. Bellomo, like his boss Gigante, was obsessed with avoiding law enforcement.

  “Barney liked meeting at crazy hours, because the chances of being tailed—especially on the BQE at two A.M.—would be unlikely,” recalled Joe Jr., who followed his father into organized crime, landing years later with the Bonanno family. “Barney said, ‘I know what happened in the past, but you’re with us.’ So he got straightened out before he got killed.”

  Bellomo’s reference was to Barone’s drug bust, which could have eliminated him from consideration. He went home and spoke to his son about the invitation.

  “He said, ‘What do you think? It’s a lot of responsibility, but it’s a big show of respect,’ ” Joe Jr. remembered. “We talked about it, but, of course, you can’t turn it down.”

  Bellomo, like the younger Barone, was the son of a Genovese veteran, Salvatore Bellomo. Barney took his first bust at age seventeen for a gun charge, with a slap on the wrist of three months’ probation. His father Salvatore was tight with Salerno; and before passing away of natural causes, the father asked the Mob bigwig to look out for his boy. The youngster wound up working for future family underboss Sammy Santora.

  Bellomo, one of the youngest made men in Mob history, was the rare next-generation gangster to fully embrace the old ways of the Mafia: omerta, loyalty, respect. Barone Jr. recalled his surprise when Barney appeared at the 1988 wake for his mom. It was the kind of thing that boosted Barney above and beyond in the eyes of his crooked contemporaries.